Interlink Cloud Blog

Looking at new technologies and want to know if Microsoft technologies are a fit?

Learn how your organization can receive funding with no purchase obligation from Microsoft for workshops and assessments! We will be providing an overview of several of Microsoft’s funding programs.
________________________________________________________

Microsoft Funding Available

Microsoft Cloud Incentive funding is now available for Microsoft's new fiscal year. These funds can be used to provide your team with educational workshops, proof of concept deployments, and cloud migrations or modernization. Microsoft has funding available and Interlink can help you get it! The best part is that these funds don’t require a purchase are available even if you just want to explore the technology.

Here are the following opportunities along with ways it would benefit your business:

Jump-start your security defenses with a cloud-native, scalable, threat intelligence (SIEM) solution!
_______________________________

Overview of Azure Sentinel

Azure Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Sentinel brings compliance to organizations through connecting Office 365 logs, especially when researching events that happened in the past, like previous behavior of a former employee or trying to determine access points that hackers may have used for entry while the default is that the log is only kept for 90 days. This is very limiting when a security breach occurs, or organizations would like to keep logs for more than 90 days. Connecting Office 365 logs to Azure Sentinel enables you to view and analyze this data in your workbooks, query it to create custom alerts, and incorporate it to improve your investigation process, giving you more insight into your Office 365 security.

Recently, Microsoft announced Windows Virtual Desktop’s move from public preview to general availability worldwide.

Read on to learn more, and how it applies and benefits you!
__________________________________________________________________________

What is Windows Virtual Desktop?

Windows Virtual Desktop is a comprehensive desktop and app virtualization service running in the cloud. It’s the only virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) that delivers simplified management, multi-session Windows 10, optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) environments. Multi-session Windows 10 allows multiple concurrent users to connect – meaning that Windows 10 may be used as a remote desktop session host server. In contrast, it was previously only available when using a Windows Server operating system. Organizations are now able to virtualize Office 365 ProPlus and optimize it to run in multi-user sessions. Additionally, manage your environment using built-in delegated access to assign roles and collect diagnostics to understand various configuration or user errors – and use Azure’s diagnostics service to troubleshoot errors.

Learn how to get the best deal with Windows Server Hybrid Use Benefit, SQL Server Hybrid Use Benefit, Server Subscriptions, and Reserved Instances. 

We’ve seen a lot of people simply paying too much!

____________________________________________

Azure pricing can be confusing...

Many companies are struggling to understand how to get their best deal when running Azure workloads. Microsoft has programs that organizations should be taking advantage of. In this article, we’ll discuss the four major ways to get a programmatic discount on Azure that can save your organization money when compared to pay-as-you-go pricing.

A few years ago, Microsoft announced a price cut on Azure which made pricing between the various licensing vehicles all the same. Then they also gave guidance to their sales teams not to discount Azure until the customer commitment was in the millions. So, it is critical to take advantage of these programmatic discounts to get the best deal possible.

Make sure your organization is ready for changes to Conditional Access Baseline Protections!
___________________

Recently, Microsoft announced an update to Conditional Access policies regarding security. Read to learn what will be replacing Security Defaults, and how to turn it on!

Baseline Protections Update  

Microsoft currently has Baseline Protection Policies in place with Conditional Access in order to protect organizational accounts. Baseline Protections will stop being enforced on February 29th, 2020 and be replaced with Security Defaults. Security Defaults are a set of basic identity security mechanisms recommended by Microsoft. New tenants will automatically have these enabled, but existing tenants will require action. When enabled, these recommendations will automatically be enforced in your organization. Administrators and users will be better protected from common identity-related attacks – but you must be sure to enable these features! View the Microsoft announcement Introducing Security Defaults, which explain this.

If you are currently using Conditional Access and want to set up the equivalent policies in place of baseline, contact us today!