AC Brown’s Cloud Guide – Part 4 – Cloud Service Providers

August 12, 2019 Leave a comment

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.…

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How Does SPF Work?

July 30, 2019 Leave a comment

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.…

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AC Brown’s Cloud Guide – Part 3 – Shared Responsibility Model

June 11, 2019 Leave a comment

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.…

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AC Brown’s Cloud Guide – Part 1 – The Basics

May 30, 2019 Leave a comment

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.…

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IT Concepts – What is Identity Federation

May 14, 2019 Leave a comment

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.”…

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Office 365 Migration – When Do I Need to Use Third Party Tools?

March 29, 2019 Leave a comment

This post may be late in coming, given that most smaller companies have already moved away from on-prem solutions to cloud based services for things like email and file sharing, but I feel like it’s important to stress some of the realities involved in migrating from on-prem to cloud systems. Particularly when migrating to Office 365.…

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Exchange Server EMail Routing – Accepted Domains and Send Connectors

March 22, 2019 Leave a comment
Exchange Server (And Exchange Online) can be a little confusing at times, particularly when we're dealing with mail routing. Internal mail routes are handled almost automatically (especially if you keep all your Exchange servers in the same AD Site, which I recommend), but how do you get it to route email to mail servers *outside* your organization? This post answers all the questions you might have about how to handle Special Mail Routing cases for Exchange.

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DNS – An Introduction

February 26, 2019 Leave a comment

Though you may not know it, DNS (Or Domain Name System) is probably the most used things on the Internet. In fact, you’re using it right now. For those who don’t know what DNS is or does, it is the system we use to translate Domain Names to IP Addresses.

What is DNS?

DNS was created to allow easy creation, distribution, and update of “Internet Names.”…

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Hardening Microsoft Solutions from Attacks

January 30, 2019 Leave a comment

Take a minute to go over this post from Dirk-jan Mollema. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait…

Did you realize how scary that kind of attack is? As an IT guy who specializes in Exchange server and loves studying security, that article scared the snot out of me. Based on my experience with organizations of all sizes I can say with a good bit of authority that almost every Exchange organization out there is probably vulnerable to this attack.…

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