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.
As more IT services move to the cloud, the need for better security features will only increase. People want to be able to log in hassle-free, but organizations need strong authentication security. The fastest way for this move to cloud service to fail is going to be though a large security breach. Microsoft is aware of all these facts, and they are putting a lot of work into ensuring that logging into their cloud servers is both easy and secure.
The ability to process computer-based data on third-party systems is not a new invention. For example, the outsourcing of financial data to tax advisers for further processing has been used for decades. Since the introduction of the term "cloud," the idea that computer-based data is stored and processed by third-party service providers creates an uncomfortable feeling.
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.
Conditional Access is a premium feature of Azure Active Directory that allows administrators to specify conditions under which users can authenticate into other cloud services. With conditional access, you can specify that a certain set of users can only authenticate to specific applications from specific IPs for example.
In this blog post, Microsoft recently announced support for Hybrid Modern Authentication for Exchange Server 2013/2016 on-premises. What is this Hybrid Modern Authentication, and is it something you should tinker about? As with most questions in IT, the answer is less straightforward and leans towards what most consultants would say: “it depends”.
In the last few weeks we have been frantically recapping the dozens of announcements made at Ignite 2017. As usual, many of the features demoed at the conference will only show up in production after few weeks or even months, but some are already available in Preview. In this article, we will do a short overview of one such feature, namely Access Reviews for Office 365 groups and applications.
The old chestnut question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" is surprisingly relevant in the world of cloud collaboration software. Maybe the modern version would be “if a service falls in the cloud and I don’t notice it, is it still an outage?”
Ignite is Microsoft’s major conference for new announcements and training aimed at IT professionals. This year Ignite took place in Orlando, Florida the week of September 25th. I wasn’t able to make it to Orlando to be onsite for the conference this year, but it’s not that difficult to follow new announcements from Ignite from anywhere in the world.
