Tag Archives: Azure Security

Allgemein, Azure Security, Cloud, Defender for Cloud, Microsoft, Zero Trust

Microsoft Defender for CSPM is GA – Information about activation, billing and new pricing information

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Microsoft announced with Defender for Cloud Security Posture Management a new plan in the Defender for Cloud product family which focuses on a central view on the security posture of the customer.

In this article I will give a overview about which topics Defender for CSPM covers, how it will be enabled and how the pricing is actual working which holds some suprises if Defender for Servers is already in use.

Continue reading Microsoft Defender for CSPM is GA – Information about activation, billing and new pricing information →
Allgemein, Azure, Azure Security, Cloud, Community, Events, Microsoft, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022

Speaking at Experts Live Netherlands 2023 about Mastering Defender for Servers

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I´m really happy to announce that I will speak at the Experts Live Netherlands 2023 Spring edition. The last one was the 10th annivesary edition in Fall last year. The Experts Live Netherlands is one of the biggest Experts Live conferences next to Experts Live Europe and because of the big Experts Live Europe will take place this year in autumn, the Orga Team decided to organize the 11 edition in spring.

Contents [show]

Session overview

This year, my session will be about the Mastering Defender for Servers. In this session I will focus on Defender for Servers to protect servers across hybrid and multicloud environments. So I dived into the different plans, feature sets, deployment methods and more. Futhermore I show as a side note the new Defender for CSPM Plan and explore how agentless scan methods works. Deploy defender for servers at scale will complete the view and enable the attendees to mastering defender for servers.

Motivation

I like the idea behind the Experts Live community and really looking forward to see many community members there, greats friends again and certainly make new contacts.
This year the edition is with 1,200 registrations sold out. The Keynote will be held by Dona Sarkar. So it is worth to be there

About Experts Live Netherlands

Experts Live is an international Microsoft community platform focusing on knowledge sharing through live events.

Every year Experts Live Netherlands organizes a large-scale one-day event where more than 1200+ IT Pros and Developers gain knowledge of Microsoft technology. National and international community experts update visitors on the latest Microsoft technologies in one day.

Slides

It was a pleasure to speak at 11th edition of the Experts Live Netherlands. With more then 1200 attendees is was one of my biggest in-person conferences in the last couple of months. Thanks to the organizers and sponsors who made this possible!

You can find the slides from my talk about Mastering Defender for Servers here. Please keep in mind that this slides was only for the Experts Live Event and I will improve the session based on the Feedback from the attendees.

Allgemein, Azure, Azure Network, Azure Security, Cloud, Microsoft, Zero Trust

Azure Firewall Basic SKU is now GA

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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.

Continue reading Azure Firewall Basic SKU is now GA →
Allgemein, Azure, Azure Security, Cloud, Microsoft, Zero Trust

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

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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

Continue reading How I successfully passed the MS Defender for Cloud Ninja training and how the security community helped me →
Allgemein, Azure, Azure Security, Cloud, Microsoft

Azure Firewall Basic is available as Public preview

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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).

Continue reading Azure Firewall Basic is available as Public preview →
Allgemein, Azure, Azure Active Directory, Azure Security, Cloud, Microsoft

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

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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 →
Allgemein, Azure, Azure Active Directory, Azure Arc, Azure Governance, Azure Security, Azure Sentinel, Azure Virtual Desktop, Cloud, Community, Events, Microsoft

Speaking at Experts Live Netherlands 2022

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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.

Continue reading Speaking at Experts Live Netherlands 2022 →
Allgemein, Azure, Azure Network, Azure Security, Azure Sentinel, Certifications, Cloud, Microsoft

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

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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.

Continue reading How I passed the Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect exam SC-100 and why I am now a Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Expert →
Allgemein, Azure, Azure Files, Azure Monitor, Azure Network, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure VM, Cloud, Community, Events, Meetup, Microsoft, Windows Virtual Desktop

Azure AMA – Azure Virtual Desktop Best Practices #AVD with Marcel Meurer and Patrick Koehler

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German below

I know it’s been a little quiet on new blog articles the last few months, but that’s due to other community topics I’m working on. One of my new projects is the Azure Ask my Anything Live format that I will be hosting with my team at Azure Bonn Live on YouTube and Linkedin. I’m excited to announce that we’re kicking off this year with an Azure AMA on Azure Virtual Desktop Best Practices, and we have the pleasure of welcoming Marcel Meurer and Patrick Koehler to this session. Marcel and Patrick are two Azure MVPs and do a lot of work in the AVD community. Marcel is known as the brains behind the WVDAdmin and Project Hydra products, which are services to automate all things Azure Virtual Desktop. Patrick has also been active in the AVD community for many years with great sessions and insights about AVD and is the organizer of AVD TechFest together with Simon Binder.

Azure AMA – Azure Virtual Desktop Best Practices will take place live on Youtube on February 14, 2022. You can register for this event via our Azure Bonn page. Please note that this is a live AMA session and we would love for you to join us live and bring your questions to the session. If you don’t have time this time, please use our Microsoft forms to submit your questions before the session starts. The session will be held in German, but you can also ask your questions in English.

German

Continue reading Azure AMA – Azure Virtual Desktop Best Practices #AVD with Marcel Meurer and Patrick Koehler →
Allgemein, Azure, Azure Arc, Azure Governance, Azure Security, Cloud, Community, Events, Microsoft

Speaking at Scottish Summit 2021 about Azure Policy and Azure Security Center

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I am pleased to have received an invitation to speak at the upcoming Scottish Summit 2021. The Scottish Summit was estabhlished in 2020. This year the conference is becoming an online-only conference and will be streamed on all social media channels. The conference itself is growing into a really big conference with many parallel tracks with different language. The main conference starts on Saturday 27/02/21 and there will be many sessions on Microsoft Cloud services (like Azure, M365 and so on).

Azure Governance is an important topic for any customer using cloud resources. In my session, I will show the power of Azure Policy and Azure Security Center to define guardrails for your Azure environment and bring it into a compliant and secure state. I will go live with my session at Saturday 27/02/21 starting 1PM. If you are interested in how Azure Policy and Azure Security Center work together and how these services are handled, please feel free to join my session and ask questions.

There are quite a few Microsoft Cloud sessions planned for the Conference. Go to the website, plan your agenda and grab your ticket. There’s also an App available for iOS and Android. I hope to see you there.