Technical Blog | REBELADMIN

Learn about Active Directory and Various Azure Services

Microsoft

I am joining Microsoft!

I am excited to announce that I am joining Microsoft as Azure/Identity Consultant on 05th July 2021. It means today is my last day as Microsoft MVP. I have been a Microsoft MVP for the last 7 years and I had the privilege to work with lots of amazing, brightest people in Microsoft as well as in the Tech community. I will surely miss the MVP summit and the company of amazing MVP friends. Hopefully, we will meet again in Redmond! (This time as a “Blue Badge” holder 😊)
It is going to be a very exciting time ahead. As I worked with Microsoft closely for years I believe in their vision, technical leadership, and more importantly culture founded in a “Growth mindset“. I cannot wait to see where this new chapter of my life will take me, and to grow and learn within this role.
I am ready to #HitRefresh and contribute to “Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”.

MVP for Last 6 Years

I am glad to announce that I have been awarded with MVP award by Microsoft for 6th consecutive time. It is a true honor to be a part of such a great community. I got my first award back in 2014 under Active Directory category. After that for last 5 years I was awarded under Enterprise Mobility Category.

What is MVP Award?

For more than two decades,the Microsoft MVP Award is our way of saying “Thanks!” to outstanding community leaders. The contributions MVPs make to the community, ranging from speaking engagements, to social media posts, to writing books, to helping others in online communities, have incredible impact. Key benefits to MVPs include early access to Microsoft products, direct communication channels with our product teams and an invitation to the Global MVP Summit, an exclusive annual event hosted in our global HQ in Redmond. They also have a very close relationship with the local Microsoft teams in their area, who are there to support and empower MVPs to address needs and opportunities in the local ecosystem.

I take this opportunity to thank my MVP program Manager Betsy Weber, former program manager Simran Chaudhry for their awesome support over the years.

I also like to thank my readers for their support and encouragement over last 7 years. In coming weeks, you will see more enhancements in my blog to give you more user-friendly experience. Also, glad to announce that soon you will able to connect with my YouTube channel. So, stay touch! if you need help with subject matters always feel free to contact me on rebeladm@live.com or follow me on twitter @rebeladm

Mastering Active Directory

This is my 14th year in IT. During that time, I was working with different companies. I was working on different positions. I was working with many different technologies. But there was one thing that never changed. It’s my love for Microsoft Active Directory. From the day I heard about Active Directory and its capabilities, I spent countless hours reading, listing about it. I spent countless hours with my labs testing its strength. I also learned from my mistakes.  When I was working with different customers I noticed that even though people know about Active Directory, they do not use most of its features to protect, improve efficiency or to improve management of their identity infrastructure. This is due to two main reasons. First is, they think the technology that involves is too “complex”. Second is, they believe they do not have enough “skills” to do it.

In 2010, my website rebeladmin.com was born. The idea of it was to explain Active Directory’s capabilities, features, in simplified way and provide Step-by-Step guides to implement and configure Active Directory related services and features. This is a non-profit website and has more than 400 articles so far. As result of this community contribution I was awarded with Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. It started a new era of my life and I was able to bring my message to communities in strong way.

Today I reached another milestone in my life. Today is the day my first book going public. “Mastering Active Directory” is the fruit of my knowledge and experience about Active Directory.

Book Name: Mastering Active Directory

ISBN : 978-1-78728-935-2

Number of Pages: 730

From today, the book is available for purchase worldwide through,

Packt Publisher – https://www.packtpub.com/networking-and-servers/mastering-active-directory  

Amazon –  http://amzn.to/2swlewD  

coverfront

Please send all your inquiries and feedbacks to rebeladm@live.com

Enterprise Mobility Suite in Open Licensing

Single-Sign-On (SSO) is one of the crucial concerns engineers have when moving in to cloud. This is critical when it comes to hybrid-cloud model. It needs to integrate “already setup” infrastructure with various SaaS applications and IaaS. Users also may connect from different locations as well as via different devices. Microsoft already have Azure AD which give opportunity bring identity management capabilities in to the azure cloud.  The Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) is designed to help organizations meet complex IT challenges by providing a people-centric IT solution that gives users access to corporate resources from the devices of their choice, while making it easier for IT administrators to securely manage devices, data, and applications across platforms.

EMS is a collection of 3 Azure individual offerings brought together in a single SKU namely; Microsoft Intune, Azure Active Directory Premium and Azure Rights Management Services. EMS provides a significant discount over these individual products and is a comprehensive cloud solution that provides hybrid identity and access management, Device and Application management and rights protection. This solution is targeted at hybrid cloud customers and O365 users.

Following slide show the main 3 characteristics of EMS.

ems1

You can get more details about each feature by watching fallowing videos.

Hybrid Identity Management Demo

Mobile Device Management Demo

Information Protection Demo

Why Microsoft?

ems2

The Enterprise Mobility Suite simplifies the procurement process—all you need is one vendor, one contract, and one SKU.

By contrast competitive offerings require customers to stich together a patchwork of products from multiple vendors.  This generally a more expensive approach, a more complex acquisition with different licensing models, and often involves using products with overlapping and incompatible capabilities.

Offering Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) through Open programs will enable sales of additional Microsoft Cloud services through Distributors and their Reseller channels, targeting small and medium businesses (25-250 PCs.)

Starting March 1, 2015 Enterprise Mobility Suite Full user license will be available in the Volume Licensing Updated Open Programs, Open License, Open Value, and Open Value Subscription. This offer is for customers wishing to purchase the Enterprise Mobility Suite without requiring an underlying Core CAL or Enterprise CAL.

Where to Start?

You can get more details about EMS using http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/enterprise-mobility/Overview.aspx

You can get pricing from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/enterprise-mobility/pricing.aspx

You can find some great articles on http://blogs.technet.com/b/em/

Active Directory in Hybrid Cloud

“Cloud”, the most common term now in IT, its everywhere . Companies which provides IT services bringing their products and services in to the cloud rapidly. “Hosting services” was the first industry affect with it and now its spread to even small companies, individual professionals. With introduce of everyday products like Microsoft office365 every one start to understand the benefits of the “cloud”. Some organizations are use their own private cloud while some are completely move in to public cloud services.

One of the main concern people had about cloud was how they can bring there infrastructure services, resources, applications without impact to productivity. For example most organizations uses Single-Sign-On (SSO) to reduce the complexity of the authentication and authorization process. After we move organization’s resources, products, services to cloud if SSO do not work it still preventing full benefits of the cloud in end user prospective. The same time it will make impact on productivity directly. This access control and authentication concerns are more applying in to “Hybrid Cloud” systems. In Hybrid cloud some resources, services, application will run on-premises and some will be run from public cloud or private cloud setup in data center. This is the most commonly used cloud model in industry.

One of the solution used to address this is federation services. But issue is not every application or products uses same standards, protocols for identity management. As we know most of available products supports integration with AD services. Even Microsoft gives relevant tools, techniques to succeed with SSO on application development. So if you have working infrastructure system with all company requirement, how you convince management to move in to cloud system which will needs to deal with identity and access issues?

Well, Microsoft has found the solution for this. “Microsoft cloud – Azure” and windows server 2012 allows to extend the active directory in to the cloud. It allows to use claim based authorization. We can use windows azure AD as the identity store for the hybrid cloud and easily integrate other systems such as web portals, email system, crm, non-Microsoft apps. Also it can sync with the on-premises windows server active directory using “DirSync (Windows Azure Active Directory Sync Agent)” with AD FS (Active Directory Federation Services).

clip_image001_1E3725C4

In next posts let’s see how we can configure Azure AD and how it works with integration. If you have any question about post feel free to contact me on rebeladm@live.com

Image Source: http://blogs.technet.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-98-54-metablogapi/clip_5F00_image001_5F00_1E3725C4.png