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Cloud advice

Monitoring, backup and restore Microsoft 365 Tenant Configuration with Microsoft365DSC

Microsoft365DSC is an Open-Source initiative lead by Microsoft engineers and maintained by the community. It allows tenant admins to write a definition for how your Microsoft 365 tenant should be configured, automate the deployment of that configuration and ensures the monitoring of the defined configuration, notifying and acting on detected configuration drifts. It also allows […]

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Cloud advice

Dynamic Groups + Group Based Licensing

Automate automate automate, that should be part of my job title. In this post I’m going to talk about a lesser known feature of Azure AD, which is now available to anyone with A3/E3 or above, group based licensing. With Microsoft’s retirement of the AzureAD and MSOL modules (replaced with MSGraph) you will need to […]

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Cloud advice

Ransomware – a clear and present danger

I am hearing increasing reports of UK academic institutions suffering from ramsomware attacks. These are now happening much more frequently than in the past and the consequences, in some cases at least, can be devastating. It is no longer a question of if you will be attacked but when you will be attacked and how […]

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Cloud advice

Easily secure your application with Jisc’s Managed Website Protection

A recording of the recent session run by Paul Martin of Fortinet at the Jisc Security Conference. The session covers Jisc’s Managed Website Protection service and how that helps institutions and organizations mitigate against the evolving security threat landscape.

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Cloud advice

The public cloud shared responsibility model – what does it mean in practice?

A recording of the recent session run by Simon Dix of the Jisc cloud solutions team at the Jisc Security Conference. The session covers the public cloud shared responsibility model in relation to the roles and responsibilities of both cloud vendors and cloud consumers.

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Cloud advice

Optimising Microsoft 365 security and governance

A recording of the recent session run by Richard Jackson and Colm Blake of the Jisc cloud solutions team at the Jisc Security Conference. The session covers best practices for the configuration of Office 365, Windows 10/11 and the Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS) suite.

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Cloud advice

Azure Virtual Desktop has a new scaling solution

Microsoft have recently announced the Preview of Autoscale for Azure Virtual Desktop and at first blush it looks like native scaling has had some much-needed improvements. The previous incarnation was a little clumsy, requiring you to independently create an automation account, an Azure function and optionally, a Log Analytics Workspace. In addition, any parameters then […]

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Cloud advice

Talking teaching at Bradford College

Bradford College deliver BSc (Hons) courses in Software Engineering and Networking Infrastructure and Security (among other things) and are part of the AWS Academy program. I had the privilege of visiting the team behind the courses and an opportunity to see their recently refurbished teaching rooms to put our discussion in context. A big thank […]

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Cloud advice

Scaling genomics workloads using HPC on AWS

AWS has made the recording available from their recent webinar, Scaling genomics workloads using HPC on AWS, presented by Aniket Deshpande and Evan Bollig. This is a great resource and I strongly recommend watching it, especially if you are relatively new to the idea of running research workloads on a public cloud platform like AWS. […]

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Cloud advice

Thinking about cloud energy usage at Jisc

Ever wondered how much energy your cloud computing is using? Jisc have, but it is not all that easy to get an answer. In an attempt to find out, Etsy created what they call their Cloud Jewels. These are estimated conversion factors that turn cloud compute consumption into watt-hours. Building on this, an open-source project […]