Azure & Active Directory Center

At Microsoft Ignite 2019 last year Mark Simos, Lead Architect for the Microsoft Cybersecurity Solution Group, ran a groundbreaking session about the top ten best security practices for Azure today. In his session, he discusses the need for stronger cloud security as more computing environments moving to the cloud. This blog post covers a summary of the session and gives you an overview about the latest Azure security innovations and what’s new in Azure Security Center.

As more IT services move to the cloud, the need for better security features will only increase. People want to be able to log in hassle-free, but organizations need strong authentication security. The fastest way for this move to cloud service to fail is going to be though a large security breach. Microsoft is aware of all these facts, and they are putting a lot of work into ensuring that logging into their cloud servers is both easy and secure.

The ability to process computer-based data on third-party systems is not a new invention. For example, the outsourcing of financial data to tax advisers for further processing has been used for decades. Since the introduction of the term "cloud," the idea that computer-based data is stored and processed by third-party service providers creates an uncomfortable feeling.

Microsoft is drizzling out a new build of Azure Active Directory Connect via auto-upgrade to select customers. They often do this when a new build has significant changes to make sure it doesn't break in existing organizations that currently use AAD Connect. It will be available for all customers to download in the coming days/weeks as either an auto-upgrade or manual download.

Conditional Access is a premium feature of Azure Active Directory that allows administrators to specify conditions under which users can authenticate into other cloud services. With conditional access, you can specify that a certain set of users can only authenticate to specific applications from specific IPs for example.

The old chestnut question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" is surprisingly relevant in the world of cloud collaboration software. Maybe the modern version would be “if a service falls in the cloud and I don’t notice it, is it still an outage?”

In my last blog post here, I wrote an introduction to Azure Resource Manager (ARM). ARM is the toolset Microsoft has added to Azure for provisioning and controlling resources in Azure.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is Microsoft's platform for deploying and managing resources within Azure. ARM allows you to build resource deployment templates using PowerShell and JSON scripts to build repeatable and consistent deployments in Azure.

The cloud! We get it. Specialization has been the way of the world since the industrial revolution, and IT isn't immune from that trend. 

The financial model makes sense for software companies and their customers. The support model makes sense for IT departments. Cloud makes sense for everyone…except when it doesn’t.