Securely collaborate with guests using Azure AD guest access reviews

by Contributed | Jun 21, 2021 | Technology

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

Companies collaborate with hundreds of clients, partners, and vendors every day. Today’s organizations use many applications and devices, and managing digital identities for these guests increases the risk of security breaches. More than 40% of IT leaders said that they want an identity governance solution that improves their security posture, according to an internal Microsoft survey.

These decision-makers’ top concern is the increased risk of security breaches due to distributed access to company resources. This problem is exacerbated as more companies adopt hybrid work and require secure collaboration with external users. IT admins have no way to track usage or answer the following questions:

•  What content are users interacting with?


• How long have the resources been shared?


• Are accounts still active?


• Are user privileges at risk of expiring?

Organizations can manage guest access with automated reviews

More than 70% of survey respondents said they either don’t have a process for managing guest accounts or they manually manage guest accounts. Manual processes often involve reliance on custom scripts or middleware, increasing the chance of human error that leads to elevated security risk. Also, an IT admin can never know all of the external users who require access to company resources. Business managers are the ones who are best suited for identity and access management activities for their guests and external partners.

Figure 1: Access review features enable customers to securely manage guest access at scale.

An Azure Active Directory Identity Governance solution empowers Microsoft customers to securely collaborate with guests across organizational boundaries. Customers can set up automated, periodic access reviews using an intuitive interface that provides smart recommendations, ensuring that guests gain the right access to the right resources for the right amount of time.

Once guests no longer require access to sensitive data, companies can automatically revoke their access to those resources. If a business owner or a manager isn’t in Azure AD, guests can review their own membership in a group.

Automated provisioning and deprovisioning of guest access to sensitive data enables customers to move away from custom scripts and reduces errors associated with manual processes Automated provisioning and de-provisioning of guest access into SaaS applications ensures that the only way guests can access these apps is through permissions set up by the organization and not decisions made on a case-by-case basis by an IT admin.

In large organizations, business managers are best suited to manage guest access for collaboration. Azure AD governance features put control firmly in the hands of business managers who are best suited to provide appropriate levels of access to sensitive data to external users. By delegating to non-administrators, customers can ensure that the right people are managing access to their department’s sensitive data. Delegation of responsibility reduces the IT helpdesk burden and frees up the IT staff for more strategic initiatives.

The response from Azure AD governance customers has been positive:

“Azure Active Directory guest access reviews give us that ability to be agile in our collaboration with external parties, with the right level of control, so our security, legal, and data privacy people are comfortable.” ~ Avanade

Microsoft customers in regulated industries and those that work with the government have to regularly demonstrate to auditors the effectiveness of their controls over access rights. Azure AD access reviews for guests enable these customers to easily prove to auditors that their organization has the appropriate controls in place. Azure AD provides a centralized view of all access reviews with a simple interface involving very few configuration steps, enabling IT admins to see which resources a user can or cannot access across a multi-cloud, multi-device, and fragmented application landscape.

Watch our video review of guest user access across all Microsoft 365 groups and Microsoft Teams for a step-by-step overview of Azure AD Access Reviews. To learn more about Microsoft Identity Governance solutions, visit our website.

Learn more about Microsoft identity:

• Related Posts: Access Reviews for guests in all Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups is now in public preview – Microsoft Tech Community


• Return to the Azure Active Directory Identity blog home


• Join the conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn


• Share product suggestions on the Azure Feedback Forum

How Microsoft Search in Bing helps keep you and your data private and secure

by Contributed | Jun 21, 2021 | Technology

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

Microsoft Search, which includes Microsoft Search in Bing, is part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and leverages the same privacy and security measures that help protect your data, files, and sites. Microsoft Search in Bing also applies some enhanced measures to help ensure your workplace searches are separate from public web results. 

For you 

Your work searches, work search history, and the information shared within your organization via work results are private and secure. So, Joanna in Marketing will never know you looked her up because you forgot her last name. And neither will your Search admins, Microsoft, or any other organization. 

• Microsoft Search in Bing protects your work results so you can feel confident knowing your info is never available to public Bing searches or other organizations, including Microsoft. 


• Only you can see your individual work search history. 


• Your search admins can only see the number of searches by type (people, files, etc.) and an aggregated list of top searches. 


• Microsoft doesn’t target advertising based on your work identity or your organization’s identity. 

What you and others can find 

When you use Microsoft Search in Bing, you’ll only find info and results that you have access to. For example: 

• Files you’ve created or that have been directly shared with you 


• Files that have been shared with a group you belong to or saved to a SharePoint or OneDrive site you have access to 


• Free/busy times for people in your organization 


• Meetings that you and a person or group have both been invited to 

• SharePoint sites that you’re a member of or that have been shared with you 


• Private conversations you were part of 


• Public conversations 

Manage access to files and sites 

Using Microsoft Search in Bing, co-workers can use the Recent Files section of your profile to easily find and access files that you’ve recently shared or edited. 

When you search work for your files or sites, you may occasionally to find information that was inadvertently shared too broadly across your organization. Since you’re in control of who you share with, use the sharing options in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Delve to stop or prevent oversharing. Learn more about Managing access to files and folders. 

Search history 

Your search history on Bing is handled differently based on your account type and your signed in status: 

• Signed in to your work account: Your specific work search history isn’t shared with your organization or other organizations, including Microsoft. You can review your search history at any time by downloading it from your search history page. Only the last 30 days of your search history are available. When using Microsoft Search in Bing, your search admin may be able to see your searches as part of an aggregated list of top searches, but they are not attributed to you. 

• Signed in to your personal Microsoft account: You’re also in control of the search history associated with your personal Microsoft account. Bing and Microsoft provide tools for you to manage and clear your search history, as well as ways to prevent new searches from being added to it. 


• Not signed in: When you’re signed out, your search history is only available on that device. You can clear all searches from your history or remove specific searches from that specific device, as well as prevent new searches from being added to it. 


• Used a private window: Your searches are never saved to your search history. If you signed in to your work or personal Microsoft account from a private browser window, any searches you made will be associated with that account. 

For your organization 

Your organization’s IT admin team controls who can access Microsoft 365 Services, like Microsoft Search in Bing. Only these authorized users can use work search to find internal results and data within your organization. Access to your organization’s work search and information is never available to public web users or other companies, including Microsoft. 

Secure by default 

Microsoft Search in Bing requests are made over HTTPS. The connection is encrypted end-to-end for enhanced security. 

User authentication and authorization 

You must be signed in with a valid work or school account tocan see work results. 

Unlike the consumer Bing experience that you’re familiar with, a personal Microsoft account can’t be used to sign in to Microsoft Search in Bing. Instead, Microsoft Search in Bing uses Azure Active Directory to authenticate and authorize you and other users in your organization. These are the same credentials you use to access other Microsoft 365 services, such as SharePoint or Outlook.  

Communication with your trusted cloud 

When you sign in to Microsoft Search in Bing with your work or school account, Bing downloads the necessary client libraries to the browser to enable results from your organization. When you search, the in-browser code calls your trusted cloud to get the results from your organization. This is done using a dedicated API that operates in accordance with the control objectives of SSAE 18 SOC2 Type 1. This means work results and work data flow through Bing systems that are subject to the same stringent data processing control objectives that your work results are subject to when they’re processed in Office 365 Core Online Services. 

Permissions 

You can only find work files and info shared with you, either directly or indirectly, or that you have permission to see. 

Work results, including files and sites, are security trimmed at the source. You can’t see answers, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, SharePoint sites, or other info that you can’t access through Office 365. You can only see your own files and files that have been shared with you either by the creator or through a group membership. 

Search logging 

All Bing search logs that pertain to Microsoft Search in Bing traffic are disassociated from your workplace identity. If we’re confident that a search isn’t specific to an organization—based on a set of restrictions or frequency thresholds—the search will be treated as described in the Search, Microsoft Edge, and artificial intelligence of the Microsoft Privacy Statement. For example, searches that are identified as not org-specific could be used to model and train public features, such as autosuggest or related searches. Searches that don’t meet the restrictions or frequency thresholds are stored separately from public, non-Microsoft Search traffic. 

Compliance and GDPR 

Searches made using Microsoft Search in Bing are executed against your organization’s internal resources and the results returned are considered Customer Data. These searches also meet the processor commitments outlined in Article 28 as reflected in the General Data Protection Regulation Summary FAQs. For searches from Microsoft Search that go to public Bing, Microsoft complies with its GDPR obligations as a data controller. 

Learn more 

Microsoft Trust Center 

Security and privacy for Microsoft Search in Bing 

How Microsoft Search in Bing helps keep your info secure 

Web Development for Beginners: A new Learning Path on Microsoft Learn

by Contributed | Jun 21, 2021 | Technology

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

> This is based on the Git Hub curriculum https://github.com/microsoft/Web-Dev-For-Beginners

There are 16 million developers in the world today. Roughly half of those, 8 million are web developers. Web development is therefore a good skill to have as you are looking to land that first job and build a career in tech. But where do you begin to learn all that? With this path 

Web dev for beginners path.

It covers everything from HTML, CSS, JavaScript to Accessibility. 

Intro to programming

What even is programming? Well, it’s a way to instruct your machine to do things for you. By running statements, you can things like creating a web a page, a simple script or why not a computer game. The possibilities are endless. You do need some kind of text editor to type it all in, we provide that to in this first module.

Intro to programming

Accessibility on the Web

Not everyone has perfect eyesight or see the colors you do or can even see at all. As a developer you need to realize that when you build programs, you should include everyone. There are specific tags and approaches you can use to make your app usable by anyone, regardless of disability. Be inclusive and build better apps.

Web accessibility

JavaScript variables and data types

One of the most popular programming languages right now is JavaScript. JavaScript can be used in the browser to create an interactive experience, but it can also be used on the backend to create APIs, application that can talk to other services and even databases. Learn how to think in programming by being introduced to the concept of variables and data types.

JavaScript variables and data types

Functions

When you start out, you might have all your code statements in one file. But there is a way to organize your code so it can be made more readable but also reusable. What you can do is to create named areas, functions, which can be called whenever you need them to carry out a task for you.

Functions in JavaScript

Decisions with IF/ELSE

Your code can execute differently depending on the values of different variables or some other condition. Having that flexibility makes your application useful in many different scenarios. Learn about IF, ELSE and much more.

Decisions with IF/ELSE

Arrays and loops

Sometimes your data takes on the form of a list. Imagining a recipe, or an ice cream menu or why not a receipt of things. Lists make it possible to store more than one thing and there are constructs that make it possible to operate on lists and get what you need from them such as their sum, or maybe the highest value and so on. 

Arrays and loops