Microsoft recently made changes to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to mitigate an issue where private key data stored in an Azure AD application or service principal could be read in clear text. Some Azure services were incorrectly storing private key data in Azure AD in the keyCredentials property when creating applications for customers. Microsoft… Read More

Microsoft announced September 22nd that Azure Virtual Desktop now supports Azure Active Directory (AD) joined virtual machines (VM). With this update you can now: Join Azure Virtual Desktop VMs directly to Azure AD Connect to VMs from any device with a username and password And automatically enroll VMs with Microsoft Endpoint Manager (MEM) Before the… Read More

Microsoft recently announced that their Ignite (online only) conference will be running again on November 2-4. That means we are approaching peak season for announcements, new public preview releases, and general availability. “Q3” in announcements and roadmaps will often mean between early September and maybe the third week of October – a code freeze will… Read More

Cloud virtual desktop provider Nerdio, which hosts its VDI service in Azure, now manages more than 1 Million Windows users. According to Nerdio’s founder and CEO Vadim Vladimirskiy, who announced the stat last week, the rapid growth of its service validates the viability of Azure Virtual Desktop as well as the new Windows 365 service.… Read More

Registering Windows 10 devices with an identity provider, like Azure Active Directory, is an important part of including endpoints in the Zero Trust security model. In this article, I'm going to show you how to join Windows 10 to Azure Active Directory. You will 1) join an existing Windows 10 device with Azure Active Directory… Read More

  We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.” In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company… Read More

Registering Windows 10 devices with an identity provider, like Azure Active Directory, is an important part of including endpoints in the Zero Trust security model. In this article, I'm going to show you how to register Windows 10 with Azure Active Directory. You will 1) register a Windows 10 device with Azure Active Directory using… Read More

Azure AD Connect is a free tool from Microsoft that's used for synchronizing objects between on-premises Windows Server Active Directory (AD) and Azure Active Directory. Microsoft announced in August the availability of Azure AD Connect V2.0. And in this article, I'm going to discuss the major changes in this new release. Here are the major… Read More

I think you’ll find that there are quite a few announcements this month. The summer quiet period is over, and we’re into a whole new development/release semester in Microsoft, not to mention the countdown to the usual peak release season for Microsoft Ignite has started – most releases announced at Ignite happen well before Ignite.… Read More

It has been revealed that Microsoft pulled a component of its Azure Cosmos DB service earlier this month because of a serious security issue uncovered by researchers at Wiz.io. Dubbed #ChaosDB, the flaw was disclosed to Microsoft on August 12, 2021. It gives any Azure user full access to other customers' Cosmos DB instances, without… Read More

Back in June this year, Microsoft sent the final Windows Server 2022 bits to OEMs for testing. And without so much as an official announcement, Microsoft has made the next version of its server product available to mainstream users. Windows Server 2022 will only be available on the Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC); unlike recent versions… Read More

Earlier this month, the Azure Sentinel and Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) teams announced the public availability of 'Fusion detection for ransomware'. Fusion is designed to automatically correlate security alerts that could be related to ransomware. More precisely, Microsoft said the Fusion machine learning model collates alerts detected in a specific timeframe during defense evasion… Read More

Microsoft recently announced that it acquired CloudKnox Security, a security management solution for businesses that use more than one cloud service provider. CloudKnox says that its solutions help IT departments "granular visibility, actionable insights, and control of machine and human identities with excessive high-risk privileges." Joy Chik, who is corporate vice president for Microsoft Identity,… Read More

July – a month that many take a vacation in, and it’s the start of the commercial year for Microsoft. That year kicks off with Microsoft Inspire, a conference for the partner community to learn about what Microsoft is launching and how Microsoft wants their partners to sell to customers. Most of the content is… Read More

I’ll admit that I may have done a not-so-best-practice type of thing, I have not gone into the Azure Portal in quite a long time (around 2 months). Now everyone’s usage of Azure is different and for me, I spend most of my time in the Azure Storage world, with many applications interacting with those… Read More