The vault or more precisely the “Identity Vault” is a single pane view of all the collated data of your users, from the various data source repositories. This sounds like a lot of jargon but it’s quite simple really.
In the diagram below we look at a really simple attribute firstName (givenName within AD) 
As you will see at the centre is the attribute, and branching off this is all the Connected Systems, i.e. Active Directory.… [Keep reading] “The Vault!”
Running Containers in public cloud environments brings advantages beyond the realm of “fat” virtual machines: easy deployments through a registry of Images, better use of resources, orchestration are but a few examples.
Azure is embracing containers in a big way (Brendan Burns, one of the primary instigators of Kubernetes while at Google, joined Microsoft last year which might have contributed to it!)
Running Containers nowadays is almost always synonymous with running an orchestrator which allows for automatic deployments of multi-Container workloads.… [Keep reading] “Running Containers on Azure”
In this post I will talk about data (aka the source)! In IAM there’s really one simple concept that is often misunderstood or ignored. The data going out of any IAM solution is only as good as the data going in. This may seem simple enough but if not enough attention is paid to the data source and data quality then the results are going to be unfavourable at best and catastrophic at worst.
With most IAM solutions data is going to come from multiple sources.… [Keep reading] “Where's the source!”
Last week (19 July 2017) one of Microsoft’s Azure Security Center’s latest features went from Private Preview to Public Preview. The feature is Azure Just in time Virtual Machine Access.
Essentially JIT VM Access is a wrapper for automating an Azure Network Security Group rule set for access to an Azure VM(s) for a temporal period on a set of network ports restricted to a source IP/Network.… [Keep reading] “Enabling and Scripting Azure Virtual Machine Just-In-Time Access”
A few weeks back I noticed that I now had the option for the Azure Cloud Shell in the Azure Portal.
Essentially rather than having the Azure CLI installed on your local workstation, you can now initiate it from the Portal and you have automatically assigned (initiated as part of the setup) 5Gbytes of storage associated with it. So you can now create, manage and delete Azure resources using a centrally hosted CLI session.… [Keep reading] “Getting started with Azure Cloud Shell”
When having to deploy resources within Azure you can easily log in to the Azure Portal and start deploying resources, however with the number of components needed to build a working solution this can quickly become time consuming. You may also need to deploy the same solution in a Development, Test, and Production environment and then make some changes to the environment along the way.
There is a lot of talk about DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in the IT industry at the moment.… [Keep reading] “Azure Build Pipeline using ARM Templates and Visual Studio Team Services”
I count myself lucky every now and again, for many reasons. I have my health. I have my wonderful family.
Today, however, it’s finding out the latest version of AAD Connect (v1.1.524.0) will probably give me back a few more months of my life.
The reason? My customer’s chosen configuration of their AAD Connect to choose the default value of ‘ObjectGUID’ for their ‘SourceAnchor’ value.
Now, for most organizations with a single AD forest, you’re laughing. … [Keep reading] “Migrating 'SourceAnchor' from 'ObjectGUID' using new AAD Connect 1.1.524.0”
For anyone who has worked with Office 365/Azure AD and AADConnect, you will of course be aware that we can now sync passwords two ways from Azure AD to our on-premises AD. This is obviously a very handy thing to do for myriad reasons, and an obvious suggestion for a business intending to utilise Office 365. The conversation with the security bod however, might be a different kettle of fish. In this post, I aim to explain how the password sync and write-back features work, and hopefully arm you with enough information to have that chat with the security guys.… [Keep reading] “Understanding Password Sync and Write-back”
Over the years I’ve transitioned through a number of laptops and for whatever reason they never fully get put out to pasture. Two specific laptops are used semi-regularly for functions associated with a few virtual machines they hold. Over the last 10 years or so, I’ve been a big proponent of VirtualBox. It’s footprint and functionality aligned with my needs. The downside these days is needing to sometimes carry two laptops just to use an application or two contained inside a Virtual Machine on VirtualBox.… [Keep reading] “Migrating VirtualBox VDI Virtual Machines to Azure”
Azure AD Connect is the latest release to date for Azure AD sync or previously known as Dirsync service. It comes with some new features which make it even more efficient and useful in Hybrid environment. Besides many new features the primary purpose of this application remains the same i.e. to sync identities from your local (On-Prem) AD to Azure AD.
Of the late I upgraded an AD sync service to AD connect and during the install process I ran into a few issues which I felt are not widely discussed or posted on the web but yet are real world scenarios which people can face during AD connect Install and configuration.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Connect – Upgrade Errors”