How Microsoft Azure Ensures Data Privacy and Global Compliance | Secure Cloud Solutions
In the era of cloud transformation, data privacy and compliance have become top priorities for businesses worldwide. As companies migrate critical workloads to the cloud, they must ensure that their service providers handle sensitive information responsibly and meet regulatory requirements across jurisdictions. Microsoft Azure, one of the world’s most trusted cloud platforms, goes above and beyond to guarantee security, privacy, and compliance for every customer — from startups to global enterprises. Azure’s approach combines advanced security technologies, transparent governance, and a vast portfolio of compliance certifications, ensuring that data stays protected no matter where it resides. https://dellenny.com/how-microsoft-azure-ensures-data-privacy-and-global-compliance-secure-cloud-solutions/Identity in Azure Understanding Azure AD, Authentication, and Authorization
In today’s digital-first world, managing user identities and access securely is paramount. Microsoft Azure provides a robust platform for identity management through Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), helping organizations protect sensitive data while ensuring seamless user experiences. Understanding the differences between authentication and authorization in Azure, and how Azure AD facilitates them, is crucial for IT professionals, developers, and security experts alike. In this article, we will explore the fundamentals of identity in Azure, the role of Azure AD, and how authentication and authorization work together to secure cloud applications and resources. https://dellenny.com/identity-in-azure-understanding-azure-ad-authentication-and-authorization/Shared Responsibility Model in Azure Explained (with Real Examples)
In today’s cloud-first world, Microsoft Azure is one of the most popular cloud platforms used by organizations globally. While Azure provides a robust infrastructure and wide-ranging services, it is crucial for businesses to understand their responsibilities in maintaining security, compliance, and operational efficiency. This is where the Shared Responsibility Model in Azure comes into play. The Shared Responsibility Model defines the division of security and operational duties between the cloud provider (Azure) and the customer. Understanding this model ensures that organizations know which security measures are handled by Microsoft and which ones they need to manage themselves. https://dellenny.com/shared-responsibility-model-in-azure-explained-with-real-examples/Copilot and Viva Empowering Employee Engagement
In today’s rapidly evolving workplace—defined by hybrid teams, digital collaboration, and shifting employee expectations—organizations must rethink how they engage, empower, and retain talent. That’s where the combined power of Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Viva comes in. Together, Copilot and Viva form a powerful synergy: transforming not only how work gets done but how employees connect, grow, and feel about their work. Their integration creates a more intelligent, people-centric experience—one that drives true employee engagement. https://dellenny.com/copilot-viva-empowering-employee-engagement-in-the-modern-workplace/How to Ask AI Meeting Assistants the Right Questions During Meetings
In today’s fast-paced hybrid work world, tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot (often simply “Copilot”) that sit inside your meeting platform are dramatically changing how we interact in meetings. But having access to a powerful AI helper doesn’t automatically mean you’ll get maximum value. Much of the benefit comes down to how you ask it questions. If you pose vague, unfocused prompts, the answers will reflect that. On the other hand, well-crafted questions can turn Copilot into your strategic co-pilot during meetings. In this post, we’ll walk you through why asking the right questions matters, what kinds of questions to ask during or after a meeting, and how to ask them effectively to improve clarity, decisions, alignment, and follow-up. https://dellenny.com/how-to-ask-ai-meeting-assistants-the-right-questions-during-meetings/Turn Conversations into Reports Instantly with Copilot in Microsoft Teams
In today’s fast-paced workplace, teams spend a lot of time in chats and meetings — but too often the valuable information shared there ends up buried in a scroll of history, or forgotten after the session ends. That’s why the ability to instantly turn conversations into structured reports is a game changer. With Microsoft 365 Copilot inside Microsoft Teams, you can shift from manually summarizing threads and meeting notes to having AI generate concise, actionable summaries and reports automatically. Here’s how this works, why it matters, and how you can make it work for your team https://dellenny.com/turn-conversations-into-reports-instantly-with-copilot-in-microsoft-teams/Azure Security Basics Network Security Groups, Firewalls, and Defender for Cloud
In today’s cloud-first world, securing your network infrastructure is no longer optional — it’s foundational. For organizations using Microsoft Azure, understanding the tools available to protect workloads, control traffic flow, and maintain visibility is essential. In this article, we’ll walk through three core pillars of Azure network security: Network Security Groups (NSGs) Azure Firewall Microsoft Defender for Cloud By the end, you should have a clearer grasp of what each offers, when to use them, and how they complement one another. https://dellenny.com/azure-security-basics-network-security-groups-firewalls-and-defender-for-cloud/
Take Data Management to the next level with Silk Software-Defined Azure Storage
Note: This article is co-authored by our partner Silk. In today’s data-driven world, every enterprise is under pressure to make smarter decisions faster. Whether you're running production databases, training machine learning models, running advanced analytics, or building customer-facing applications, your data needs to be more agile, secure, and readily accessible than ever before. That’s where Silk’s software-defined cloud storage platform on Microsoft Azure comes into play — bringing performance, resiliency, and intelligence to data management across the cloud. With the recent addition of Silk Echo, you can now supercharge your Copy Data Management (CDM) strategy to ensure your data isn’t just protected, it’s available instantly for any purpose — a true strategic asset. Transforming Azure IaaS with Silk's Platform Microsoft Azure offers a rich ecosystem of services to support every stage of your cloud journey, and when paired with Silk, customers gain a game-changing storage and data-services layer purpose-built for performance-intensive workloads. Silk’s software-defined storage platform runs on Azure infrastructure as a high-performance data layer between Azure compute and native storage. It works by orchestrating redundant sets of resources, as close to the DB compute as possible. Aggregating and accelerating the native capabilities of Azure, enabling databases to reach the maximum physical limits of the underlying hardware. Silk makes use of the excellent L-series of storage optimized VMs and NVME media, ensuring the data is always quickly available and able to withstand multiple failures using erasure coding. Silk is designed to address common challenges customers face when migrating relational databases — such as SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2 — to the cloud: Performance Bottlenecks: On-prem workloads often rely on ultra-low latency, high-throughput storage systems with features that are difficult to replicate in the cloud. Data Copy Sprawl: Multiple non-production environments (dev, test, QA, analytics) mean many redundant data copies, leading to storage inefficiencies. Operational Overhead: Managing snapshots, backups, and refreshes across environments consumes time and resources. Silk changes the game with: Extreme performance in the Azure cloud. Up to 34GB/s of throughput from a single VM. The combination of Silk and Azure provide a unique cost/performance balance, through the combination of a very low latency software defined cloud storage platform and sharing of Azure resources. Inline data deduplication and compression for optimized resource utilization. Autonomous, fully integrated, non-disruptive, zero cost snapshots and clones for effortless environment refreshes. Multi-zone resilience and no single point of failure. This makes it easier than ever to lift and shift critical applications to Azure, with the confidence of consistent performance, uptime, and flexibility. Elevating CDM with Silk Echo for AI While Silk’s core platform solves performance and efficiency challenges, Silk Echo for AI introduces an intelligent, AI-powered layer that revolutionizes how organizations manage and leverage their data across the enterprise. At its core, Silk Echo for AI offers next generation Copy Data Management capabilities that empower IT teams to accelerate digital initiatives, reduce costs, and maximize the value of every data copy. Key Benefits of Silk Echo for AI Smarter Data Copying and Cloning Silk Echo leverages AI to understand data access patterns and recommends the optimal strategy for creating and managing data copies. Instead of manually managing snapshots, you can automate the entire workflow — ensuring the right data is in the right place at the right time. Instant, Space-Efficient Clones Using Silk’s advanced snapshot and cloning engine, Echo creates fully functional clones in seconds, consuming minimal additional storage resources. Teams can spin up dev/test environments instantly, accelerating release cycles and experimentation. Cross-Environment Data Consistency Echo ensures consistency across copies — whether you're cloning for testing, backup, or analytics — and with AI-driven monitoring, it can detect drift between environments and recommend synchronizations. Policy-Based Lifecycle Management Define policies for how long data copies should live, when to refresh them, and who has access. Echo automates the enforcement of these policies, reducing human error and ensuring compliance. Optimized Resource Consumption Silk Echo minimizes redundant data storage through smart deduplication, compression, and AI-driven provisioning — resulting in cost savings of 50% or more across large-scale environments. Enablement for AI/ML Workflows For data science teams, Silk Echo provides curated, up-to-date data clones without impacting production environments — essential for model training, experimentation, and validation. Real-World Use Case: Streamlining Dev/Test and AI Pipelines Consider Sentara Health, a healthcare provider migrating their EHR and SQL Server workloads to Azure. Before Silk, environment refreshes were time-consuming, often taking days or even weeks. With Silk Echo for AI, the same tasks will be completed in minutes. Now, development teams have self-service access to fresh clones of production data — enabling faster iteration and better testing outcomes. Meanwhile, their data science team leverages Echo’s snapshot automation to feed AI models with real-time, production-grade data clones without risking downtime or data corruption. All of this runs seamlessly on Azure, with Silk ensuring high performance and resilience at every step. Joint Value of Silk and Microsoft Together, Silk and Microsoft are unlocking a new level of agility and intelligence for enterprise data management: Data-as-a-Service: Give every team — DevOps, DataOps, AI/ML — access to the data they need, when they need it. Free snapshots democratize data so up-to-date copies can be made quickly for any team member who can benefit from it. AI-Ready Database Infrastructure: Your infrastructure evolves from a reactive model which is addressing problems as they arise (i.e. triggering responses on alerts), to a predictive model that utilizes AI/ML to forecast issues and mitigate them before they occur by learning patterns of behavior. Silk enables real-time AI inferencing, for business-critical agents that require access to up-to-date operational data. Reduced Costs, Improved ROI: Storage optimization, reduced manual overhead, and faster time to value — backed by Azure’s scalability and Silk’s performance. Accelerated Cloud Migrations: Achieve the enhanced scalability and flexibility of a cloud migration for your Tier 1 databases without refactoring. Get Started Ready to take your data management strategy to the next level? Explore how Silk’s software-defined storage and Silk Echo for AI can accelerate your transformation on Microsoft Azure. Whether you're modernizing legacy systems, building AI-driven applications, or simply trying to get more value from your cloud investments, Silk and Microsoft are here to help. By embracing the power of Silk’s software-defined storage and Silk Echo, organizations can finally make their data in the cloud work smarter, not harder. Contact Alliances@silk.us for a deeper dive on Silk!
Oath hardware token
Hi All, I just received my hardware tokens to set up for a few users in our organization that do not have access to company mobile devices. I have uploaded the .csv files with the required information in our Azure portal and it successfully uploaded. I am not able to activate the token, it keeps failing but I’m not sure why and I don’t really get a reason. Is there a clearer way to set this up or do I need to enable something before I set this up. I would like this set up before the end of the week, any help is appreciated. Thanks,
