Azure is a great platform. Users have access to a very broad range of hardware and services that can enable IT to transform how the business operates. However, sometimes there’s just too much choice, and administrators need to restrict the ability of contributors to deploy or use certain features. The obvious restriction is limiting VM size – not many organizations have a use for the very large instances, such as the … [Read more…]
Wow! I’ve been quite busy the last few weeks and I missed posting. This is no good… especially with all the new stuff announced this week! There’s sometimes lulls in new stuff (at least, that I care about), but this week has been full of cool and exicting features Native VMWare Backup with Azure Backup … [Read more…]
Where I work, we currently use a third party SSO provider to access most of the day-to-day applications we use. When I went this morning to log my hours for the week, I got a Server 500 error! Unfortunately, the cloud SSO provider was offline. This, it turns out, was due to an AWS failure … [Read more…]
As organizations increasingly move data and services to Azure, it can be difficult to assess whether the services are implemented in a secure fashion. Many of the traditional datacenter security good practices apply in Azure, but they don’t necessarily translate in an obvious way. Moreover, with the ease with which an administrator can add resources, … [Read more…]
I have some follow-ups to my previous post on disk encryption in Azure, after I attended BRK3277 – Protect your data using Azure’s encryption capabilities and key management. I learned some interesting tidbits about how this works – the presenter is the owner of the functionality within Microsoft, so I’d consider his information to be authoritative. There’s … [Read more…]
Note – Update 2018-11-13: The Azure team has released a new disk encryption method that is much less complex! You can read more about it here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/azure-security-disk-encryption-overview This post will walk you through the configuration necessary to encrypt a virtual machine’s hard drives in Azure. This post applies only to Windows VMs running in Microsoft Azure; … [Read more…]
As I mentioned in my first blog post, this website is hosted entirely natively in Microsoft Azure. I’m using Project Nami, which is a fork of WordPress with a a single initial goal — to teach WordPress to natively speak T-SQL while maintaining full compatibility with properly written plugins and themes. This is an important … [Read more…]
I spend a lot of my time at work introducing clients to Azure. There’s a lot to learn and understand about Azure – and the cloud computing paradigm in general. I’m often asked questions like: “Where do you learn about Azure?” “Where did you get started with Azure?” “How can I learn about Azure?” “What … [Read more…]
In the last couple weeks, some very welcome updates came to the Azure portal. There’s lots of little changes to the verbiage throughout, such as updating the “Browse” button to “More Services” – I bet the documentation team is going to be updating that for quite some time now. Two of the changes have really … [Read more…]