Azure & Active Directory Center

One of the great features in Microsoft 365 is Azure Active Directory Application Proxy. AAD App Proxy allows you to publish internal web applications to the Internet and ensure users authenticate in a very secure way. Best of all, it can do this usually without requiring any firewall changes – all that is required is outbound Internet access from the computer running the AAD App Proxy agent.

What a difference a few weeks can make. In less than a month, a huge segment of the world’s working population has had to transition to a work from home model. For some workers and organizations this is the first time they’ve done this, and some are still scrambling to make it work. A lot of organizations have spent the last 10-20 years securing their environments to prevent external access only to find out now that they need to break down those barriers.

Today, Office 365 customers experienced another global outage affected by Azure AD. When did you first know that there was a problem? Were you alerted to the problem by a frustrated user trying to log into email on a Monday morning? How much productivity was lost within your organization due to the outage?

Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) is an on-premises information rights management solution that ships with Windows Server. It uses encryption and a form of selective functionality denial for limiting access to documents such as corporate emails and Microsoft Office documents, and the operations that authorized users can perform on them.

Office 365 comes with a set of admin roles that can be assigned to users within your organization. Each admin role maps to common business functions and gives your users permissions to do specific tasks in the Office 365 admin center and Windows PowerShell.

Microsoft is drizzling out a new build of Azure Active Directory Connect via auto-upgrade to select customers. They often do this when a new build has significant changes to make sure it doesn't break in existing organizations that currently use AAD Connect. It will be available for all customers to download in the coming days/weeks as either an auto-upgrade or manual download.

For hybrid customers, Azure Active Directory Connect is one of the most important tools you need to keep Azure AD up-to-date. Besides directory synchronization, it provides means for authentication to Office 365 resources using password hash sync, pass-through authentication, or AD FS.

One of the most important aspects of moving to a cloud solution like Office 365 is to provide a way for users to authenticate to their cloud resources. Organizations typically want to reduce administrative overhead and user confusion by managing only one directory, be it the on-premises directory (AD) or the cloud directory (Azure AD).