Azure & Active Directory Center

The last couple of years we have seen several security breaches in IT, leading to serious impact and financial losses. Not only in the United States, but also in the rest of the world. Last year here in Holland we have seen two respected companies in a lawsuit, where one company was compromised, leading to a financial loss of a 7-digit number of the other company. The first company was running their environment in Office 365, but because of a weak password, the mailbox of a financial controller was compromised.

Almost a year ago, in March 2020, I wrote an article called Microsoft stops basic authentication, now what on this site about Microsoft’s plan to decommission Basic Authentication in Office 365. The Covid-19 pandemic took over the world and a lot of projects were postponed. This was also the case of the Basic Authentication project at Microsoft, but the decommissioning is still planned although there are some serious changes in Microsoft’s planning. Time for an update.

There’s a running joke in the industry that the COVID-19 pandemic has done more to drive digital transformation in organizations than any consultant, project team or CTO. While this may be a slight exaggeration, there is definitely an element of truth to it. Many organizations have historically been slow to adopt remote working practices, but the pandemic and associated lockdowns have forced organizations all over the world to change their work from home policies and accelerate the deployment of tools to support telecommuting.

Administrative Units Management in Azure Active Directory

Since writing this blog post in May 2018 about administrative units, some things have finally been changed. As this feature is still in preview, it can now be managed in the Azure portal and with Microsoft Graph. But before we go into more detail, let's do a quick heads-up what administrative units are used for. 

Part 1 - Recap

Securing your data in Office 365 can be a challenging task. The problem is that using user names and passwords as the basis of our authentication protocols is not a very successful way to run our technology.

Securing your data in Office 365 can be a challenging task. The problem is that using user names and passwords as the basis of our authentication protocols is not a very successful way to run our technology.

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).

Modern authentication has been around for a while now, and it’s great. It brought support for the latest and greatest in authentication and authorization protocols and made new scenarios available. It gave us simple, unified experience across devices and platforms and improvements to the Alternate Login ID feature. On top of all that, it enabled proper support for two-factor authentication for all clients and put an end to the Office 2013 RTM fiasco (bye-bye rich clients, rest in peace app passwords!).

Active Directory Synchronization for Office 365 and Azure has been a vital, but fairly straight forward, part of Office 365 migrations for almost 5 years now. DirSync was updated to Azure Active Directory Sync, and AAD Sync was updated to Azure Active Directory Connect. In this blog post, I’m going to cover everything you need to know about deploying the newest version of AAD Connect.