With immutable vaults, Azure Backup ensures that recovery points that are once created cannot be deleted before their intended expiry time. Azure Backup does this by preventing any operations which could lead to the loss of backup data. Hence, this helps you protect your backups against ransomware attacks and malicious actors by disallowing operations such as deleting backups or reducing retention in backup policies. Immutable vaults are now in preview (as of this article - Jan 2023) in all regions. An immutable vault can assist in safeguarding your backup data by prohibiting any actions tha ..read more

Have you ever wanted to export an icon from the Microsoft Azure Portal but found yourself having to screenshot the icon at a low definition to include in your documentation or presentations? Well - using the Amazing Icon Downloader browser plugin, you can export a single or all icons on a specific page in high definition as an SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file. Easily view all icons on a page, works with: portal.azure.com endpoint.microsoft.com Search to filter down long lists of icons Rename and download any single icon Bulk download all icons as a .zip file Works with either Chrome or Ed ..read more

An IP Group in Microsoft Azure is a logical container of IP address ranges for private and public addresses. IP Groups allow you to group and manage IP addresses for Azure Firewall rules in the following ways: As a source address in DNAT rules As a source or destination address in network rules As a source address in application rules An IP Group can have a single IP address, multiple IP addresses, one or more IP address ranges or addresses and ranges in combination. The IP Group allows you to define an IP address that can be used in conjunction with Azure Firewall, to allow or deny intern ..read more

It’s that time of year again! The time to be jolly and experience the Month of December by looking at the Festive Tech Calendar! This year the Festive Tech Calendar Team is raising money for the charity @missingpeople. We believe its important to support charities that do great work. Without fundraising Missing People wouldn’t be able to find vulnerable missing people and reunite families. If you would like to donate please visit our Just Giving Page Today, we sent our present and took a peek inside the box - at Microsoft Dev Box! Overview Microsoft Dev Box provides self-service access for d ..read more

Azure Storage account SFTP functionality has now gone GA (Generally Available) across most regions as part of the GA release - SFTP support for Azure Storage accounts was free while it was in preview - but now that the service is GA - there is an additional charge for SFTP (Secure File Transfer) functionality. Enabling the SFTP endpoint has a cost of $0.30 per hour. We will start applying this hourly cost on or after December 1, 2022. This service has worked for me without a hitch for months, but as with most resources in Microsoft Azure - you pay for what you use! Therefore, there may be in ..read more

Azure-Firewall-mon is a near real-time Azure Firewall log viewer. Azure-Firewall-mon provides an alternative_and_opinable ? way to access and inspect Azure Firewall logs. The recommended approach for analysing Azure Firewall logs is to set up a Log Analytics Workspace to collect all the data and use Kusto (KQL) queries to check what’s happening. In Azure-Firewall-mon, the idea is to provide an approach much more like Sysinternals Process Monitor or Check Point’s SmartView, where there is no queries or dashboards that you need to implement first to get working. Still, all events are available ..read more

You don’t have a be a Microsoft MVP to engage with Microsoft product teams, and help give feedback! One of the best ways that the Microsoft product teams engage with the community- is through Public Community Calls! Here is a list of the community calls across Microsoft Azure products. Topic Link Notes Azure ARM/Bicep Community Calls https://github.com/Azure/bicep/issues?q=label%3A%22Community+Call%22+   Azure Governance & Deployments https://github.com/Azure/azure-policy#general-questions Same as the ARM/Bicep community call. Also features Azure Policy. Cloud Security http ..read more

Microsoft Ignite is an annual conference held by Microsoft for IT Professionals and Cloud builders - each year is a flurry of new announcements and updates! Keeping track of the changes can be a full-time job during the week (and beyond!)! Make sure you check out the Microsoft Ignite 2022 Book of News! For a consolidated list of features and releases! Also, check out AzureFeeds - for a consolidated feed across all Microsoft changes! Along with the product pages, current and new Microsoft documentation have been updated to align with these new products, features and changes! The pages that have ..read more

Cost Analysis in Microsoft Azure allows you to analyse the cost of your services; these services can be scoped into Resource Groups, Resources and Services; you can also group your services by Tags. Azure tags are name-value pairs used to organize resources. You can apply tags for individual resources, display show back or ownership and can be used for automation - but what assigning parent/child relationships to your resources? Tags work well for most used cases, but there may be times when you want to get a more in-depth view of the service and dependencies - this is where the “cm-resource-p ..read more

This was asked in the Microsoft forums; with the change of platform from being able to see and download certificates for the competition of your Microsoft exam with Pearsonvue to the new Microsoft Learn experience, you might find yourself lost when attempting to view (and print) your hard-earned Microsoft certificate! The certificate format has also been refreshed. Old New To view and print your certificate: Navigate to: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/users/me/activity/ Click on: Certifications Find your certificate and click on View certification details. Click a Print certification, the ..read more