Travis Roberts

Azure AD addresses identity management for cloud-based services. Many organizations have extended their on-premises identities to Azure AD for the best of both worlds: network and cloud identity management. Some organizations take their identity strategy further by removing their domain controllers and transitioning to cloud-only identity management, using Azure AD as the sole identity management solution. This article reviews considerations for moving to cloud-only identity management with Azure AD.

This overview of key Azure and Azure AD security services is a reference for anyone who is getting started with Azure security or reviewing the available options. It is not an all-inclusive list of security services but includes Azure’s common security services.

Azure AD administrative units are containers for other Azure AD resources that allow delegating administrative rights. This article gives an overview of Azure AD administrative units, explains how to create them, and shows you how to assign rights.

This is the third post in our series about Windows Virtual Desktop. The following information provides an overview of the services that need to be in place before WVD is deployed. The post goes on to provide a walkthrough of deploying a host pool from the Azure Portal.

Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) is Microsoft’s remote desktop solution hosted in Azure. It provides the ability to host remote desktop sessions on Azure virtual machines and has gained significant adoption with the increase in working remotely. Users connect to Windows Virtual Desktop in a variety of ways. In this article, we review the options for connecting to WVD and configuring the client when a user connects.

Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) is a disruptive technology in the published desktop and applications market. WVD is a remote desktop and application service hosted in Azure. It uses a secure, no-charge Platform as a service (PaaS) offering with integrated Azure Active Directory authentication. Customers pay for the VMs that host user sessions in Azure.

Azure Migrate is a tool to facilitate rehosting servers in Azure. It comprises a portal for analyzing and migrating the servers, a virtual appliance that runs on-premises for inventory and assessment, and a replication agent for migrations. Azure Migrate works with both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMWare VCenter virtualization environments. Azure Migrate is also extensible, with offerings from independent software vendors to enhance both assessment and migration functionality.

Whenever an RDP connection is not working or you have trouble accessing your application on an Azure VM, Azure Redeploy can help solve the issue on Windows-based VMs. This article outlines what the Redeploy tool is and how and when to use it.

A bastion host is a secured, purpose-built server that sits between a public and private network. It manages incoming requests from a public network to the internal, private network. Bastion hosts have served for years to allow incoming traffic such as email, FTP, and web traffic. Incoming firewall rules provide the same service as a bastion host.

This article demonstrates how to orchestrate the failover of multiple Azure virtual machines (VMs) using recovery plans in Azure Site Recovery (ASR), a backup service for cloud or on-premises servers. Protecting a single VM is a straightforward process I covered in my previous article. A common requirement is to failover multiple VMs in a specific order and modify server and application settings as part of the process. Recovery plans in ASR aim to do this.

The following information demonstrates the process of protecting and testing an Azure VM with Azure Site Recovery, as well as the process to failover and failback a VM, should the primary region become temporarily unavailable.