When it comes to cybersecurity, the threat landscape over the last 12 months has never been more complex and challenging. During Microsoft’s annual partner event, Microsoft Inspire, a strong emphasis was put on trust and security. According to Microsoft, they have been busy thwarting and tracking the following:
On-premises Exchange servers are still a thing, and with future versions of Exchange coming on-premises we can assume they still will be for some time to come and on-premises Exchange monitoring is recommended. If your organization still runs on-premises Exchange servers, then Datacenter Activation Coordination (DAC) is a feature you need to understand.
“Cut-over” . . . . Even the word itself sounds abrupt. The pressure of preparing all your data, especially your critical Exchange email data, and then trying to move all of it all at once without creating disruption for users is neither a trivial project nor a welcome prospect.
There are still thousands of cyberattacks targeting zero-day security vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server faster and more furious every single day as malicious hackers attempt to target organizations that have yet to apply the security patches released to mitigate them.
With the HAFNIUM experience still fresh in mind, we are a bit worried about other vulnerabilities and security updates for Exchange. The last two weeks there were rumors about new vulnerabilities in Exchange.
On April 13, 2021 Microsoft released new and urgent security updates for Exchange server 2013, 2016 and 2019 that addresses four Remote Code vulnerabilities:
If you haven’t read part 1 and part 2 of this article series yet, we recommend you do. Reading parts 1 and 2 are essential for proceeding part 3.
Moving past parts 1 and 2, I now have all my clients using my new inventory classes I created. I’ve verified with a few clients that they are successfully sending this data to the site server. What’s next? The next piece of this process is to query the database, however this is an optional step. What we'll discuss next is setting up the SSRS report, but I always like to setup a SQL query in the SCCM console first. It’s a quick and easy way to figure out what’s in your database.
Most organizations are spread across multiple locations in today’s business world. Exchange being such a critical application, it’s essential to make sure that it is up and running around the clock without any downtime. Regarding High Availability and Disaster Recovery, Exchange 2013 has many features due to new improvements and some changes with DAGs as compared to Exchange 2010.
While handling employee separation is generally a process controlled or handled by human resources, IT has to get involved somehow to manage email, contacts, and other knowledge items stored within Exchange. Here are some suggestions on how to gracefully handle the technical side of employees transitioning out of your organization.
Now that you've looked over part 1's information on how to build a SCCM report of let's proceed with part 2.
Once you’ve properly extended the SCCM hardware inventory you should now focus your attention on the clients. In order for the clients to pick up their new marching orders they will need to retrieve a new machine policy.
Microsoft SCCM (and MDT) are great tools that provide a robust system to lay down OS images onto many clients. Once setup, SCCM admins and technicians can easily image computers all day every day without thinking about how much time and money they’re saving the company. Rather than just telling your boss you’re making progress on something like the Windows XP replacement project you’ve got going on why not give her/him real, hard numbers of how many devices you’ve been knocking out over the past 6 months?