Step-By-Step: Migrating The Active Directory Certificate Service From Windows Server 2008 R2 to 2019
End of support for Windows Server 2008 R2 has been slated by Microsoft for January 14th 2020. Said announcement increased interest in a previous post detailing steps on Active Directory Certificate Service migration from server versions older than 2008 R2. Many subscribers of ITOpsTalk.com have reached out asking for an update of the steps to reflect Active Directory Certificate Service migration from 2008 R2 to 2016 / 2019 and of course our team is happy to oblige.AZ-500: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Study Guide
The AZ-500 certification provides professionals with the skills and knowledge needed to secure Azure infrastructure, services, and data. The exam covers identity and access management, data protection, platform security, and governance in Azure. Learners can prepare for the exam with Microsoft's self-paced curriculum, instructor-led course, and documentation. The certification measures the learner’s knowledge of managing, monitoring, and implementing security for resources in Azure, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments. Azure Firewall, Key Vault, and Azure Active Directory are some of the topics covered in the exam.PowerShell Basics: How To Unlock A User In Active Directory via PowerShell
Everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes end users forget their passwords and lock themselves out of their Active Directory access. Administrators can unlock these accounts via the Windows GUI, but what if there was a quicker way. The PowerShell Active Directory module can save administrators time in governing end users and can also provide automation if required. This example will highlight how to unlock an end user account in minimal steps via PowerShell and the Active Directory module.Step-By-Step: Enabling Advanced Security Audit Policy via Directory Services Access
Active Directory is one of the more impactful services within an organization. Even small changes in Organization’s AD can cause a major business impact. Preventing any unauthorized access and unplanned changes in an AD environment should be top of mind for any system administrator. Would you have enough information to answer questions such as what has changed should changes or unauthorized access happen within your AD environment?Step-By-Step: Manually Removing A Domain Controller Server
Use of DCPROMO is still the proper way to remove a DC server in an Active Directory infrastructure. Certain situations, such as server crash or failure of the DCPROMO option, require manual removal of the DC from the system by cleaning up the servers metadata. This blog post will help you accomplish this.Step-By-Step: Creating a SQL Server Always On Availability Group
One of the most requested features in SQL, from as far back as SQL 2012, has been Always On Availability Groups. This takes disaster recovery and high availability to a new level by enabling multiple copies of the database to be highly available, enabling the possibility of Read-Only workloads and enabling the ability of offloading management tasks such as backups. Unlike database mirroring, Always On Availability Groups allow for failover of a group of databases in a single SQL Server instance. This step-by-step details the creation of a SQL Server 2016 / 2017 Always On Availability Group to ensure high availability of mission-critical databases.Step-By-Step: Getting Started with Azure Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence (AI) study and use is on the rise. Tools to enable AI are becoming more readily available, simpler to use and easier to implement. What's more is that the definition of AI itself has been broken down into ingredients that, when later applied into a recipe (or process), can provide multiple desired outcomes. One of the more important ingredients used in most recipes is Machine Learning. Machine Learning in essence is a way of teaching computers to provide more accurate predictions on provided data. These predictions can also make apps and devices smarter by providing recommendations as an outcome to the data.PowerShell Basics: How to check if MFA is enabled in Azure and Office 365
Security governance has been top of mind for most since the onslaught of human malware has the masses working from home. This comes with new concerns surrounding identity protection and actually proving that remote users are who they say they are in order to be allowed access to organizational data. Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) is a great tool to ensure this however the task of knowing which user has it enabled can be tedious. Enter PowerShell to the rescue to automate reporting of this process.How to Manage Microsoft Teams via PowerShell
Microsoft Teams usage has increased greatly during the current pandemic. All types of organizations are using the communications tool to stay connected with its employees and customers alike. The increase of use has also resulted in an increase of demand of system administrator's time to manage Microsoft Teams. Everything from adding users and groups to managing policies of said users and groups can be managed via PowerShell. This post will highlight the foundations to get started and provide links to continue your automation through script writing journey.PowerShell Basics: How to Force AzureAD Connect to Sync
In every organization, the possibility of role changes or change of contact information can occur quite frequently. AzureAD Connect is a great tool that allows administrators to make said updates either on-premises or in cloud and will sync all changes accordingly. It can take up to 30 minutes for Azure Active Directory to update these changes when these changes are applied on the on-premises Active Directory instance and vice-versa via AzureAD Connect. It can also take up to an additional 30 minutes to then sync changes with Office 365. This post will detail steps to force AzureAD Connect to sync on command when required via PowerShell to combat the delay.
