Categories
Cloud Computing Cloud Migration

Customer-Supplied Master Images in Azure

tl;dr – don’t bring your own image unless you really have a good use-case and you’ve already modernized configuration management processes. Re-evaluate what is baked into the standard deployment and carefully plan automation. Test thoroughly. When first investigating running applications in Azure, customers often ask me “How do I upload my base image to Azure?” […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
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
Cloud Computing Information Security

Encrypting a Virtual Machine in Azure

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; […]