Orchestration Groups enable a few basic patching automation features, such as setting the patch installation order and specifying scripts to run before or after the patch is installed. These are very basic options that our Beekeeper Patching Automation software for System Center has been doing for years.

How does Beekeeper stack up in comparison to the pre-release features introduced in the newer versions of SCCM? Let's compare apples to apples.

The media claims Garmin ended up paying a hefty multimillion-dollar ransom to unlock their infrastructure. A fine prize for the alleged perpetrators, “Evil Corp,” who supposedly used a variant known as WastedLocker to lockdown Garmin’s apps and services.

How could an organization with the resources and talent of Garmin face a multiday outage under intense scrutiny? While dodging ransomware may seem as simple as restoring a backup, in practice a large-scale attack is a major mitigation undertaking. Here are three reasons why it can take days or even weeks to recover even if you give in and pay the ransom.

Most of the guides I found online only talk about how to do a fresh install of Azure AD Connect. I wanted to be able to preserve all the existing rules and settings and not disrupt anything for the users. It is possible to manually document all the settings by digging deep into the Azure AD Connect tool, but there is always a chance to miss something.

Here are the steps I followed to do it.

Like many other technology conferences in the shadow of COVID-19, Microsoft decided to go all-digital for this year’s edition of Build, the company’s massive annual developer-focused conference. The affect of COVID-19 on Build 2020 couldn’t have been more obvious than the “work from home”-style keynote that Scott Hanselman and friends did.

This year was the 10^th edition of Build and due to the digital nature was even entirely free to attend. 48-hours of sessions were peppered with news about Azure, .NET, Windows, Microsoft 365, GitHub, and more, alongside educational content in the form of Q&As and tutorials.

Read on to discover our top picks from Build 2020.

But what is this new framework for productivity applications? Here’s why we’re excited about Fluid and the changes it may bring to the way we collaborate and work digitally.

Your DR plan should focus on recovering key essential technical functions while also considering the supporting tools, applications, data collaboration, and potential workforce displacement.

But how exactly do you identify which systems are critical – and in need of faster time to recovery – and which can rely on more simple backup methods? Here are four key questions to ask yourself as you prioritize within your continuity plan.

Many organizations have sent devices home with employees so they can work remotely. Your standard monthly Windows and security updates — typically distributed across a high speed, corporate network — can now potentially create bandwidth and user performance issues if received over the corporate VPN. It’s critical to maintain patching and compliance schedules while minimizing traffic spikes over your VPN that can cause connectivity and performance issues.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a wrench into many IT plans and budgets for 2020. We won’t dive into that right now, as it’s been said many times over.

Now, many IT managers are turning towards the grim possibility of reduced budget. With economic uncertainty looming, it may be enough to just keep the proverbial lights on. This is a great time to take a look at both short- and long-term opportunities presented by pursue digital transformation.

Your daily operations are already disrupted. Your users are adopting new ways of working. And even if your IT staff and budget are stretched thin, many aspects of digital transformation can actually help you increase efficiency and deliver more value to your organization.

Here are the most vital transformative measures to focus on during this time of upheaval.

The piece, which can be read below in its entirety, covers the history of Deliveron and its founders, the strategy behind the Green House Data acquisition of Deliveron, and the ways that DevOps and Digital Transformation are changing the marketplace for IT services.

One native Azure tool that can be useful to begin this cloud journey is Azure Migrate. It consists of Azure Server Assessment and Azure Server Migration. Assessment is a discovery tool helps you assess cloud readiness and collect valuable intelligence about your virtual machines and associated infrastructure so you can be prepared to replace them in Azure. Migration, as you might expect, can actually migrate those servers to Azure.

Within the Azure Migrate hub are also database migration tools, Movere (an assessment tool purchased by Microsoft), a web app migration assistant, and Azure Data Box which assists with large scale data migration without using the internet.

This blog will focus on the Server Assessment tool, which helps you plan for cloud readiness, budget, and target environment architecture within Azure. Learn if it will work with your target environment, what it reports, and how it can lay the groundwork for a successful migration.

For 8 in 10 organizations, digital transformation has been a focus within the past five years. Meanwhile, 84% see innovation as key to success. So it’s likely either transformation or innovation will reach your whiteboard as a top initiative in 2020. But what do these terms really mean in practice? Aren’t they kind of synonymous? Well, not really. Once you dig into the meat of digital transformation, you realize it could lead to innovation. And if you can truly innovate, chances are you’ll need to transform your digital operations to follow through.

Where should you focus your efforts? That depends on the state of your IT and application teams along with your overall mission.

Microsoft itself estimated that 60% of its Windows Server install base was still running 2008 back in August. Some of those instances may have been upgraded or migrated to cloud VMs, but we’re betting many of them remain. Unofficial estimates peg the number of Windows 7 machines worldwide at around 200 million.

Change can be hard, especially when your systems seem to be working properly and upgrading appears to be a complex and time-consuming endeavor. But operating systems that have reached End of Support open the door for vulnerabilities, bugs, and incompatibility with newer infrastructure. They also make it more difficult to deploy and support newer software that can improve employee efficiency and empower the business to drive revenue in new areas and to compete with others in the industry. With Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 End of Support upon us, what are your options?

Of course the humorous last name of “Anglin” belies the true nature of this connection: phishing. While our security team was swift to send out a notice not to connect to this individual, the attempt highlights a growing trend of phishing attacks reaching beyond e-mail to the social media realm.

But why bother posing as a fellow employee or a friend on social media? Several employees asked what the threat could be from this seemingly innocuous connection, even if it was made in bad faith. 

The two terms are sides of the same coin. They refer to when you will test your application or piece of technology – is it during development or once your solution has already entered production? Of course, for true DevOps success, the answer is both! Continuous improvement involves testing at all phases of the application lifecycle.

Let’s take a closer look at the ideology behind “shift left” and its counterpart as well as how they affect the development cycle (which can also be applied beyond app development itself and used when designing and deploying most IT systems).

Pervasive and persistent threats that are hardly new to the scene have made their way past small fry to take down some of the biggest service providers around. In many ways, 2019 proved the most effective threat vectors remain the most difficult to protect against, with the crucial attack point coming in the form of people – the hardest thing to control for within your organization.

There are some newer threats to consider as well, of course. Hackers never sleep!

Here’s our lineup for the nastiest InfoSec baddies of 2019.

Here are our Top 10 Things SysAdmins Are Thankful For in 2019:

It was interesting hearing Gartner start to shift their message from “cloud is the only option” to “cloud is an option.” As cloud adoption strategies have matured we have seen this attitude shift as well, with more organizations looking multi-cloud while maintaining some on-prem systems. One presentation on public cloud costs compared to on-prem data centers really helped drive this home. The bottom line is that the cloud is not automatically cheaper or even necessarily more efficient depending on the application or purpose of the deployment.

Other major topics included how to find digital talent, as the management of human capital and IT teams continues to evolve alongside the industry, as well as one of my favorite presentations, “Are You Maximizing Your Security Operations Center,” which had a ton of great information around security.

With the symposium still fresh in mind, here is my list of where enterprise IT operations are heading in 2020 and beyond.

Data storage can be a complicated beast thanks to the myriad ways data grows and integrates with various components of your IT infrastructure. A secondary goal of any data migration project should therefore be data management itself, reducing complexities introduced by application logic, customization, governance, and other entanglements.

Regardless of the destination of your data or the business drivers behind the migration, you’ll need to extract your data, modify it, and perform the actual data transfer. Detailed planning and risk evaluation are key before proceeding, especially as you are likely to handle some sensitive information.

While cost cutting is a reality, it is fundamentally different from ongoing cost optimization. You should be practicing cost optimization as part of your regular duties, reviewing spend and ensuring the technology, hardware, software, and services in use across your organization are serving their business need and appropriately configured in scope and performance.

By formulating and practicing a cost optimization protocol, you’ll be prepared should the day for cost cutting ever come, while also gathering evidence for the impact IT has on the overall bottom line.

Security is a specialized area of IT and it requires specific skills for a holistic approach. It is also a moving target with many components and attack vectors across your technology stack. A dedicated security team or individual, whether in-house or contracted, can therefore be valuable. But security must be a shared responsibility among every user, no matter their role.

There’s an inherent problem here and its name is Diffusion of Responsibility. When everyone has a stake in security and there are dedicated managers to boot, users could be more likely to engage in risky behavior. After all, it’s taken care of! That’s why we hired that security guy.

DataOps does not boil down to DevOps principles applied to data analytics, however. While both approaches may embrace automation, continuous improvement, and strong communication between departments, DataOps is less of an infinite cycle and more of an injection of agility into a one-way data pipeline.

Let’s explore the roles, strategies, and technologies at play in a DataOps approach to analytics.

Cloud governance is the answer to common questions like:

• “How do I keep my data compliant with industry regulations?”

• “How can I implement chargeback within my organization so I know which departments are consuming cloud services and account for that usage?”

• “How can I mandate security and access measures across our cloud environment?”

By implementing a flexible set of controls and overall organizational hierarchy within Azure, you can enable adoption of the cloud services your business units require and avoid shadow cloud use. A well-designed enterprise cloud environment can accommodate modern agile practices alongside traditional workloads.

Here’s how to structure your organizational hierarchy within Azure so you can set governance requirements and encourage speed of delivery for your individual departments and business units.

• Starting VMs
• Taking snapshots or checkpoints
• Reverting to snapshots or checkpoints
• Merging snapshots or checkpoints
• Cloning or exporting VMs
• Shutting down VMs
• Live migrating  VMs when patching the Hyper-V host

You can add these validations to your patching process so you are automatically covered when it comes to compliance and VM configuration even after applying patches. Automating these processes is Beekeeper's specialty.

Dynamic testing is performed as an application is running and focuses on simulating how an outside attacker might access that application and associated systems. Static testing, on the other hand, examines the code itself and related documentation, often throughout the actual development process, to try and discover potential vulnerabilities before the application reaches production.

Should you use DAST or SAST for your applications? In truth it is not an either/or situation, as DAST and SAST are complementary and evolved indivually. First let's take a look at the key differences between them.

In Part Two of this post on using agile Scrum methodology within DevOps ecosystems, we'll examine the Four Values of Agile and learn how to change your organizational mindset to accommodate this new paradigm.

While development was in progress, some of the EDI-based vendor data sources changed the mapping. This situation created chaos in the project. The management team decided to hold off the development phase. The project had to go through the requirements cycle again to identify the gaps. This situation impacted the schedule and budget, creating massive frustration in the organization. The first six months of the project investment was on hold. The sequential software development process we followed did not allow the flexibility to deliver any incremental value to the organization since the beginning of the project.

If we had followed an agile approach, this challenging outcome might have resolved in a different manner. The short intervals of development would have produced incremental value to the organization. Therefore we would have minimized the organizational concerns of not providing any value for six long months.

Here's how agile practices, Scrum, and DevOps all work together. Learn how to overcome adoption obstacles and several keys to Scrum success in this two-part blog series.

To execute the script, you can run it on the Beekeeper server. Learn how below.

In 2019, over 22 governments have been affected by ransomware – and that number was prior to recent news breaking that an additional 22 small towns in Texas were all targeted in a single coordinated attack.

Over 200 state, county, or city government IT systems have been targeted in recent years. With thousands and thousands of cities and towns across America, that may seem like a drop in the bucket. But ransomware is becoming easier and easier to distribute and users continue fall victim; usually via phishing emails or web exploits that deliver malware without any user action outside of visiting an apparently innocuous site.

Why are governments becoming a preferred target for ransomware? And how can you improve your chances of avoiding or mitigating ransomware?

A common InfoSec response to the unfamiliar is to attempt to cover all potential angles of attack, regardless of whether they are pertinent to the technology. This is done in order to ensure that we meet both risk and governance management goals. The result of this approach is rarely better security. Rather, it typically results in unnecessarily complicated security control implementations that are neither functional (e.g., they don’t do what we want/expect them to do) nor operational (e.g., our personnel can’t adequately manage them). 

How do we avoid over-complication in our security controls? We focus on the fundamentals: Preparation, Awareness, Response. 

While securing Office 365 is an ongoing effort, there are several top priorities that should be first to be addressed after your migration.

After all, for years marketing pushed lower overall costs after migrating to the cloud. So what gives? Why are many cloud workloads ending up more expensive than their on-prem counterparts?

You've probably heard the old joke before that the cloud is “just someone else's data center.” That may have been true a decade ago, but no longer.

Forcing a cloud migration is not the key to savings. You must understand the business value, catalog and think deeply about the existing and desired state of your infrastructure, rearchitect your workloads, and adjust your workflow to this new paradigm. Here are the five key areas you need to plan things out.

With unstructured data pooling rapidly in cloud object storage and structured data overwhelming your databases, you’ll wisely implement data management protocols that include long term archiving, encryption and security measures for sensitive data, and strategic use of various cloud and on premises storage methods to minimize costs.

But are you taking advantage of that data beyond how it used in the applications that gather and handle it? There are business insights to be gleaned and platforms like Power BI can help you make sense of it. If you don’t have time to learn a new platform or budget to hire a full time data analytics staff, you can instead find an Insights as a Service provider to help.

The primary gist is to not only introduce new tech, but to also take a close look at the business processes and organizational units behind them to ensure that innovation can occur, and the bottom line is improved. In other words, technology for the sake of technology won’t solve any business problems. You must transform your entire organization with a combination of technology and process.

True digital transformation involves your entire organization and results in the integration of various systems and operations across the business. If that sounds like a major undertaking, it is.

It also comes with a slew of information security concerns that should not be overlooked in the rush to the cloud.

Let’s take a closer look at how each of these serverless automation platforms work within Azure and some use cases for them.

Enter Integration as a Service. We know, we know. Everything as a Service overload! This emerging field involves a vendor who can help architect enterprise IT apps to work across on premises and cloud environments, complete with real-time exchange of data.

How does Integration-a-a-S work and what should you expect from a cloud integration provider?

There are two basic types of Information Security engagements in terms of how they are scoped. This is most applicable to managed services providers (MSPs), though it remains relevant to a practitioner supporting an internal corporate or public sector security team. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to call them FFP and T&M. The purpose of this blog isn’t to dig deep into financial models, but rather to discuss, in a simplified manner, how they drive the delivery of work. And then, to discuss an alternative model.  

With both Fixed Firm Price and Time & Materials engagements – and really any other model of InfoSec contract scope – there are some overlapping goals and realities. 

Bastion connects VMs, your local computers, and cloud resources without exposing them to public network connections. As a Platform as a Service, it simplifies the process of setting up and administrating bastion hosts or jumpboxes in your cloud environment.

But what are bastion hosts or jumpboxes? And why would you use them, or a service like Azure Bastion?

Most crucially, we discovered that while 72% of respondents were currently using multiple cloud providers, a whopping 56% of them had no multi-cloud strategy or long-term roadmap.

We dug in deeper to learn how these IT pros were using external service providers to manage multi-cloud workloads, whether they were using multi-cloud management tools, if containers entered the equation, and much more.

Read on to learn the rest, including the top challenges faced in a multi-cloud environment.

One big question when facing a major software upgrade such as this is whether to remain in place, so to speak, and update to the latest version from your current deployment scenario on premise or in a hosted environment, or to move to a cloud-based server – namely Azure, since that offers you tight integration and lower costs with Microsoft products such as these.

SQL Server end of support is imminent, coming up on July 9, 2019. Windows Server has a few months to go, ending support on January 14, 2020.

In typical Microsoft fashion, there are an array of different plans and licensing levels for each option. Deciding which is the best option can therefore take some time.

What is Microsoft 365 and how is it different from Office 365? M365 includes enterprise-specific features that you would likely purchase separately, critically several Enterprise Mobility and Security components.

For businesses at the midsize and enterprise levels, M365 seems like the clear choice. But what exactly do you get at each level of M365? And how does it compare to O365?

But seriously, even if Agile and cloud technology aren’t as tasty as PB&J, they can still have you smacking your lips in satisfaction as you react to business problems with technology solutions in a much faster and more reliable manner.

Here’s why Agile software development practices work so well when you’re working with cloud infrastructure, even if you aren’t a software development company.

DevOps at all costs is not going to provide any additional business value. Nor is it likely to be great for your IT team morale. Make sure you keep in mind these three common DevOps pitfalls as you evangelize and adopt DevOps practices throughout your IT department or larger organization.

Information security consists of three core archetypes: builders, breakers, and defenders. It is through recruiting and building the skills of these archetypes that the foundations of highly functional security teams are formed.

The answer isn’t that simple, but there is certainly a time and place for cloud repatriation. Here’s why it’s trendy to move some workloads back on premise and how to decide whether its time for you to follow suit.

In a way, I feel this comparison is a bit unfair, like comparing apples with oranges. Ultimately the two products can work together and overlap in order to eliminate monitoring gaps in your environment. So which monitoring solution would work the best for your enterprise? Let’s try to figure out!

In Part Two, we'll examine deeper functionalities within Sentinel including Machine Learning, queries, and automation.

Threats related to infrastructure, networking, users, and applications can be monitored via Azure Sentinel. As a cloud-native service, it scales as per your needs. It collates the data from your environment on-premises, in Azure, and any third party cloud providers. It uses Microsoft Threat Intelligence to analyze all the signals and filters out the noise from actual relevant alerts.

This two part blog series will introduce you to Azure Sentinel and show you how to get set up with the service and start exploring its many features.

I have created PowerShell scripts to do these tasks.  In a series of blog posts, I will share these PowerShell scripts and go over their usage.

The first PowerShell script will export servers from an SCCM collection into a CSV.  Then another script will import that CSV to create the appropriate Application groups, Windows Failover Clusters, or Exchange DAGs.

As multi-cloud environments continue to become more and more popular and your virtual servers, storage, and associated components sprawl across various providers, efficient governance becomes even more critical.

By implementing a cloud resource tagging policy, you lay the groundwork to consistently apply automated or manual actions relating to allocation, reporting, chargeback, compliance, security, patching, software installation, and even decommissioning or scaling resources when required.

Have you ever had the tedious task of creating multiple alerts for all of the resources in your subscription? Let me tell you, it is really time consuming to create them from scratch one by one.

I have a PowerShell Script that can Target and Create specific metric alerts for the resources you define inside of the script, making it much simpler to create a large amount of alerts at one time.

Skip down to the script if you’re familiar with Alerts already. If you aren’t here’s an overview on how they work.

Infrastructure as code (IaC) works in practice by managing your computing resources — virtual machines, storage, networking, and all the associated policies for security and such — in the same manner as you treat your code. This packages everything necessary for your application, from the code and assets to the underlying infrastructure itself, together into what works functionally as a single deployment.

Just as DevOps combined development and operations into one entity, IaC combines code and infrastructure as one.

Learn how to implement this, including downloadable Validation Pack and code snippets, in this blog post. For more information about Beekeeper patching automation software, view the product page.

If you aren’t very familiar with Kubernetes, here’s why you might be interested in the platform and why it has proven essential to large scale containerized IT applications.

One way of doing it is to author your own service monitor, but that involves considerable amount of knowledge and experience of management packs and the underlying coding. It usually takes a lot of time as well. Not everyone has the right knowledge or the time to spend on this so I thought I’d share a quick trick I do to measure uptime of a service and also be able to present it to the concerned parties in the form of a report.

This works perfectly when you need to resolve a common issue with a trusty PowerShell script that you have often used. This method will save you time and effort; you can rest assured that the issue is being taken care of with the help of a Custom Script Extension.

Running a custom script on a specific machine when an alert is triggered in Log Analytics is quite easy. Here are the following steps you need to follow to achieve this.

Microsoft deprecated OMS as of January 2019, moving all functionality into the Azure portal. Learn more about why OMS and the new Azure portal are useful for your IT workflow and what has changed with the migration to Azure.

But where should you begin when it comes to automating your cloud environment? There are many moving parts in an enterprise cloud deployment, even within specific application clusters.

These are the three easiest targets for automation and orchestration.

If you’re moving from an active on-premises Exchange deployment, you’ll first configure an interim “Exchange Hybrid” environment which hosts mailboxes within Exchange Online and your local Exchange server. The two locations share namespace, address books, free-busy, calendars, really every Exchange functionality is synced between them. Mail flow and other functions appear to be internal, but might actually be processed and stored in the cloud environment.

Don't forget to tune in after the New Years for more great data center, cloud, and managed IT services content!

We’ve discussed previously how cloud can be difficult for Accounting to classify. But even Human Resources has to adapt. Much has been made of the cloud skills gap as a challenge to hiring the right talent. A shortage of qualified applicants may be real, but if your HR team doesn’t change the actual job descriptions and roles for which they are hiring, they won’t find the skills they need, either.

Here’s how the cloud is changing IT team roles and responsibilities.

The crux of DevOps is the unification of tools and processes between development and operations teams to decrease time to market/deployment and implement continuous improvements throughout the development, testing, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of applications and underlying infrastructure.

Despite widespread DevOps adoption — or at least the majority of surveyed enterprises reporting they have started the journey towards it — many organizations are still struggling. Enter DevOps as a Service. But is DevOps as a Service a legitimate offering? The definition is still evolving, and different MSPs may offer different takes on DevOps-a-a-S.

Bruce is a 45-year-old IT manager, with twenty years experience working for ACME Power. Bruce has three photos on his desk – one of his wife, Linda; one of his kids - Davy and Wendy; and one of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Apart from his laptop, Bruce’s desk is pristine. He walked into the office this morning with a big smile on his face and passed out donuts to his colleagues.

Today has been highlighted in Bruce’s Outlook calendar for weeks. It’s day one of a thorough compliance audit of ACME Power’s application and server infrastructure. 

Basically, most organizations have been hyper focused on Infrastructure and Platforms as a Service — migrating to cloud VMs, hiring admins for Azure and AWS ecosystems, learning Kubernetes and Docker.

Meanwhile, shadow IT and the overall enterprise trend is to initially prefer SaaS. Of course, SaaS has made inroads with IT departments even at the enterprise level, especially Office 365. But without Infrastructure and Operations teams taking SaaS seriously, your overall IT environment could be opened up to security risks on top of integration problems, fragmentation, and service delivery concerns.

Are you in SaaS denial? Do you have blinders on as you focus entirely on IaaS adoption or other more pressing matters? Now is the time to get ahead of the SaaS adoption hurdles by being proactive within your IT and operations departments.

You can use many of the best Azure tools, processes, and features — including add-ons and open source solutions from the Azure Marketplace — in the cloud of your choice, helping to meet regulatory or technical challenges.

Before you get started with this intriguing hybrid and private cloud technology from Microsoft, there are a few things you’ll need to keep in mind, however. Here are some of the most important.

Runbooks that use these kinds of certificates work fine in the Azure environment, but if you need to run it in your local environment, using Hybrid Worker machines, this represents a challenge. Here's how to get those connection certificates on your Hybrid Worker.

Fundamentally, security isn’t a hyper-complex enterprise; It’s not, as they say, rocket science. It often feels that way, because the discipline is so broad in scope; encompassing both disparate technologies and governance frameworks. But, the vast majority of risk can be mitigated through adhering to basic foundational security.

More to know: A review of breaches outlined within the Verizon 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) against the Center for Internet Security (CIS) top 20 critical security controls found that:

• Adopting the first 5 controls could mitigate 85% of attacks, and
• Adopting all 20 controls could mitigate 97% of attacks.

That basic foundational security can be expressed in one essential formula, which boils down what is under your control as an IT security professional and what is outside your purview. That equation is as follows.

SCOM includes the option to autogrow your Operations database. You can enable this to allow the DB to grow in size along with your overall SCOM environment. In my opinion, you should not do so, however, unless you are absolutely forced to.

That’s great for large-scale improvements. But modern IT practices preach continuous improvement, agile methodology, and DevOps practices even beyond the software development world. With the advent of cloud, it’s all about continuous, constant iterations of your software and services.

Many SaaS platforms take care of this for you. That may not be the case with IaaS and remaining hardware, however. Focusing your existing staff on business goals and service delivery while augmenting it with an advisory and managed service provider partner can take even your backend infrastructure and upstack applications into the realm of continuous improvement via cloud management services, automation, and feedback loops.

Enterprise data center management can fray the nerves of even the most experienced administrators. “To err is human”, as the saying goes, and errors can happen during patching, even with the powerful toolset in Microsoft System Center. A server admin could spend hours struggling with a single patch and cause productivity delays the next day for the systems which don’t get addressed.

There are effective ways of automating these tasks, which come with price tags both directly and indirectly related to patching itself.

A managed services partner might be the best way for you to take advantage of multi-cloud IT infrastructure and services, especially if you face the all-too-common cloud skills gap that many organizations encounter.

Read on for statistics on multi-cloud adoption and cloud skills difficulties, as well as ways in which a partner can help you alleviate the top multi-cloud obstacles.

Included in Azure Automation is the option to extend your libraries. You can import a set of libraries called Modules to your automation account from a preexisting list that can be found in the Gallery or by uploading script files of your own.

Below you’ll see where to upload or choose these Modules.

I recently spoke at a Daniels Fund conference panel about ethics in business. A student remarked, “I have access to so much data in the workplace. How can you protect from a bad apple stealing your information?”

Ethics is the key to protecting from these types of internal threats — and it helps your company handle external threats as well.

Gartner has even named Digital Ethics and Privacy as their Number 9 trend on the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019. They recognize this growing awareness of the value of personal information and concern among various entities and individuals over how personal and sensitive data is being consumed, processed, and shared among public and private organizations.

Gartner’s advice? Move from asking “Are we secure?” or “Are we compliant with regulations?” to asking “Are we doing the right thing?”

However, there are some gaps in SCCM patching functionality, especially when it comes to orchestration, validation, and report logs. These can cause issues with QA and risk mitigation and can drive frustrations among your IT staff.

Usually this practice takes longer to execute and will require a printout of variables or comments to follow the code execution, as you are not debugging your script.

There is another, possibly better, way to get your PowerShell code into Azure.

This attack vector involves the exploit of programmatic weaknesses in applications to run unintended code to manipulate your backend SQL databases, and thus access information or even gain administrative access and credentials.

Any application that uses SQL could be subject to this type of attack, from simple websites to SaaS apps like your CRM and ERP — even VoIP systems. This attack is also not limited to applications exposed to the internet. Internal applications are prime targets for attackers who have breached your external boundary (e.g., through phishing).

You don’t need to take a deep dive into technical evaluations of each workload to choose between public cloud and a hybrid or private infrastructure. It’s possible that your business practices will make that decision for you before you ever get to individual app/system analysis.

Here are the business traits to consider as you weigh your cloud options.

For every organization that chooses to subscribe to Microsoft Online Services– Office 365, Dynamics 365, Intune, etc., choosing the correct identity model for AAD becomes an important task. In this article, we will have a look at the characteristics of each.

While there are no specific dependencies on the identity model of AAD for Microsoft Online Services to function, your organizational needs and other factors such as manageability, access control, auditing, and user experience determine which identity model should be deployed.

IT no longer has complete control and insight over every aspect of the datastore; instead as multiple cloud providers are implemented and endpoint data is served and collected from widely-flung users and workstations, you’re likely to run into compatibility and versioning issues between various databases and storage platforms. The data management problem grows even larger as multicloud, the Internet of Things, and Big Data initiatives rise in popularity and real-world applicability.

Three ways to get all your ever-growing databases and datastores on the same page are data federation, data hubs, and data lakes. What are the differences between each, and what are some pros and cons of their use?

We have several ways to implement this. One option is to use Microsoft’s Azure Automation toolset. Let’s explore what you can control with Azure Automation and how to get started using it for cloud server update management, configuration, and more.

This blog will walk you through how to create your first Management Pack in Systems Center Operations Manager, one that will discover apps by identifying their registry key.

Privacy Shield is an international law in flux, with EU lawmakers threatening to withdraw entirely if the USA does not enforce compliance. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will go into effect in 2020.

What do these laws entail? And should your organization be concerned with these data privacy measures?

While each of these infrastructure design strategies has a role in keeping your critical applications and data up and running, they do not serve the same purpose. Simply because you operate a High Availability infrastructure does not mean you shouldn’t implement a disaster recovery site — and assuming otherwise risks disaster indeed.

What’s the difference between HA, FT, and DR anyway? Do you really need DR if you have HA set up?

In Part 1 we discussed Connect, Single-Sign On, and Multifactor Authentication. You can also find a table of AAD pricing on that post. Remember, this series is not a deep dive into AAD configuration, but rather an overview of key features. Depending on your SKU you may or may not have access to all of these features.

Part 2 includes Self Service Password Resets, Identity Protection, Conditional Access, and Privileged Identity Management. These features help you control access and maintain security and compliance protocol across your enterprise cloud.

I was recently involved in reviewing the existing VPN solution and then deploying another solution for a client. Here are some common mistakes I found made when configuring these policies.

If you’re looking to shift some of your clients and sales towards the cloud, you need to adjust your operations accordingly or risk losing customers to direct sales or competitors.

Here are the biggest changes you’ll need to make to your channel sales and IT operations in order to maximize on your cloud resale strategy.

Since AAD is a cloud offering it of course requires a paid subscription to use many of its features. But there’s a free tier for those who want to explore and are just getting started with the service.

This two part article is not a deep dive how-to guide. Rather, this is an effort to talk about a few major features available with AAD that you can use to get started with managing identities in the cloud. Depending on your AAD SKU, you may, or you may not have some of the features that are being discussed.

Here’s how 2FA can be overcome by determined hackers and how you can best maintain account integrity across your organization or personal accounts.

Rather than focusing simply on the end goal from an IT perspective, your IT department should be focused on the bigger picture. Your users are in effect your customers — and your company’s customers are supported by those users. By bringing business goals and processes under the IT umbrella, you help foster communication, efficiency, improve IT services, and most importantly revenue growth across the organization.

Here are three areas to focus on when transforming your IT department into a service center.

Management Groups can be used to apply conditions to subscriptions based on Azure regions, SKU sizes, server versions, resource type, and more. They work in conjunction with Azure Policy and Azure Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) and are similar to Active Directory in their setup and administration.