You may be reading this if you have recently received an email from Microsoft prompting you to take action and upgrade your basic SKU Azure Load Balancers to the standard SKU. This is due to the retirement of the basic SKU of this service due on 30th September 2025. Yes, that’s 3 years away at the time of writing but something you will want to prepare for and take action on well before you are forced to. Microsoft retire products and services quite regularly – you can review these retirement announcements here. This can be due to a number of reasons such as feature, security and performance i ..read more

I posted a video on Azure Chaos Studio as my contribution to Azure Back to School 2022. Thanks to Dwayne Natwick for organising the event. I hope you enjoy the video, let me know if you have any questions ..read more

The issue With more and more services going cloud native it’s becoming increasingly more common for organisations not to rely on DNS servers anymore. Just like how we are seeing new ‘greenfield’ organisations going fully cloud native and opting not to use domain controllers at all. We are also starting to see organisations not want to provision a server based DNS service. In the past, whenever we used an Azure Point-to-Site VPN connection you needed to use a DNS forwarder or conditional forwarder to resolve private DNS names in Azure. This meant more infrastructure, more maintenance, more pote ..read more

I’ve had a few people ask me recently about the difference between two resources that are both used for Azure Backup, namely Recovery Services Vault and the newer Backup Vault. Both of these are used by Azure Backup and both can be used to backup your virtual machine data as well as data from some other Azure services but they work in very different ways. I wanted to write a post about the key differences between these two backup services and to try to help you make a decision on which one to use or even why you might want to use both. Recovery Services Vault This is the traditional service u ..read more

It’s that time of the year again and I’m delighted to be taking part once more in Azure Spring Clean, a community event focused on Azure management best practises. Many thanks to Joe Carlyle and Thomas Thornton for organising the event again this year. Please check out the website from the link above for loads more excellent Azure articles, there’s a really great selection this year. My contribution this year is a collection of posts that I have been working on over the past couple of months and it’s all about best practises on how to manage your customer tenants as a ..read more

Welcome to the final part of my well-tempered Azure tenant series for MSPs. This time we will take a look at Microsoft Defender for Cloud. This service has undergone some recent name changes having been formerly known as Azure Security Center (Standard tier) and then simply Azure Defender before taking its current name. It is now part of the larger Microsoft Defender family of products but the purpose of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is to improve your overall Azure cloud, hybrid and now even your AWS and GCP security posture by providing additional security tools and management capabilities. P ..read more

Welcome to part 6 of my well-tempered Azure tenant series for MSPs. This time we will take a look at Azure Arc. Very few environments are truly Cloud only or if they are then they are using a multitude of different Cloud providers. Azure Arc is a service that was launched at Microsoft Ignite 2019 and its purpose is to bring management and governance capabilities to hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This is very significant for MSPs as not only do we already have a means to manage multiple Azure customers across tenants using Azure Lighthouse but we can now extend some of these management ca ..read more

Welcome to part 5 of my well-tempered Azure tenant series for MSPs. This time we will take a look at Azure Monitor. A powerful solution for collecting performance metrics and logs from your customer tenants. Using this telemetry we can provide proactive managed services through monitoring dashboards and alerts which is essential for any managed service provider. Part 5: Azure Monitor Azure Monitor has built-in support for Azure Lighthouse so although we have to configure the monitoring for each customer at the subscription level, we can monitor the collected telemetry centrally across our dele ..read more

Welcome to part 4 of my well-tempered Azure tenant series for MSPs. We have already begun our journey of managing our customer’s Azure tenants with Azure Backup. Let’s switch focus now to governance and discuss how we can use Azure Policy to put in place some guardrails for our customers. This is not only good practice but will also help ensure that we have consistent governance across our customer base rather than taking an ad hoc approach. Part 4: Azure Policy This post won’t be so much of a what is Azure policy, I will assume that you already know what this is and what it is used for. Inst ..read more

Welcome to part 3 of my well-tempered Azure tenant series for MSPs. At this point we have already covered how to onboard your customers for delegated management using Azure Lighthouse. Now it is time for us to start making use of that delegated access and to start managing our customers. This post will focus on a core service that I think most MSPs will likely be using and perhaps struggling to manage at scale – Azure Backup. Fortunately for us, this service has some nice reporting features that benefit from Azure Lighthouse and can be used at scale across customer tenants. Part 3: Azure Back ..read more