Category Archives: Microsoft

Azure Firewall Basic SKU is now GA

Microsoft announces with the Azure Firewall Standard and Premium two native Firewall Services available as PaaS solution what are a great benefit to classic Firewall deployments, because of native Autoscaling Features, no need for VM Management and more. Unfortunately the price was to high for SMBs, with 900€ for the Standard and over 1200€ for the Premium Edition. A frequently requested Features, was a cheaper variant aimed at small and medium businesses.

This wish has been answered and last year October with the Azure Firewall Basic edition (public preview). The Azure Firewall Basic (AzFw Basic) has leaved the Public Preview and are now GA. The planned subscription must first be prepared before the deployment can begin with some Powershell commands.

Now Azure offers three different Azure Firewall solutions. The following table list the different SKUs and the price for using in West Europe (03/2023).

Microsoft has made some changes to deploy the Firewall Basic compared to the Firewall Standard and Premium SKU for better Service avalability. This article will give you a short overview of this changes.

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How I successfully passed the MS Defender for Cloud Ninja training and how the security community helped me

One of my goal this year was to work more and more with the Microsoft security solutions and got deeper into the different services and possibilities. My focus on this is to get a better understanding how we can secure our Hybrid Cloud environment with the different Microsoft defender products.

About the Microsoft Security Community

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Speaking at Cloud Brew 2022 about Azure Arc

After many hybrid events in the last few years I really like to get back to in-person or hybrid events to see the community live at the events and discuss and learn from each other about different projects and meet some new people.

About the Cloud Brew

One of my favorite conference in 2019 was the Cloud Brew in Belgium, it was a great conference because of different things:

  • Great list of speakers and sessions
  • Deep dive technical sessions
  • Big community from around europe
  • One of the biggest Azure related conference in belgium
  • Great place in the beautiful former brewery Lamot

The Cloud Brew 2022 will take place from 18/11/ – 19/11/2022 in Lamot, Mechelen in Belgium. There are some free seats available.

About my session

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My favorite Microsoft Ignite 2022 Fall Highlights

After the pandemic beguns Microsoft switched the both big conference Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite to virtual only events. The Ignite was two times a year in 2020 and 2021. For 2022 it was long time not clear will it go back to an in-person event or still stay as a virtual event.

The Microsoft Ignite 2022 has start 2 hours ago as an hybrid event delivered from Seattle with 6 Spotlight events around the globe and delivered as before virtually. I’m a little disappointed because a lot of the content is pre-recorded and even great speakers like Donovan Brown don’t hold their sessions live in Seattle but are only shown there virtually as well.

In this article I will share the important announcements from my perspective from the Microsoft Ignite 2022. Most of you know me as an Azure Governance, (Hybrid) Infrastructure and Security guy, so please forgive me for focusing on these things.

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Azure Firewall Basic is available as Public preview

Microsoft announces with the Azure Firewall Standard and Premium two new Firewall Services available as PaaS solution what are a great benefit to classic Firewall deployments, because of native Autoscaling Features, no need for VM Management and more. Unfortunately the price was to high for SMBs, with 900€ for the Standard and over 1200€ for the Premium Edition. A frequently requested Features, was a cheaper variant aimed at small and medium businesses.

This wish has been answered and is now available in the form of the Azure Firewall Basic edition. The Azure Firewall Basic (AzFw Basic) is available as public preview and the planned subscription must first be prepared before the deployment can begin with some Powershell commands. This article will guide you through the setup process for a Hub and Spoke Network and the main difference between the three Azure Firewall editions.

Azure Firewall edition comparison

Microsoft already introduced the Azure Firewall as Standard Edition in 2018 and expanded it with numerous updates in 2019. The Firewall Manager followed at the end of 2019 to manage various Azure firewalls under one roof. Mid of 2021 Microsoft announced the Azure Firewall Premium edition and extend the capabilities compared to the standard edition by the following features: TLS Inspetion, IDPS, Web categories and URL Filerting.

The acceptance of the firewall has been high so far due to the numerous features and the fact that the firewall is provided as a PaaS solution. As an SMB solution, the prices called are too high and that is where the Basic Edition is now trying to attract attention.

The following table list the difference between the edition. Please note the Maximum throughput between the different edition. Azure Basic Firewall is limited at time of article of 2 VMs under the hood and a maximum troughput of 250 (maybe increase to GA).

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Microsoft will disable Legacy Authentication 1st of October 2022 – What this means and what you have to do

Many of my customers move to the cloud in the last recent years. This means for existing environments a start of a journey away from on-prem system going forward to cloud environments. We all know a journey starts with preperation and needs different steps and is always not a good idea to work on all systems together. But on the other hand, same system still exists in there old way and use sometimes old, unsecure protocols for communication and authentication.

To adress this issues Microsoft announce Septemper 2019 in a blog article “Improving security” the disabling of support for Basic authentication for the protocols like EWS, POP, IMAP and Remote Powershell. After the plan the corona crisis came up and Microsote decided to postpone the disabling of the noted protocols.

In September 2021 Microsoft released new information about this in the article “Basic authentication and Exchange Online” including some updated information. Microsoft will disable basic authentication beginning 1st of October 2022 for all protocols except SMTP auth. This means the following protocols will be disabled:

  • Exchange Web Services (EWS)
  • Exchange ActiveSync (EAS)
  • POP
  • IMAP,
  • Remote PowerShell
  • MAPI
  • RPC
  • OAB
Continue reading Microsoft will disable Legacy Authentication 1st of October 2022 – What this means and what you have to do

Speaking at Experts Live Netherlands 2022

The full event month of September is slowly coming to an end and what better way to end it than with a great Azure conference? I´m really happy to announce that I will speak at the Experts Live Netherlands. The Experts Live Netherlands is one of the biggest Experts Live conferences next to Experts Live Europe and celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

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Cloud Identity Summit 2022 Recap

After 8 Months of planning the Cloud Identity Summit 2022 is over and I can say it was really a pleasure to help to organize this great Community event from my perspective. Four years ago Thomas Naunheim come up with the Idea to create a event focus on Identity for the Community. We discuss this in our Azure Bonn Orga Team and finally the Cloud Identity Summit was born. At the end of 2019 we plan the first edition for 2020 as a in-person event, but things changed and we changed the format to an virtual event and this also for 2021.

Back in february we start planning for the 3rd edition 2022 and we decided to go back to our original idea to hold it as a in-person event, but with the experience of two virtual events we move it to an hybrid event. Yesterday was our 1st Cloud Identity Summit 2022 as hybrid edition and I can say, I was really exited about it. Why?

CIS 2022 – Conference view
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Microsoft announced Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage in preview – for me a big announcement this year

In the past, it was quite quiet about new features and announcements in the Azure IaaS space. Yes, sometimes there were new VM sizes with more cores or more RAM, but in general there were no surprising announcements last year. From my point of view, this has changed with MS Inspire, which is currently underway.

Microsoft announced, surprising from my point of view, a new Disk SKU for Azure VMs called Premium SSD v2 Disk. The last announcement in this area was 2019 with the introduction of Ultra Disks.

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How I passed the Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect exam SC-100 and why I am now a Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Expert

Three months ago on 7th of April Microsoft announce a new exam for security architects and introduce again the existing exams SC-200, SC-300, AZ-500 and MS-500. The article contains the new announcement of the new exam SC-100 to become Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect.

I took the Microsoft Cybersecurity Beta exam #SC100 and got yesterday the confirmation that I passed the exam. This is great news for me as it confirms that I am gaining a better and better knowledge in Azure Security topics.

In this article I will introduce the exam, how to get the Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Expert award and which materials I used to prepare for the exam.

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