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Sander's qualities extend beyond the typical triple-A stories in the area of Identity and Access Management. Of course, authentication, authorization and auditing are necessities but my out of the box solutions get the most out of software, hardware and the cloud. Rapid technological advancements have resulted in cutting-edge solutions around Active Directory, Azure Active Directory and Identity Management. Keeping up with these is just a small challenge, compared to my true goal: helping people use the technology on a daily basis. In a way that ICT is not a mere hurdle, but an infinite enabler. His work as a consultant, blogger and trainer are all means to achieve this goal. His multiple Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status, Veeam Vanguard status and extensive certification aids him. Through direct communications with the product teams in Redmond, he remains up to date, exchanges feedback and accelerates support. Sander is also a Virtual Product Owner for AppGov and ENow.
Hybrid Identity, the relationship between Active Directory and Azure AD, has benefitted from many improvements in Azure AD Connect. For the vast majority of organizations with Hybrid Identity, Azure AD Connect provides the synchronization part of the Hybrid Identity story and can also play a vital role in the authentication part of it.
Compromised Domain Controllers are every Active Directory admin’s nightmare. However, Domain Controllers now have nightmares of their own … all through their Print Spooler services.
One of the pieces of feedback we received from a previous ENow post (integrating your temporary COVID tenant with your on-premises environment), was the fear of introducing errors and interrupting processes that now rely on the Azure AD tenant. This, indeed, may be the case when you rely solely on Azure AD Connect’s soft matching capabilities and wield a narrow scope for synchronization of objects.
In the first quarters of 2020, when organizations were confronted with the demand to work any place, any device, all the time, some had to scramble to make things work. One of the common approaches we found was creating a “COVID Microsoft 365 tenant” and provisioning other temporary solutions.
There are many types of organizations. Some organizations have started as cloud-only. Other organizations are still very much entrenched on-premises. From the last group of organizations, I hear the following sentence a lot: “We don’t use Azure AD.”
I think this is an interesting but dangerous thing to say.
Kerberos may be considered the old-timer of authentication protocols, but Active Directory still relies heavily on it. That’s why Microsoft is now using a new strategy to address vulnerabilities. IT Pro's may operate the same way they did before but might not get the same results as they once did.
