Azure & Active Directory Center

Microsoft’s identity portfolio is huge and includes products and services like Active Directory, AD FS, Azure AD Connect, Defender for Identity, Microsoft Identity Manager and Azure AD. Contrary to what some belief, Active Directory on-premises is supported, alive and kicking and here to stay for most organizations. This became abundantly clear in August 2022, as Microsoft improved things for Identity admins in the following ways:

Exchange admins have enjoyed the Group writeback optional feature in Azure AD Connect for a long time. It offers add-on functionality to Microsoft 365 Groups in Azure AD for organizations that use both Active Directory and Azure AD in a Hybrid Exchange setup.

Using Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK

In my previous article about creating custom roles for Exchange Online administrators here, I described how to grant a specific team of administrators permissions to grant admin consent ONLY for specific OAuth2.0 application permissions.

Hybrid Identity, the relationship between Active Directory and Azure AD, has benefitted from many improvements in Azure AD Connect. For the vast majority of organizations with Hybrid Identity, Azure AD Connect provides the synchronization part of the Hybrid Identity story and can also play a vital role in the authentication part of it.

Microsoft 365, formally Office 365, is maturing. It has been more than 10 years since the launch of Office 365, and the type of migrations I see as a consultant are changing.

Recently I had to upgrade my Azure AD Connect server from version 1.x to version 2.x, and I blogged about in my December 2021 blog article "Upgrade Azure AD Connect from 1.x to 2.x". After the upgrade I had to upgrade my Azure Active Directory Password Protection services as well since I installed a new server and decommissioned the old one.

The last couple of years we have seen several security breaches in IT, leading to serious impact and financial losses. Not only in the United States, but also in the rest of the world. Last year here in Holland we have seen two respected companies in a lawsuit, where one company was compromised, leading to a financial loss of a 7-digit number of the other company. The first company was running their environment in Office 365, but because of a weak password, the mailbox of a financial controller was compromised.

Last year I wrote "Microsoft 365 Security Assessment" Part 1 and Part 2, where I provided a list of actions one should perform or check in one’s Microsoft 365 environment as a security assessment.

When you’re in your own data center and your security model is based on perimeter security and passwords, you’re not cloud ready. Security models that only leverage firewalls and passwords, leave organizations exposed as soon as cloud services start to be consumed. However, many organizations don’t realize just how exposed they are.

Years back, Active Directory (AD) was all the rage. I recall its release with Microsoft Windows Server 2000 and entire books were written on the subject, everything from design to deployment to continued maintenance. Over time, AD has lost its novelty as the shiny new toy, but it hasn’t lost its value as the foundation piece to all other aspects of your network and on-premises servers, like Exchange. That has held true even with its cloud-based cousin Azure AD. Nothing takes out the entire Microsoft 365 suite like an Azure AD outage because identity management and a host of other server necessities are tied back to it.