Prepare your cloud environments using Azure landing zones

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

As you embark on your cloud journey, there are obvious concerns around security, compliance and proper governance of your digital assets in the cloud. You want to enable your teams to achieve innovation with speed and agility and at the same time ensure that proper guardrails are in place. Azure landing zones help you set up your Azure environment for scale, security, governance, networking, and identity – aligned to your organizational needs.  They are a set of architecture guidelines, reference implementations, and code samples based on proven practices—to prepare cloud environments.


We are pleased to share a new Mechanics video on this topic where we talk about the 8 key design areas which describe what you should consider before choosing the right implementation option for Azure landing zones; which could be a ‘start small and expand approach’ where you start with implementing basic landing zone considerations or the ‘enterprise-scale approach’ where you have a rich initial implementation with fully integrated governance, security and operations right from the start.


 





Whether you’re looking to deploy your first production application to Azure or you’re operating a complex portfolio of workloads, the Azure landing zone implementation options can be tailored to your needs. You can learn more about Azure landing zones through this Microsoft learn module. You can also read more about landing zones in this recently published blog for more information and review the detailed documentation on this topic.

SQL Server 2019 Always Encrypted: The Searchable Encryption! | Data Exposed: MVP Edition

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Always Encrypted in SQL Server 2019 is now in its second iteration which has added the ability to do pattern matching searches on encrypted data with the use of a technology called secure enclaves. In this episode with Mladen Prajdić, we’ll take a short look at what’s needed to make this work, how it works, and how it can benefit your organization for more secure data practices.


 


Watch on Data Exposed



View/share our latest episodes on Channel 9 and YouTube!

Using Teams for Live Agent Chat with a Bot on your Website

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Powering Customer Service
Bots are a great way to provide a customer-facing agent who can answer frequently asked questions and fend off 90% of the users who need help. For the other 10%, your bot should be able to escalate the user to a human once their needs can no longer be met by the bot.



There are many solutions out there that provide this live chat capability. ServiceNow and Dynamics both have live chat capabilities, both of which are escalation scenarios supported by AtBot. But what if you do not own either of these solutions, or you just want to be able to leverage Teams as your platform of choice? The video below illustrates this exact scenario, using AtBot, Teams and Power Automate.


 


[VIDEO EMBED]


 


Conclusion
If this is a scenario that you would like to implement, we would love to hear from you! You can reach out to us at hello@atbot.io or you can get started yourself with AtBot Premium.


 


Full documentation on AtBot can be found at https://admin.atbot.io/Docs
Additional videos and tutorials at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRUbWpikjmH9-zHeqSu8bzA

Security baseline for Microsoft Edge, version 88

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

 


We are pleased to announce the enterprise-ready release of the security baseline for Microsoft Edge version 88!


 


We have reviewed the settings in Microsoft Edge version 88 and updated our guidance with the addition of one setting that we will explain below. A new Microsoft Edge security baseline package was just released to the Download Center. You can download the version 88 package from the Security Compliance Toolkit.


 


Basic Authentication


HTTP Basic Authentication is a non-secure authentication method that relies on sending the username and password to the server in plaintext (base64). When Basic Authentication is used over non-secure HTTP connections, the credentials can be trivially stolen by others on the network.


Basic Authentication for HTTP has been configurable since Internet Explorer 7. Until now, however, there wasn’t a way to configure it for Microsoft Edge. With version 88 we now have that ability and are recommending the disablement of basic authentication over HTTP. Disabling Basic Authentication over HTTP falls in line with our other security baselines where we disable this method.


 


Microsoft Edge version 88 introduced 17 new computer settings and 17 new user settings. We have included a spreadsheet listing the new settings in the release to make it easier for you to find them.


 


As a friendly reminder, all available settings for Microsoft Edge are documented here, and all available settings for Microsoft Edge Update are documented here.


 


Please continue to give us feedback through the Security Baselines Discussion site or this post.


 

Log Analytics Multi Scope Pin to Dashboards

Log Analytics Multi Scope Pin to Dashboards

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Intro:


Pinning a visualization from Log Analytics to Azure Dashboards is a fast and easy way to operationalize logs, creating a single pane of glass that allows fast and easy monitoring of resources in your Azure estate.


 


Multi scope pinning


We have upgraded our pinning capabilities to allow pinning from multi scope queries.


This allows the selection of multiple resources of the same type as the scope of the query – and simply pin a unified visualization spanning cross the selected scopes.


To take advantage of this new capability, use the resource picker to select the scope or scopes you want for your query, run your query and pin to an Azure Dashboard as you normally would:


Multi select pin to dashboard.gif


Feedback


We appreciate your feedback! comment on this blog post and let us know what you think of the this feature.


You may also use our in app feedback feature to provide us with additional feedbacks:


Log Analytics feedback.png