I’ve slacked a bit on reading books lately. Life, in general, has been hectic, and I haven’t had a decent chance to read an excellent book. I’ve fixed that now, at least for this week, by reading the latest book… Read More »Review: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Cookbook by Sasha Kranjac (Packt Publishing)
I briefly wrote about the EU Sovereign Cloud in March of this year. Fast forward to today, and we have the official announcement from Microsoft – the EU Data Boundary is being rolled out in a phased manner from January… Read More »An early look at the EU Data Boundary
Some time ago, I came upon a blog from Signal on how to help people in Iran. The idea is to run a proxy that relays traffic for Signal messaging. This is then used in scenarios where the government blocks… Read More »Building and securing a Signal Proxy service in Azure
About a year ago, I wrote about transforming your organization by retiring the on-premises Active Directory. This post is a bit of a sequel to that, as I left you with the thought of migrating your Active Directory identities to… Read More »Transforming your organization to cloud-only: Migrating Active Directory identities to cloud identities
After a nice vacation this summer, we were able to move to our new house in early August. I’ve written about the design phase of the home previously. Also, I have a few pictures of building the house here. Now… Read More »Living with the Yale Linus smartlock
This past April, I had a chance to try out the new Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect (SC-100) certification exam beta. At the time, no official study or preparation material was available. As it usually goes with beta exams, the results take… Read More »Thoughts on preparing and passing the new Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect (SC-100) certification
I was about 11 years old when I first tried transferring a file using FTP. This was sometime in the late 1980s or very early 1990s. Since then, I’ve used FTP a lot, but in the past decade, much less… Read More »Building a modern data integration to Azure using SFTP with a Storage Account
It’s Monday, and the past week has been filled with lots of great activities – Microsoft Ignite, our very own community session, and good progress at the gym. Also, we continue publishing our weekly podcast episodes with Tobias for the… Read More »Building a secure remote access setup using Tailscale
These days, Microsoft has produced plenty of certifications and exams to earn them. I’ve lost count but having done several dozen exams, and I feel it’s simply a side hobby at this point. I’ve written how I prepare for a… Read More »Thoughts on passing the SC-200 security certification exam
This one is easy. If you block and deny all traffic in your firewall, you cannot access any Azure services. Someone asked me this question a few months ago, and I wanted to test what happens and how a company… Read More »Can you access Microsoft Azure if your firewall is blocking all traffic?
On most devices that I frequently use, I use a solution to block excessive ads. Firefox on mobile and desktop is super easy as the same ad blocking extensions work on both. Many of my friends have been praising Pi-Hole… Read More »Goodbye telemetry and ads – running Pi-Hole in a home network
When you work in IT, numerous little things could or should be automated. One of those is the monitoring of expiring SSL certificates. Quite often, the process of monitoring for SSL certificates is calendar-based. When someone orders a new certificate,… Read More »Using Azure Application Insights to monitor for expiring SSL certificates
I’ve used Google Photos since 1969. Err, no, wait – that’s what the image metadata is telling me, but actually, my earliest photos stored in Google’s cloud are from 2009. I’ve paid the 1.99 €/month fee to ensure I have… Read More »Self-hosting memories: Migrating from Google Photos to Synology Photos
Last week, Microsoft held a special online event to announce the next version of Windows: Windows 11. It looks nice in the sizzle video: Of course, one has to look beyond the fancy covers also. The first preview bits for… Read More »A look at TPM and Windows 11 hardware requirements
This week I’ve been working with a set of Linux virtual machines hosted in Azure. They are all Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, so relatively new – but not the latest release (which at the time of writing this is 21.04). Once… Read More »Securing your Linux VMs in Azure with Azure Disk Encryption
This is one of the more enjoyable projects I’ve done recently during my spare time. I run Azure Sentinel in all of my Azure environments – it’s a SIEM solution, which stands for Security Information and Event Management. In essence,… Read More »Building an integration between Azure Sentinel and Unifi infrastructure for a proper SIEM solution
I’m building a new home network, which for me means upgrading certain hardware, and acquiring new hardware over time. The far-reaching plan is to build a solid 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based network, with guest WiFi, proper VLANs, and the ability to… Read More »Review: Ubiquiti Networks’ Unifi Dream Machine Pro (UDM-Pro) in a home network
Before the public cloud was such a prevalent service, I spent most of my days (and evenings) building On-Premises solutions. Ordering racks and servers for those racks, planning to cable, and finally installing and configuring everything was very tangible. You… Read More »Hey Microsoft Azure, where is my data?
About a month ago, I decided to remove all Google Analytics tracking, telemetry, and analytics from this site. Initially, I started using GA years ago, when I wanted to see what kind of content seems interesting for my audience, and… Read More »A practical look at using Cloudflare to protect and optimize my site
Microsoft Azure, with its numerous services and capabilities, is a significant platform. Depending on what a company might enable or employ from Azure, securing it might be trivial and challenging at the same time. I often consult with organizations of… Read More »Securing Microsoft Azure in 10 steps
