NICconf is a two-day event in the heart of Oslo with around 3000 particioants, focusing on Microsoft technologies such as Azure, Hybrid Cloud, Identity and Security. There will also be a pre-day organized where attendees can participate in different masterclasses (full day workshops). There will be a masterclass by Paula Januszkiewics or Mikael Nyström and Viktor Hedberg,
Password spray attacks on accounts have increased rapidly in recent months. As a result, the security risks for accounts that do not use MFA for authentication have increased significantly. Microsoft works in the past on different ways to enable MFA for all users they work with Azure and Microsoft 365. One first try was the activation of security defaults, but this can be deactivated by user.
Based on this development and for other reason Microsoft announced the enforcement for Mutlifactor authentication for all sign-in/access to the Azure Portal. This announcement was a little suprise and bringe some challenges to organization espesically when we take a look at service principals and break glass accounts. Don´t get me wrong, it is mandatory to enable MFA for all users they access your tenant and have a valid and regulary reviewed Conditional Access policy in place. But for some special accounts this was not the focus or recommended. In this article I will explain how Microsoft rollouts this enforcement which steps you have to proof and how you can ensure that you are not affected or prepared for the upcoming changes.
I am pleased to announce that I have once again been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for Azure and Security in 2024-2025. This year there were some internal changes and the announcement was therefore postponed to July 10. So late Wednesday the mail came and I saw, just before my birthday, that I was again awarded in the following categories:
MVP for Microsoft Azure Compute Infrastructure
MVP for Cloud Security
What a great surprise
It is still an honor to be part of this family. There are many people who have supported me along the way, without whom this award would not have been possible. A big thank you goes to my wife Jessica, without her support this would not have been possible. There are many people who have become true friends during this time and to whom I am very grateful for their support, like Eric Berg, Thomas Naunheim, Marcel Meurer and Tom Janetscheck and many others. Also a big thank you to my Azure Bonn Orga Team, René de la Motte and Thomas Naunheim without whom the many Meetups and the Cloud Identity Summit would only be half as nice.
But this award is not possible without the community and the recognition from Microsoft, so a big thank you for that.
If you’re interested in what conferences you can find me at in 2024, feel free to check out my upcoming community events page.
The Microsoft Security Community programm continues to grow and there are many exiting new features and additional previews coming to live. I´m working on some of the new previews to gain insights and provide feedback and there are really great new offerings coming.
I`m happy to share that I was awarded as Defender for Cloud Champion and as Community Advocate 2024.
With the announcement of the next Windows Server release, called Windows Server 2025, Microsoft decided to organize the next Windows Server Engineering Summit. The Windows Server Summit 2024 will take place March 26-28, 2024, 8 AM – 4 PM Pacific Time with many sessions around Windows Server solutions.
I´m happy to be invited to hold two sessions, which I think are really important and value from Management and Migration purposes.
In the first part of this article (Three-big-reasons-to-migrate-to-update-manager-and-forget-the-classic-update-management-center) I dived into the improvements and reasons why Micrsoft introduce Azure Update Manager as a successor of the classic Update Management Center solution based on Azure Automation. In this part, I will explain how it works and what major improvements and new functions the Azure Update Manager offers
Please note: Azure Update Center is based on Azure Automation and needs the Microsoft Monitoring Agent. The MMA has been discontinued and will no longer be supported after August 2024. Support for Update Center has therefore also been discontinued.
2nd note: Microsoft will charged at a daily prorated value of 0.16/server/day which equates to approximately $5 USD/server/month beginning 1 February 2024 for customers using Azure Update Manager on Arc-enabled servers.
Microsoft model for a scalable Cloud Adtoption is based on the Enterprise Scale Architecture and I think this is a scalable and useful modell for every customer that uses Azure ressources. It´s based on the definition to granulary devide the workloads in different subscriptions and gives via Management Groups the possibility to group this differnent subscription into workload groups like Development, Core, etc. I know many customers struggle with this model and mistakenly think that Enterprise Scale is a reference to Enterprise customers, but this is not the case.
Based on the Enterprise Scale Architecture some services and security features can only be activated on subscription level to guarante that each resource inside the subscription is secured. This basis makes it even more important for customers to consider the Enterprise Scale Architecture or to orient themselves towards it.
The Microsoft Defender for Cloud and especially the Defender for Server P1 and P2 plans can only be activated on subscription level in the past. Microsoft has decided to change this and now allow plans to be activated at resource level (per server). It is important to understand that the principled approach activating on Subscription Level and the Enterprise Scale architecture are still valid and needed and this possibility is only a concession to cover certain requirements:
manage security configurations at a lower hierarchy level
flexibility for excluding specific resources (VMs) inside the subscription
enable different plans on subscription because for implementation of Enterprise Scale approach
In my current project we have the requirement to deactivate Hyper-threading on some Azure VMs. There are some Azure VMs available without Hyper-threading which can be found on the Azure compute unit site where Microsoft published a table with VM SKUs sizes where the “vCPU: Core” give a hint about VMs which are not having HT integrated. But this sizes are very limited and we have some requirements from licensing side to disable Hyper-threading and there also some applications which have a better performance when HT is disabled.
Microsoft released a completely new designed Update solution for Azure which supports VMs running in Hybrid- and Cloud-only environments with the name Azure Update Manager (formerly known as Update Management Center). This new solution is completely new and not based on the Azure Automation solution. The Azure Automation solution is based on the Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA – Log Analytics Agent) which will be retired on 31 august 2024.
The new solution cut off a lot of dependencies and fully compatible with Azure Arc. The reason that the solution, which has been in preview for a long time, is now announced as GA is that this solution supports the extended security updates for Windows Server 2012, which recently went out of extended support.
Please note: Azure Update Center is based on Azure Automation and needs the Microsoft Monitoring Agent. The MMA has been discontinued and will no longer be supported after August 2024. Support for Update Center has therefore also been discontinued.
The new Azure Update Manager in preview named as Update Management Center, was needed, because of an consistent Update Management over all VMs including VMs, that are integrated via Azure Arc.
The new solution offers significante improvements:
Zero on-boarding with Azure Policy support
No dependencies on Log Analytics or Azure Automation
Built as native functionallity on Azure Compute and Azure Arc for Servers
Support Azure RBAC and roles based of ARM in Azure
No manual intervention is needed as long as Azure-VM- or Arc-agent is running
Gathered information available for analysis via Azure Resource Graph
Support for automatic VM guest patching and hotpatching
Manage Extended Security Updates (ESU) for out of supoort WS2012
In this article I will give you a overview about the solution and how you can configure this solution for your VMs. Since I’ve been using it in a large Azure environment since the Public Preview release, I’ll point out some recommendations and pitfalls.
Our 4th edition of the Cloud Identity Summit 2023 is over and it was a blast to meet all this great speaker and the Identity Community this year virtual and in-person in Koblenz.
This year we were kindly provided with the location by the Debeka Innovation Center (DICE) which is located near the University of Koblenz and close to the Moselle. The location is a designed as a open space to enable new thinking and new technologies which is a perfect match for our Cloud Identity Summit.
The 4th edition offered 10 sessions in two parall tracks, divided into Identity Security and Identity Management and it was really a pleasure to see this big identity experience in the different Identity topics on this day live at our conference. The speakers who made the extra journey to the event can certainly be called who as who of the identity scene. Therefore, at this point I would like to thank you explicitly, because without you this event would not have been possible:
Sefallah Tagrerout and Jean-Francois (Jeff) Aprea – Securing your Azure Ad with our Zero Trust Approach!
Jan Vidar Elven – Monitoring and Reporting on Activities and Security in Microsoft Entra Azure AD
Fabian Bader – From (tier) zero to cloud hero: How to pwn Azure AD from on-prem
Kenneth van Sarksum – Implementing and building advanced Microsoft Entra Id Conditional Access scenarios
Christopher Brumm – Walk the walk – explore ways to ensure strong authentication in real life scenarios
Sfefan van der Wiele – Walk the walk – explore ways to ensure strong authentication in real life scenarios
Daniel Krzyczkowski – The future of customer identity with Microsoft Entra
Nicki Borell – Azure AD Identity Governance – What do your users do with their access
Sander Berkouwer and Raymond Comvalius – Just apply the basics in your Azure AD tenant!
Anton Staykov – Seamless cross-tenant application access with Entra Azure AD Cross-Tenant sync
Koblenz is the hometown of Thomas Naunheim therefore we had also recommendations for sightseeing tips, city walks and Restaurants and start to meet the speaker on Wednesday in a Restaurant close to the Rhine and the Deutsche Eck (German Corner). After our great dinner, we made a short city walk to the Deutsche Eck and after this to a final beer for a good preperation for our conference on Thursday.
We started our hybrid conference a little late with a strong focus on the in-person experience and also broadcast the Sessions live to the world via teams.
In my estimation it was a complete success due to four factors:
Which is thanks to the great speakers who share their knowledge with great pleasure
The on-site participants who brought a lot of fun and made the sessions interactive, through their numerous questions
The great help of our team which made sure that the speakers and participants felt comfortable
Our great sponsors (adesso SE and glückkanja-gab AG) without whom this event would not have been possible for many reasons
We hope that the conference meet the expectations from our attendees and will plan for 2024 and we really want your Feedback for good and not so good thinks. The really goal of this conference it´s a conference from the community for the community. So gave us your feedback for a better Cloud Identity Summit in 2024!
