Azure & Active Directory Center

ENow Software's Azure & Active Directory blog built by Microsoft MVPs for IT/Sys Admins.

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Security

Azure AD Security Defaults feature image

Azure AD Security Defaults – What You Need to Know

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Alistair Pugin

Scenario 1: You are part of the IT team that is responsible for moving to the cloud. Your company/organization has chosen Microsoft’s cloud services as the provider of choice, for your new virtual datacenter. During the planning phase to migrate your current solutions to Azure and Microsoft 365, your risk department requests information about security and compliance, and how the shift from your current “private” datacenter to a public center will impact security. You end up Googling and stumble upon a Microsoft post that talks to Security defaults and what it is.

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Microsoft Entra cloud identity governance

Microsoft Ignite 2022 – What’s New in Entra Identity

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Matthew Levy

Microsoft Ignite was held on October 12 to 14th 2022, and was a truly hybrid event, with in-person sessions held at the Seattle conference center as well as pre-recorded content and Teams live-event style sessions being streamed around the world. The big catch phrase of the conference this year was “Do more with less”. As organizations adapt to new challenges, they are looking to have more choice in the way they work and to get better results with less friction. The updates to products revealed at Microsoft Ignite were aimed at helping customers get the full value of Microsoft’s technologies.

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Weak Password and how Active Directory can help

How to Prevent Users from Using Weak Passwords

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Jaap Wesselius

Previously, MVP Nicolas Blank wrote an interesting article "Having an Identity Crisis" and it talked about all kinds of attacks on your environment. One such attack is on user email.  Users tend to choose a password that is easy for them to remember and this makes the password weak and easy to guess by others.  Even with some social engineering, user passwords are easy to retrieve, as can be seen on this YouTube clip What is your password?

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Authentication Planning

Authentication Planning in the Enterprise

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Nathan O'Bryan MCSM

What a great time to be an IT pro. I mean really, who has it better than us? On any given day there is so much going on, so much to learn, so much to improve, and that's why I do really enjoy my job(s). As I think about how to open this blog post, it occurs to me that I’ve had some great opportunities in my career. Sort of a “as one door closes, another one opens” sort of thing.

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Microsoft 365 Security Assessment Part 1

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Matthew Levy

As a Microsoft 365 certified Security Administrator, and Microsoft certified Azure Security Engineer I have recently done a number of Microsoft 365 security assessments. Some of them have been post-breach assessments. A lot of companies had to enable remote workers in a hurry at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a result have realized security configuration and protection is more critical than ever.

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Security and Identity Microsoft listing image

Having an Identity Crisis

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Nicolas Blank

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.

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Sander-AD-Book-2nd edition copy

Want to learn more about Active Directory?

Active Directory Administration Cookbook, 2nd Edition

In this book, Microsoft MVP & Technical Editor of ENow's Azure & Active Directory Center, Sander Berkouwer will share the intricacies of managing Azure AD, Azure AD Connect as well as Active Directory for administration in the cloud and on Windows Server 2022.