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Uncategorized

Azure Managed Disks 2 – Conversion

In my last post, I discussed the advantages of Azure Managed Disks and briefly mentioned that it is possible to convert from Storage Account to Managed Disks, but made no reference as to how this was achieved. Advantages to converting to Managed Disks include: Improved Availability Improved Management Ability to switch from Premium to Standard, […]

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Cloud Computing

Azure Managed Disks

I’m late to the game on this, but I think it’s worth writing a bit about the new Managed Disks service in Azure. For years, Amazon has had elastic Block Store (EBS)[footnote]I should point out that I know virtually nothing about AWS – I could be way off-base[/footnote]. EBS is a storage system dedicated to […]

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Cloud Migration

App Modernization – Automation

I’ve been quite lax on the whole… posting thing. As usual. I found this post languishing in my drafts folder, and decided that anything that’s been in Drafts since August either needs to be published, or deleted. I was thinking about what I’d written regarding updating applications for Azure, and realised I’d glossed over the […]

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Uncategorized

Azure Bootcamps

Hi! One of the difficult parts of working with Azure is simply getting started with a totally new way of managing your IT assets – software, hardware – it’s all different. Last year, I was privileged to work with Softchoice and Microsoft and present a number of Azure Bootcamps – day-long events in which we covered the basics of Azure. We’re repeating these […]

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Cloud Computing Information Security

Key Management in Azure

Most organizations have secrets, such as private keys and passwords that need to be protected. Many organizations (rightly) are very sensitive to where the secrets are stored, and how they are used. On premises, it’s possible to simply store the keys on a USB drive in a safe, for example, but for larger organizations this […]

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Cloud Governance

Controlling Deployments In Your Azure Subscription

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 […]

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Azure Updates

New – Azure Advisor, Azure Backup

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 […]

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Application Resiliency Cloud Computing Disaster Recovery

Application Resiliency

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 […]

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Cloud Computing Information Security

Azure Security Center

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, […]

Categories
Information Security

Azure AD Pass-Through Authentication

One of the features that I’m really excited about, announced at Ignite, is Pass-Through Authentication for Azure AD. Many customers feel the need to install AD FS in their environment to provide single-sign-on and consistent authentication for their users, or they have a security (audit, authentication barrier) or HR (enforce logon hours) need to perform authentication via their domain controllers. […]