Azure

This article will detail the different versions of Microsoft’s Azure AD Connect (AADC) sync software that are going out of support this month (August 2022) and in March 2023. If you’re still using one of these soon-to-be-deprecated Azure AD (recently renamed Microsoft Entra ID) Connect versions, you’ll want to plan your upgrades/migrations to supported versions…

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Firewall structured logs. The new feature brings an improved logging experience for firewall events and makes it easier to search, filter, and analyze network traffic data. “Azure Firewall’s structured logs provide a more detailed view of firewall events. They include information such as source and destination and…

Last week, Microsoft acknowledged an issue that triggered connectivity issues on its Azure portal. Now, the company has confirmed that the outage was caused by an “anomalous spike” in Azure traffic. Specifically, Microsoft reported that the incident started at 8:00 A.M PT on June 9. They saw the “We’re working to restore all services as…

As an IT admin, preventing your users from using simple or known-hacked passwords has become critical for the overall security of your enterprise. An excellent step to take is to plan for and deploy Azure AD Password Protection. In this article, I’ll walk you through installing the Proxy service and DC agent in your on-premises…

While working with customers using Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI solution, I often hear concerns about the security, identity management, and Internet access aspects of this platform. In this article, I’m going to detail a methodology allowing IT pros to make their Azure Stack HCI environment more secure by creating a fabric domain and network. More…

When you virtualize an Azure Stack HCI cluster, you may want to load balance applications running on it to optimize server utilization. While there are various built-in options to do that, they may be quite limited depending on your usage scenarios. In this article, I’ll discuss the various options you have to implement Azure Stack…

Failover clustering in Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI can help to reduce disruptions in service within an organization. In this article, I’m going to explain why you need to have a Windows Server Active Directory domain controller outside of your Azure Stack HCI cluster. I will also detail how to deploy this domain controller…

Both Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop perform a similar function for end users, which is providing access to a Windows desktop. From the IT admin perspective though, they are fundamentally different solutions. In this article, we’ll walk through the major differences between Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop so that you can understand which solution,…

Microsoft announced yesterday several new features for developers at its Azure Open Source Day 2023. The company explained that these capabilities enable software developers to quickly build intelligent applications. “Most companies have leveraged AI to improve efficiency and costs. Large AI applications leveraging natural language processing (NLP), automatic speech recognition (ASR), and text-to-speech (TTS) are…

Cloud repatriation appears to be one of the new IT hot topics of 2023. For companies that invested time and money into transferring some of their workloads to the cloud, why would it now make sense to bring some of them back to on-premises resources? Well, I’ll explain in this article why cloud repatriation is…

Microsoft has patched vulnerabilities in four different Azure cloud services. The security flaws could enable attackers to perform a server-side request forgery (SSRF) attack to gain unauthorized access to cloud resources. The security vulnerabilities were first discovered by researchers from Orca Security between mid-October and mid-December last year. The flaws affect various Microsoft cloud services…

Microsoft has announced the general availability of its Azure OpenAI service. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also unveiled its plans to launch OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot as a service to make it accessible to more customers. Microsoft launched its Azure OpenAI service back in November 2021. It enables businesses to integrate powerful AI tools (such as GPT-3.5,…