It's common to find a requirement to create new Microsoft 365 accounts with PowerShell. We're at a point of transition when the old method of using the Azure AD module will switch to the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK or Graph API queries. In this article, we explain how to create new accounts and assign licenses with both the Azure AD module and the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.
Backing up Azure AD may sound like a counterintuitive concept to many. However, in this article, we examine several reasons aside from Disaster Recovery that support why this is good practice for enterprise organizations, now more than ever.
Microsoft has announced a six month extension for support of the Azure AD Graph API. The new deadline is the end of 2022, which gives Microsoft 365 tenants some extra time to convert PowerShell scripts which use the Azure AD and MSOL modules. The original deadline for retirement of the Azure AD license management cmdlets remains at June 30, 2022.
Over the years, the Microsoft security stack has become very feature rich and offers many ways to customize the configuration. Third-party products are available with similar features, but lack the integration capability of the Microsoft stack. In the second part of the "Ten Ways to Harden the Security of Your Microsoft 365 Tenant" series, we look at five ways to secure your environment using controls that require a premium license such as Office E5 or Azure AD Premium.
If there's one topic all administrators can agree on, it's that security is something every organization should work to improve in 2022. In this two-part article series, we explain ten different ways to improve tenant security that every administrator should consider. The first part reviews five ways to harden tenant security without the need for extra licenses, using controls that every organization can implement.
As many organizations adapt legacy scripts to use app authentication instead of traditional service account credentials, security can be compromised if certain risks are overlooked. While app secrets can be great for testing code, there’s a reason they have an enforced expiry date - the longer a secret exists in production, the higher the risk it will become compromised. The methods described in this article will help build a good foundation for app authentication while keeping security top of mind when creating or updating automation scripts.
Attack Simulations are Microsoft’s foray into a crowded field of competitors who provide a service that trains users to recognize dangerous email with simulated Phishing or malware-infested messages. Microsoft has continually added features and functionality since they released Attack Simulations, including additional simulation types, different payloads, custom payloads, customizable training and more. The most recent upgrades are RBAC permissions and end user notifications. These two additions to Attack Simulation Training are a great incentive to deploy and adopt this functionality, as End User communications are the key enhancement that make this feature worthwhile for an organization.
The number of guest accounts in Azure AD keeps growing, largely due to usage in Microsoft Teams. In this article, we describe five basic management steps to control where guests come how, how they connect, what they can do and access, and removing inactive guests. It's the kind of thing all Microsoft 365 tenants should do.
Conditional Access policies provide many security benefits, from the implementation of MFA in a user-friendly way, to the controls that can limit what data users access or download. However, the process of setting up CA policies is daunting to some at first. This article provides some thought processes and best practices to make this security initiative more manageable.
Join myself and Paul Robichaux for this week's latest episode of the podcast to discuss a plethora of updates in Microsoft 365. Plus we're joined by Microsoft MVP Theresa Miller to discuss all things VDI with Microsoft 365. We chat about Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix, VMware and much more, from the point of view of Microsoft 365 IT pros.
33 Comments
Azure Automation runbooks can run Exchange Online PowerShell code on sandbox machines. Is this a good way of getting work done? In this article, we examine how to create an Azure automation account, a RunAs account, and some runbooks for PowerShell code to run against Exchange Online and other Microsoft 365 data.
There’s a lot of debate around the need to separate Microsoft 365 administrator accounts, especially when controls such as Privileged Identity Management exist within an organization. However, even with PIM there are remaining security concerns which necessitate the operation of separate accounts. This article explains the importance of using separate accounts; details how to target different Conditional Access policies for admin and user accounts and highlights how this approach increases your security posture and limits potential attack vectors against administrator accounts.
