Azure & Active Directory Center

Microsoft Ignite was held on October 12 to 14th 2022, and was a truly hybrid event, with in-person sessions held at the Seattle conference center as well as pre-recorded content and Teams live-event style sessions being streamed around the world. The big catch phrase of the conference this year was “Do more with less”. As organizations adapt to new challenges, they are looking to have more choice in the way they work and to get better results with less friction. The updates to products revealed at Microsoft Ignite were aimed at helping customers get the full value of Microsoft’s technologies.

Last year I wrote "Microsoft 365 Security Assessment" Part 1 and Part 2, where I provided a list of actions one should perform or check in one’s Microsoft 365 environment as a security assessment.

Introduction to Identity

With organizations moving workloads to the cloud, they no longer have the traditional network security boundaries to manage access to applications and data. Therefore, identity is now the primary control plane in the cloud. This means that organizations control capabilities based on either the user identity or the device identity or a combination of both, using controls such as conditional access policies, compliance policies, self-service, single sign-on and automatic account provisioning and deprovisioning to cloud software as a services (SaaS).

Last week I shared part one of my Microsoft 365 Security Assessment where we took a deep dive into securing things related to Azure Active Directory. If you haven’t had a chance to read through it yet, take a few minutes and read it here.

Now that we’re all on the same page, lets dive into part two, where we’ll cover security settings in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

As a Microsoft 365 certified Security Administrator, and Microsoft certified Azure Security Engineer I have recently done a number of Microsoft 365 security assessments. Some of them have been post-breach assessments. A lot of companies had to enable remote workers in a hurry at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a result have realized security configuration and protection is more critical than ever.