Nic catches up with Darrell Webster (aka Darrell as a Service) to talk about cloud adoption messes, infrastructure challenges, people challenges, how to change rollout practices towards cloud adoption and so much more.
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Microsoft Inspire recently wrapped up in Las Vegas and in this episode, Nic catches up with Michael Van Horenbeeck to talk about his experience at Microsoft Inspire. Michael talks about his role as a Microsoft Partner and the value of attending Inspire.
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With Microsoft Ignite 2019 fast approaching, the Community Call for Content is now open and closes on August, 4. In this special episode, Anna Chu (a.k.a The Community Khaleesi) takes us through the types of submissions being accepted and walks us through the process. Are you interested in presenting at Ignite 2019? If so, Anna’s tips will help you put together the best possible submission, increasing your chances of success!
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Ever wondered about the scale of Exchange Online or what it takes to manage a service at that scale while constantly deploying new features? Microsoft’s Brent Alinger gave us a tour of Building 31 (a.k.a Exchange Central) on the Microsoft campus and sat down with us to talk about the humble beginnings of the service and how it has grown and matured since then.
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July 1 every year is a big day for the MVP community - Its renewal day for MVPs and we also get to welcome new MVPs into the community. Nicolas, Warren and I are humbled to have been renewed and to be part of this amazing community for another year. In this episode, we had a lot of fun catching up with Anna Chu (a.k.a The Community Khaleesi) to talk about being an MVP, the MVP summit and got a sneak peak into Ignite and Ignite The Tour coming up later this year.
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This post was originally published TechTarget, you can view the original post here
Microsoft employs many engineering teams to make its hosted email service Exchange Online as highly available as possible, but no system is perfect. An Office 365 outage can occur at any time as well as any Azure service you depend on, but with some advance preparation, you can try to make a disruption less jarring.
Much like Exchange Server on premises relies on services such as Active Directory and domain name system, Exchange Online is part of Office 365 and relies on many shared services to provide a user access to their mailbox. Microsoft’s cloud got hit with a few outages last year that affected Azure multifactor authentication and prevented users who require MFA to log on from accessing Office 365 services, including their Exchange Online mailbox. These outages also affected administrators who used MFA on their accounts and could not get into the Office 365 portal.
Developing a highly available Exchange environment on premises involves load balancers, database availability groups, switchovers, failovers and the like. Organizations that move to Exchange Online leave that work in Microsoft’s hands, but you will have new tools and new strategies to use if an Office 365 outage occurs or a critical Azure cloud service breaks to make downtime less of an issue.
Monitoring your tenant and supporting services won’t prevent a service problem, but it will help you to respond proactively when one occurs and let your users know about the problem before they start alerting you.
The specifics of what to monitor depends on your environment and the services you consume, but it’s always a good idea keep an eye on your identity and authentication infrastructure. How are my domain controllers performing? Is Azure AD Connect synchronization successful? These are the types of questions Azure AD Connect Health can answer. Azure AD Connect Health is included with the Azure Active Directory premium tiers as a component of Azure AD Connect. It monitors the key parts of your identity infrastructure: Azure AD Connect synchronization, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) and Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS)
You use agents with Azure AD Connect Health, so you only configure it for the services you want to monitor. For example, if you don’t use AD FS, then there is no need to install and configure that agent.
In addition to monitoring your identity and authentication infrastructure, it is essential to keep an eye on the Office 365 service health page in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Office 365 is a massive service with thousands of servers, so it stands to reason that there will always be an incident or service advisory. Some have a wider-reaching effects than others, but it’s a good idea to monitor the service health daily to understand which affect your tenant and users. You can access the service health dashboard from the Health node in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
There are a plethora of third-party monitoring tools that provide in-depth monitoring and reporting of your environment and the Office 365 services you consume. Some include additional monitoring features and will alert you if things like user experience become suboptimal.
If you use System Center and prefer to monitor your Office 365 tenant in one application, then you can download a management pack from Microsoft that adds a monitoring dashboard.
If you follow Microsoft’s security recommendations, then all the administrators in your Office 365 tenant should be using MFA to access the Microsoft 365 admin center. But what if you didn’t have any workarounds when the Azure MFA outages hit? You would have lost access to the admin center, unable to see the service health dashboard or perform any other administrative tasks in the tenant.
To get administrative access to your environment during an Azure MFA outage, then you can create an emergency access account, also called a break glass account, to gain administrative access to the tenant when the needed.
What is an emergency access account? As the name indicates, it’s a global administrator account in the tenant for use only when absolutely necessary. There are some basic rules of thumb when creating a break glass account:
It’s also important to have a well-documented process to use the break glass account. It doesn’t help if just one person with access to the account password is away on vacation when you need to use the account. It is also a good idea to periodically reset the account password and confirm that it still has all the required permissions and policy exclusions in place.
The Microsoft Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) has come a long way since it was first introduced in Exchange 2010 SP2, prior to that configuring a hybrid deployment required ~50 manual steps. We had the pleasure of sitting down with Greg Taylor and Georgia Huggins while in Redmond recently to talk about the evolution of the HCW and what challenges the newly released Hybrid Agent solves for customers.
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We often talk about “The long tail of previous best practices” and how in today’s ever-evolving cloud landscape it is very important to follow updated guidance, this includes keeping our security policies up to date. Nic sat down with Tarek and Mark from Microsoft to talk about Azure AD security, the evolution of identity management and the need to modernize legacy applications.
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If you’ve ever used the Exchange Server Role Requirements Calculator or consulted The Exchange Preferred Architecture you’ll be very familiar with the work of our guest, Ross Smith IV. Nic and Warren caught up Ross to talk about his 19-year tenure at Microsoft and his new role in Intune Engineering, giving us a sneak peak into some of the innovation we can look forward to in Outlook for iOS and Android.
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There is no denying that the only constant with cloud services is change, the nature and rate of this change often brings about some interesting challenges for organizations. We sat down with Anna Donnelly to talk about organizational change management, driving user adoption and how a sound change management strategy is essential to the success of your cloud adoption project.
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