Kurt Shintaku's Blog

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Dates:
March 2–4, 2021

Registration:
https://myignite.microsoft.com/

Anyone that’s ever been responsible for cost controls & billing for Azure knows that it’s not light work and a whole lot clicking.

Well, check out what’s new with Azure Cost Management and Billing – there’s a lot of time-saving features that have been introduced that is sure to delight Azure financial admins.

Updates include:

• a new cost view for resource groups
• the ability to change billing scopes
• other time-saving tools

Review the updates here:

• Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – January 2021
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cost-management-and-billing-updates-january-2021/

On April 1, 2021, Azure Active Directory will update our public service level agreement (SLA) to promise 99.99% uptime for Azure AD user authentication for all licensed Azure AD Premium customers, an improvement over our previous 99.9% SLA. This change is the result of a significant and ongoing program of investment in continually raising the bar for resilience of the Azure AD services.

Because our identity services are vital to keep customer businesses running, resilience and security are and always will be our top priority. In the last year, we’ve seen a surge in demand as organizations moved workforces online and schools enabled study from home—in fact, some national education systems moved entire student populations online with Azure AD. Azure AD is now serving more than 400 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) and processing tens of billions of authentications per day. We treat every one of those authentication requests as a mission critical operation.

In conversations with our customers, we learned that the most critical promise of our service is ensuring that every user can sign into the apps and services they need without interruption. To deliver on this promise, we are updating the definition of Azure AD SLA availability to cover user authentication and federation (and removing administrative features). This focus on critical user authentication scenarios aligns our engineering investments with the vital functions that must stay healthy for customers to run their businesses.

• NEWS: 99.99% uptime for Azure Active Directory Premium customers is coming April 1st, 2021
  99.99% uptime for Azure Active Directory – Microsoft Tech Community

As I understand it, we’re going to be making a major announcement about Microsoft’s Content Services platform & “Project Cortex”.

Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, will be keynoting, along with our Content Services executive leadership.

-k

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Join us and discover our commitment to empower people and teams be their best at the Reimagine the Employee Experience digital event, February 4, 2021, at 6:00 AM Pacific Time. See new ways to bring together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights with everyday work.

Check back at https://www.myeventurl.com/Events/Details/197 or visit Microsoft 365 Twitter on Thursday, February 4 at 9:00 AM Eastern Time for a link to the digital event.

Our Enterprise Security Executive, Andreae Pohlman, helped me understand the rebranding and all the “renaming of products” that occurred when we moved to the the “Microsoft Defender” branding of our security solutions.

Here’s a cheat sheet she shared with me.  Hopefully it’s useful for you too.

(Much of this rebranding was announced in this bbog post announcement: https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/?p=91813)

Additionally, there are other “Defender” branded security protection technologies available:

• Azure Defender for App Service
• Azure Defender for MySQL (Preview)
• Azure Defender for PostgreSQL (Preview)
• Azure Defender for Storage
• Azure Defender for Kubernetes
• Azure Defender for ACR
• Azure Defender for Key Vault
• Azure Defender for ARM (Preview)
• Azure Defender for DNS (Preview)

This week, we extended the previous “limit increases” made to Live Events.  Initially set to expire Jan 1, 2021, the “limit increases” will now expire on June 30, 2021.

Microsoft 365 live event limit increases

To continue supporting our customers’ needs, through June 30, 2021, we will extend temporary limit increases for live events, including:

• Event support for up to 20,000 attendees
• 50 events can be hosted simultaneously across a tenant
• Event duration of 16 hours per broadcast

Additionally, Live Events with up to 100,000 attendees can be planned through the Microsoft 365 assistance program. The team will assess each request and work with you to determine options that may be available. Learn more.

See the NEW limit extension date documented here:

• DOCS: Limits and specifications for Microsoft Teams
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/limits-specifications-teams

Alex Weinert & the Microsoft Identity team worked hard to build you an Azure Active Directory monitor workbook to help you hunt for Solorigate Identity activity in your environment – Check it out!

In the interest of helping customers concerned about the Solorigate attacks we are publishing a new workbook in the Azure AD admin portal to assist investigations into the Identity Indicators of Compromise related to the attacks. The information in this workbook is available in Azure AD audit and sign in logs, but the workbook helps you collect and visualize the information in one view.

The workbook is split into 5 sections, each aimed at providing information associated with the attack patterns we have identified:

1. Modified application and service principal credentials/authentication methods
2. Modified federation settings
3. Azure AD STS Refresh token modifications by service principals and applications other than DirectorySync
4. New permissions granted to service principals
5. Directory role and group membership updates for service principals

…

Read more & access the Workbook here:

• BLOG: Azure AD workbook to help you assess Solorigate risk
  https://aka.ms/SolorigateAzureADWorkbook

I recently was asked:

“What sort of training is available for Surface Hub?”

1. MICROSOFT STORES
   The teams that formerly staffed the physical Microsoft Stores operate virtually now and will offer virtual training on the Surface Hub’s basic usage and operation. You can contact them directly at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/locations/personal-training
2. TRAINING PARTNERS
   The following Microsoft Partners offer customized & personalized training for organizations around the usage of Surface Hub for a fee.
1. CollabTech Group
   CollabTech offers customized training & produced the Microsoft online video training below.
   https://www.collabtechgroup.com
2. YorkTel
   YorkTel produces industry-specific training for various workflows as well as on-prem support.
   https://www.yorktel.com/services/consulting/user-adoption/
3. ONLINE VIDEO TRAINING
1. Surface Hub 2S on-demand adoption and training videos – Surface Hub | Microsoft Docs (Numerous videos)
2. Surface Hub 2S Demo: The Experience [Webinar] – YouTube (Video walk through as well)

The accelerated adoption of cloud last year due to COVID-19 was phenomenal; advancing IT modernization for many organizations while also bringing a wealth of lessons learned. While much progress was made, many government agencies find there can still be challenges to getting started with cloud.

With that in mind, we invite you to RSVP and join us to kick off the New Year learning how agencies can master cloud fundamentals in 2021 during an Azure Government Meetup hosted on Teams Live.

During this event, which is free and open to the public, we will discuss:

• Cloud fundamentals: What you need to know to get started
• Security and compliance considerations
• Planning, assessing and migrating to the cloud
• Training resources and reskilling for cloud 2021
• Plus, demos of tools to ease your move to cloud

Register for this no cost event here:

• Date/Time:
  Jan 27, 2021 – 6:00PM-7:00PM
• Location:
  Virtual
• Registration:
  ”Mastering cloud fundamentals for government in 2021” | Meetup
  https://www.meetup.com/DCAzureGov/events/275210391/

Read this Gartner report (published 10/2/2020) to learn about taking advantage of security solutions from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers. This report tells you how:

• The automation, programmatic infrastructure and built-in security capabilities of leading IaaS providers enable enterprises to improve and scale the protection of public cloud infrastructure.
• Properly managed, security and risk management leaders can secure cloud better than their data centers.

Read the full report here, available for download:

• How to Make Cloud More Secure Than Your Own Data Center, Neil MacDonald and Tom Croll, 9 October 2019
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/gartner-how-to-make-cloud-more-secure-than-your-own-data-center/