Azure & Active Directory Center

My email address is my identity

In Active Directory on-premises or Azure Active Directory (AAD), used by Office 365, our User Principal Name (UPN) is often the same as our email address. These days, we often log in with our email addresses, which means that whatever we’re “using under the hood” from an authentication point of view is the same as our email address. This convention of making our email address the same as our UPN is common practice and even advocated by Microsoft.

There’s a running joke in the industry that the COVID-19 pandemic has done more to drive digital transformation in organizations than any consultant, project team or CTO. While this may be a slight exaggeration, there is definitely an element of truth to it. Many organizations have historically been slow to adopt remote working practices, but the pandemic and associated lockdowns have forced organizations all over the world to change their work from home policies and accelerate the deployment of tools to support telecommuting.

As more and more organizations move to Office 365 the challenge shifts from “How do we get into Office 365?” to “How do we manage our data within Office 365?” Keeping your organization’s data secure inside the service is a major concern for many organizations, as well as for Microsoft itself.

Today, Office 365 customers experienced another global outage affected by Azure AD. When did you first know that there was a problem? Were you alerted to the problem by a frustrated user trying to log into email on a Monday morning? How much productivity was lost within your organization due to the outage?

Part 1 - Recap

Securing your data in Office 365 can be a challenging task. The problem is that using user names and passwords as the basis of our authentication protocols is not a very successful way to run our technology.

Securing your data in Office 365 can be a challenging task. The problem is that using user names and passwords as the basis of our authentication protocols is not a very successful way to run our technology.

In the last few weeks we have been frantically recapping the dozens of announcements made at Ignite 2017. As usual, many of the features demoed at the conference will only show up in production after few weeks or even months, but some are already available in Preview. In this article, we will do a short overview of one such feature, namely Access Reviews for Office 365 groups and applications.

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?”

If there is anything consistent about Office 365,  it's change . Not only do the services that you use all the time change constantly, but there are also new services added to Office 365 on a regular basis. Microsoft wants to build Office 365 into a complete business productivity suite, and they are doing that by making sure all your bases are covered.

A few months back, we did a short introduction to Advanced Security Management (ASM), a stripped-down version of the Cloud App Security suite, tailored to the needs of Office 365 administrators. As it is now a year since the product was officially launched, I thought it’s a good idea to take it for another spin and compare it to its big brother, in terms of Office 365 related functionalities that is.