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, … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]
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…]
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. … [Read more…]