Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Did you know that 25% of all data breaches are caused by trusted insiders? This case study, based on a true story of corporate espionage, shows how you can reduce insider risk with #Microsoft #Purview.

• Reduce Insider Risk | Microsoft Purview
  https://info.microsoft.com/ww-thankyou-data-protection-with-purview-how-it-detects-and-responds.html?LCID=EN-US

#InsiderRisk #MicrosoftPurview

We are thrilled to announce that GPT-4 Turbo with Vision on Azure OpenAI service is coming soon to public preview.

GPT-4 Turbo with Vision is a large multimodal model (LMM) developed by OpenAI that can analyze images and provide textual responses to questions about them.

It incorporates both natural language processing and visual understanding. This integration allows Azure users to benefit from Azure’s reliable cloud infrastructure and OpenAI’s advanced AI research.

• GPT-4 Turbo with Vision on Azure OpenAI Service https://aka.ms/gpt-4v/

#Microsoft #gpt4vision #gpt4turbo #azure #openai #ai

Just released—get our downloadable, interactive guide from the Microsoft Incident Response team to learn how to improve your organization’s ability to respond effectively and limit impact during a security breach:

“New Microsoft Incident Response team guide shares best practices for security teams and leaders” | Microsoft Security Blog
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/12/11/new-microsoft-incident-response-team-guide-shares-best-practices-for-security-teams-and-leaders/

#IncidentResponse #MSFTSecurityExperts #Security #Cybersecurity #Microsoft #msftadvocate

From our Security Global BlackBelt, Andrea Fisher:

For years, we’ve been hearing how much people rely on GPOs – so much so that they were effectively “blocked” from getting to Intune for management of their Windows PCs.

But did you know that you import existing GPOs to Intune? The GPO’s settings are auto-evaluated for comparable MDM settings. You can then click “Import” to generate an Intune policy based on that GPO.

Read more here:

• Use Microsoft Intune to import and analyze group policies | Microsoft Learn
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/configuration/group-policy-analytics

Generative AI is poised to transform cybersecurity, empowering defenders to respond to incidents in minutes instead of hours or days. Learn how to supercharge threat detection and begin preparing your organization for AI security tools with unified extended detection and response (XDR) and security information and event management (SIEM).

Get the e-book, The Path to AI: Pave the way for powerful cybersecurity AI with integrated XDR and SIEM, to explore how to:

• Get started on your path by deploying end-to-end visibility to gain an edge over attackers.
• Layer on cost savings by simplifying the number of tools defenders use to protect your organization.
• Accumulate the high-quality threat signals necessary to use generative AI tools like Microsoft Security Copilot effectively.

Download the eBook here:

• Pave Your Path to Cybersecurity AI | Microsoft Security
  https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-the-path-to-ai.html?LCID=EN

The Microsoft Incident Response team has observed common misconfigurations for Microsoft Entra ID across various industry verticals.

In their recent post, they present details on the common misconfigurations observed in their engagements and provide guidance on how to properly configure Microsoft Entra ID to remove risks and harden environments against cyberattacks.

For example:

• Accounts that are used to administer Microsoft Entra ID should be native to Microsoft Entra ID and not synced from on-premises Active Directory
• Any account that holds privilege in on-premises Active Directory, such as Domain Administrators and the respective groups such as Domain Admins, should be completely excluded from being synced to Microsoft Entra ID
• To remove the attack vector of direct phishing attempts, users that hold privilege in Microsoft Entra ID should not have a mailbox assigned

For over 100+ recommendations on how to best configure your Entra ID, visit:

• Microsoft Incident Response lessons on preventing cloud identity compromise | Microsoft Security Blog
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/12/05/microsoft-incident-response-lessons-on-preventing-cloud-identity-compromise/

In the context of enterprise applications, the question we hear most often is “how do I build something like ChatGPT that uses my own data as the basis for its responses?”

The combination of Azure Cognitive Search and Azure OpenAI Service yields an effective solution for this scenario. It integrates the enterprise-grade characteristics of Azure, the ability of Cognitive Search to index, understand and retrieve the right pieces of your own data across large knowledge bases, and ChatGPT’s impressive capability for interacting in natural language to answer questions or take turns in a conversation.

Read the post below to learn more on how to leverage these services for your own ChatGPT bot for your Enterprise data.

• Revolutionize your Enterprise Data with ChatGPT: Next-gen Apps w/ Azure OpenAI and Cognitive Search
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ai-azure-ai-services-blog/revolutionize-your-enterprise-data-with-chatgpt-next-gen-apps-w/ba-p/3762087/page/3

If you’re interested in differentiating between what’s available with Teams Live Events and what the new Teams Town Hall feature will make available, this post may help. 

While the services will be extremely similar, I’ve been informed that there will be some differences that you should be aware of.  The core differences are documented here: Switch from Microsoft Teams live events to town halls – Microsoft Support

Some of the new announcements around what else we are releasing for Town Halls is listed below – including GCC availability.

Following our recent announcement of the general availability of the new town hall in Microsoft Teams and the retirement of Microsoft Teams Live Events, below are several key updates to share with customers regarding the existing Teams Live Events experience and the new town hall experience.

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‌Teams Live Events Updates

Teams Live Events Capacity Extensions: We previously announced the introduction of town hall for commercial customers that will replace Teams Live Events, along with the retirement of Teams Live Events for commercial customers on September 30, 2024. To help our customers with a smooth transition from Teams Live Events to Town halls, we are extending the capacity limits for Teams Live Events that are currently set to expire on December 31, 2023 – we are extending the timeline for capacity limits to now expire on June 30, 2024. This means that customers using Teams Live Events will continue to have a view-only broadcast experience for up to 20,000 attendees (previously up from 10,000 attendees); 50 events hosted simultaneously across a tenant (previously up from 15 events); and event duration of 16 hours per broadcast (previously up from 4 hours). Note, as the capacity limits expire in June 2024, customers that require more than 10,000 attendees and more than 15 concurrent events, will need to use the new town hall experience and purchase relevant Teams Premium licenses for the additional capacity. Learn more.

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‌Teams Live Events for New Teams: Currently, only presenter and attendee roles can use Teams Live Events on new Teams. Organizer roles will be able to start using Teams Live Events on new Teams by end of January 2024. Presenter roles will be able to start using Teams Live Events on new Teams by end of March 2024. Teams Live Events will be fully supported for all roles on new Teams by end of March 2024.

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‌Teams Town Hall Updates

Town Hall for Government Clouds Availability: Town hall general availability for government cloud customers (including GCC, GCC-High, and DoD) will be announced in Q1 2024, along with the retirement timeframe of Teams Live Events.

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‌3P eCDN support for Town Hall in Teams Premium: We previously announced 3P eCDN providers will be supported with advanced town hall functionality in Teams Premium that includes scaling of up to 20,000 attendees with Q&A support and concurrency of up to 50 tenants across a tenant. This support for third-party eCDN with advanced town hall in Teams Premium will be available in early February 2024 where we will enable admins to have the ability to disable Microsoft first party eCDN at a user level within a tenant for users licensed with Teams Premium and switch the users back to using a third-party eCDN as they prefer. Learn more.

Microsoft eCDN Support and Licensing for Town Halls: Microsoft eCDN (first-party) support is included as a part of the Teams Premium offer, however, as this is an attendee-based feature for town hall, it is recommended that all attendees have either a Teams Premium or standalone eCDN license in order to benefit from the eCDN capabilities. Learn more.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explains what Copilot Studio provides customers of Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft Ignite 2023.

By empowering them to build their own custom AI Assistants for their applications, including integrating them through pre-built connectors with SAP, Workday & ServiceNow, Copilot Studio make it possible to build your own Copilot for your own in-house applications… leveraging your organization’s own internal data.

Recently, I’ve had a number of customers question whether their organization requires Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC).

We have a straight forward guide around determining whether GCC is required – and whether an organization is even eligible to obtain a GCC tenant.

Determine whether your organization needs Microsoft 365 Government – GCC and meets eligibility requirements.

The Microsoft 365 Government – GCC environment provides compliance with US government requirements for cloud services, including FedRAMP Moderate, and requirements for criminal justice and federal tax information systems (CJI and FTI data types).

In addition to enjoying the features and capabilities of Microsoft 365, organizations benefit from the following features that are unique to Microsoft 365 Government – GCC:

• Your organization’s customer content is logically segregated from customer content in the commercial Microsoft 365 services from Microsoft.
• Your organization’s customer content is stored within the United States.
• Access to your organization’s customer content is restricted to screened Microsoft personnel.
• Microsoft 365 Government – GCC complies with certifications and accreditations that are required for US Public Sector customers.

You can find more information about the Microsoft 365 Government – GCC offering for US Government customers at Microsoft 365 Government plans, including eligibility requirements.

The Microsoft 365 US Government service description describes the platform’s benefits, which are centered around meeting compliance requirements within the United States.

You might want to transfer the tables of information in the service description into an Excel workbook and add two columns: Relevant for my organization Y/N and Meets the needs of my organization Y/N. Then you can review this list with your colleagues to confirm that this service meets your organization’s needs.

More information is available at

• Microsoft 365 Government – GCC deployments – Microsoft Teams
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/plan-for-government-gcc
• Office 365 US Government – Service Descriptions
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/office-365-platform-service-description/office-365-us-government/office-365-us-government
• Office 365 GCC – Service Descriptions
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/office-365-platform-service-description/office-365-us-government/gcc