Author: rzomerman

  • Client Side Encryption (CSE) & Confidential Computing

    In the previous post, I detailed the Server-Side-Encryption and the initial trust that someone must have in the cloud provider. I’ve also demonstrated how confidential compute helps in that trust with regards to Managed HSM and how a blind trust in a “Hold-Your-Own-Key” might be misplaced. While server side encryption relies on the services to…

  • External Key Store vs Azure Managed HSM

    A comparison of two options for secure key storage and cryptographic operations Introduction Cryptographic keys are essential for protecting sensitive data and ensuring the integrity and authenticity of digital transactions. However, storing and managing these keys securely can be challenging, especially in cloud environments where parts of the encryption process is managed by the cloud…

  • Availability Zones & DR

    Disaster Recovery – how to recover your application if a disaster occurs. Disaster Recovery is part of what we call “resilience” today. Resilience is the how to ensure that our applications are reliable or recoverable. This is a different approach and view of the more legacy “disaster recovery” environment where a cold (or warm) standby…

  • Availability Zones VM Conversion

    As a continuation of my AZGateway migration scripts I entered the scripting world again for the migration of VMs. As anything worth doing is worth doing twice I actually wrote the entire script and then found out the Microsoft Azure SAP team already had something lined up. While their script did migrate VM’s there were…

  • Availability Zones Gateway Conversion

    As promised, I would cover Availability Zones a bit more in the next few posts. If your Azure region supports Availability Zones you probably want to use them. Yes the services are a bit more expensive but you gain a higher SLA and the ability to adopt an active-active infrastructure. This active-active infrastructure usually starts…

  • Azure Availability Zones Mapping Checker

    Microsoft is working hard to make “Availability Zones” available for most of their primary Azure regions. What is an Availability Zone will be covered later in another blog post, including why you should use it, what advantages it brings and more importantly (as most of the previous is covered by Microsoft documentation) – how do…

  • BGP Filters in Juniper

    So, this topic might be a bit too short for you, and I’m sure your BGP filters in your SRX are way more advanced. But for the simpler people like me that just need to get something done; this one is for you. When I did the AnyCast DNS setup using BGP at home and…

  • LDAP Proxy for old stuff

    Doing Active Directory Migrations is always tricky, certainly on applications. I’ve recently came across an application that performs an (uche 200x) based simple-LDAP bind to validate credentials. Now, we could rewrite the entire application to use SAML, OpenIDConect, Kerberos, Headers or whatever. But that’s not always possible. But how do we manage applications that do…

  • ImmutableID – mS-DS-ConsistencyGuid – AADConnect – ADMT – Part 4 – Groups

    In earlier posts I talked about ADMT and user accounts. Now a migration is never a full migration if groups are not migrated too. But how Azure AD Connect deals with users and groups is a bit different, certainly when custom anchors are being used. In this post we will be looking at how we…

  • when Azure subscriptions make sense

    I wanted to write this post on when to decide on a new subscription or not.. but then it turned to security – which – as many of you know is close to me as well.. so while the beginning of this post is about “when to choose a new Azure subscription” the conclusion is:…

  • Look up… DNS Anycast on ADDS

    When deploying Active Directory, it has been a tradition to set the DNS IP addresses on clients to match the nearest Domain Controller to the clients. This means that every DHCP scope in the organization has to have different IP addresses for the name servers and administrators have to manually ensure everything is configured correctly.…

  • SQL on AKS on HCI

    I thought to start the new year with acronyms. This post will be about deploying Microsoft SQL containers inside Azure Kubernetes Services running on top of Azure Stack HCI. Microsoft SQL has been around for quite some time but deploying it as a container in Kubernetes is quite new for administrators. It does bring benefits…