What if I told you just using multi-factor authentication (MFA) wasn’t enough anymore? The Lapsus$ hacking group, who were at least partially made up of a group of teenagers in the UK, took a very targeted hacking approach. They used password stuffing to try to breach the password credentials of power users within organizations they […]
Tag: azure
Passing AZ-104–Azure Administrator
This Monday, I took and passed the Azure Administrator exam (Az-104) exam. It was a little bit unusual for me to take this exam, as I’m already an Azure Solutions Architect, but as part of the new Microsoft partner requirements, I had to take this exam, even though it’s a subset of what’s on the […]
Why You Shouldn’t Use Amazon RDS for your SQL Server Databases
Disclaimer: I’ve a Microsoft MVP and shareholder, but neither of these things affected my opinions in this post. Cloud vendors have built a rich array of platform as a service (PaaS) solutions on their platforms. They market these heavily, because they have higher degrees of stickyness compared to IaaS platforms (and in many cases they […]
Passing the AZ-500 Exam–How I Prepared
A few months ago, I was asked to do a webinar on security for Microsoft Teams. In preparing for that webcast, I noticed a number of security features that required either Azure Active Directory P2, or Office 365 M5. In order to get either of those two features for free, DCAC needed to gain the […]
A Lesson in DR, Azure Site Recovery, and Troubleshooting
I need to blog more. Stupid being busy. Anyway, last week, we were doing a small scale test for a customer, and it didn’t work the way we were expecting, and for one of the dumbest reasons I’ve ever seen. If you aren’t familiar with Azure Site Recovery it provides disk level replication for VMs, […]
How Do You Shrink Your Azure SQL Database?
In the early days of Azure SQL Database (ne SQL Azure) we had size limits that were minuscule–I vaguely remember 5 and 10 GB, but it could have been smaller. Back then space was at a premium. In 2021, we have hyperscale that allows us to have an Azure SQL Database of up to 100 […]
Do You Even Tag, Bro?
Sorry for the clickbaity title. One of the things I hated most about working in corporate IT, was the persistent, never ending discussions around server naming standards. I once flew to Switzerland to spend 16 hours in a room full of dudes (it’s always a room full of dudes) discussing each of the 16 characters […]
Automating TempDB Configuration in Azure
One of the unique things about managing SQL Server on Azure VMs is that we use the local D: drive for TempDB. The D: drive (or /dev/sdb1 for those of you running on Linux) is a direct-attached solid state drive (on nearly all VM tiers) which offers the lowest latency storage in Azure, making it […]
Would You Fly a Plane with One Engine? Or Run Your Airline with One Data Center(re)?
For those of you who may of been in the US or outside of Europe this past weekend, you may not have heard about the major British Airways IT outage, that took down their entire operations for most of Saturday and into Sunday. Rumors, which were later confirmed, were that a switch from primary to […]
Why Are You Still Running Your Own Email Server?
One of the things I tell customers when doing any sort of architectural consulting, is to identify their most important business systems. Invariably something that gets left off of that list is email. Your email is your most critical system. ERP may run your profit centers, but email keeps it moving. With that in mind, […]