Conditional Access in Azure AD provides a level of security required to maintain appropriate controls over who can access confidential and privileged information. It was the topic of discussion at our most recent “Ask the Engineer Q&A Roundtable” where attendees learned tips for a successful Conditional Access deployment and got answers to their specific questions.
Read More
It’s a crazy time out there. Businesses have been mandated by state governments to enable employees to work from home. Literally overnight, there have been massive shifts to connect people remotely. Suddenly even your grandparents know what Zoom is!
Microsoft Teams is playing an integral part in facilitating remote communication and collaboration. Most companies with Office 365 subscriptions already have licenses for this product, but just now are really rushed to enable Teams for the massive increase of remote workers.
Read More
As we all strive to adjust to the changes that coronavirus has brought to our lives in the past several weeks, I wanted to share some tips about self-care and coping in these uncertain times. Here are a few tips and suggestions for managing stress and staying balanced:
Read More
In today’s multi-vendor, multi-cloud world, managing IT maintenance contracts can easily spiral out of control. Not having a full grasp of where they all stand can be costly in terms of both budget and vulnerabilities from out of support equipment and software.
We’ve identified seven questions that every IT organization should ask to truly understand if their maintenance management is fully optimized:
Read More
Every IT professional already knows that the proliferation of log files generated by Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions can be overwhelming to manage. There are multiple SIEM tools that analyze and automate this tremendous amount of data to provide alerts that help troubleshoot network issues, quickly remediate threats, and identify potential non-compliance vulnerabilities.
Read More
On February 11 2020, Microsoft released a patch for Exchange Servers that would fix a vulnerability pertaining to unauthorized access to the backend of the Exchange Control Panel. There is now confirmation from a source at the United States Department of Defense that multiple nation-state backed actors and other ransomware gangs are actively and maliciously exploiting this vulnerability on unpatched systems. The vulnerability results from the Exchange Server failing to properly create unique cryptographic keys at the time of installation. The hackers’ sophisticated exploits circumvent encryption, granting them full access of the server.
It is imperative that the latest patches from February 11th be applied as even a single Exchange instance puts you at risk.
Read More
The CDC recently requested all businesses to dust off their pandemic preparedness plans amid the spread of the Coronavirus also known as (COVID-19). The global threat has already had a major economic impact in a very short time, as is evidenced in the recent stock market plunges, worldwide flight cancellations and travel bans, and the clothing manufacturing sector to name a few.
Read More
Microsoft has a well-known yearly user conference in Orlando called Ignite. But did you know there is a smaller, free version of this conference? Microsoft Ignite The Tour is set to hit 30 cities around the world in 2020, including two U.S. cities: Washington DC, Feb 6-7th and Chicago, April 15-16th.
I had the benefit of attending the first 2020 event in Toronto earlier this month. In this blog, I’ll review the unique format of this event and share my personal highlights. Hopefully, I’m able to convince a few admins and business users to attend.
Format:
Read More
Microsoft Teams is the cloud-based collaboration solution in the Office 365 suite that integrates business messaging, calling, video meetings and file sharing. It is Microsoft’s replacement for Skype for Business.
Read More
Impossible travel. Is it sending a human to Saturn or Venus? Well maybe, but in the context of Microsoft Office 365, Impossible Travel is a security feature that is a great indicator of potential hacking attempts. The concept is straightforward. If you login to Office 365 from your office in Boston and then 20 minutes later you try to login from Dallas, or you login from home in Chicago and five hours later from Beijing, Office 365 basically says “wait a minute, that’s impossible” and it denies login from Dallas and immediately sends an IT security alert.
Read More
