There are a lot of different ways to take a career in IT. A lot of the time, people fall into a path in their career without really realizing. I personally fell into a focus on email because I kept getting assigned to work on email systems as a primary assignment. The more I learned about email, the more my employers began to rely on me to work with Exchange server.…
Depending on your situation, you may want to take control of how Exchange’s Autodiscover lookup process works. Specifically, there are a lot of scenarios where Autodiscover will break because the lookup process isn’t properly controlled. In this article, I’ll go over registry settings that will let you control which steps are used and which ones are skipped.…
Email security is a war between security professionals and malicious actors. Security professionals are often following malicious actors and reacting to changes. Unfortunately, success in this war is dependant on information. To aid in that effort, every major security vendor that works in the email world has some way to report bad emails. Each report can be examined to figure out what techniques were used to bypass existing security.…
An important security concept that has cropped up over the past few years is Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Its predecessor, 2 Factor Authentication, has been around for decades but has become less common recently due to some inherent flaws. Put simply, both techniques improve security, but how? To get to that, let’s go through the MFA acronym backward, so I can explain how things come together.…
What are Cloud Service Providers
Moving from a traditional IT infrastructure to a cloud-based or hybrid infrastructure is a complicated undertaking. Cloud systems will reduce the level of control an organization has over their application, and getting the right setup is sometimes difficult. This is where Cloud Service Providers (CSP) come in. I should first point out that CSP is a Microsoft term for organizations that partner with them to provide migration, administration, architectural, security, and development services to their customers.…
No, I’m not talking about sunscreen. The SPF I’ll be discussing here is Sender Policy Framework. It’s an email security measure that can prevent unauthorized use of your email domain name. I’ll be going over a few things in this post, but if you just want to know how to craft an SPF record, you can scroll to the “The SPF Puzzle” section below.…
What does “Shared Responsibility” Mean
“Shared Responsibility” explains the demarcation line between what a cloud provider controls and what a cloud consumer controls. In a traditional DIY IT environment, responsibility for everything rests entirely on the business and its IT personnel. Electricity, physical security, hardware, software, and everything else has to be purchased, installed, maintained, and administered by the company directly or through an intermediary.…
In my last post, we covered the basic concepts of cloud computing. This time, we’ll be diving down a little deeper into the cloud to cover the actual structure that most cloud environments use to operate. There are a lot of differences between cloud providers, but they all use very similar hardware and network designs to get things done.…
Cloud Concepts and Terminology
As a consultant who was working on Office 365 migrations shortly after it was released (well, renamed), I have worked on a log of migrations. Migrations are a always a project that can be difficult to manage if not done properly. As with any project, planning for a migration is extremely important.…
One of the most historically difficult problems to address in IT is usernames and passwords for multiple applications. We all have a multitude of accounts we have to manage. Bank accounts, social media, email, work accounts, cloud storage, and every other system we use relies on usernames and passwords to “authenticate” who we are. There are a number of different solutions for this problem, but the most user friendly method is a technique called “Identity Federation.”…