One of the most common things we hear from our clients is their need to automatically access security related reports from Azure AD. With last week’s announcement from Microsoft about AAD Reporting APIs Public Preview, we now have that capability.
Azure AD already has a robust set of activity, security and audit reports, with some of the most useful provided within Azure AD Premium, and they can all easily be viewed within the Azure portal. With the new APIs, we can now programmatically access that data via “any tool or programming language which supports REST APIs with OAuth” and integrate it into a custom dashboard, Power BI/Excel, or your favorite SIEM solution.
The following reports can be accessed via the API:

• AuditEvents
• AccountProvisioningEvents
• SignInsFromUnknownSourcesEvents
• SignInsFromIPAddressesWithSuspiciousActivityEvents
• SignInsFromMultipleGeographiesEvents
• signInsAfterMultipleFailuresEvents
• signInsFromPossiblyInfectedDevicesEvents (AAD Premium)
• IrregularSignInActivityEvents (AAD Premium)
• allUsersWithAnomalousSignInActivityEvents (AAD Premium)
• CompromisedCredentialsEvent (AAD Premium)

Ready to get started? Check out this guide to Get Started with the Azure AD Reporting API.

The most common way for enterprises to connect their datacenters or home offices to resources in Microsoft Azure is over VPN. Although Microsoft has made connecting to Azure quick and easy, VPNs, in general, do have their drawbacks. Because they traverse the public internet, availability and performance are difficult to control. Latency can also be an issue for those applications and connections which depend on low latency communications.
Fortunately, Microsoft realizes many companies require better connections to their Azure resources, and they offer ExpressRoute as a solution. ExpressRoute provides private connections between Azure datacenters and a company’s on-premises datacenter. These connections don’t traverse the public internet so the result is higher security, lower latency, better reliability and faster speeds.
If you are thinking of extending your existing datacenter to Azure, or if you want to take advantage of the storage, backup, and recovery benefits of the Azure cloud, now is a great time to give it a try. Up until June 30, 2015, the Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute 10 Mbps Network Service Provider (NSP) offering is free of charge. Just to sweeten the pot, some Microsoft NSP partners are offering related promotions during this period.

If you want to explore the many benefits of a fast, reliable and secure private connection to the Azure cloud, you can find more information about the ExpressRoute promotion here.
For more on Azure and Microsoft’s cloud offering, take a look at our latest white paper.
[pardot-form id=”34122″ title=”MSFT: White Paper BLOG form: The CIO’s Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services”]

Windows Server 2003 will reach end of life on July 14, 2015. Support and security patches will no longer be available after that date. If you are still running Server 2003 in your environment, hopefully you are already planning how to migrate your workloads to a supportable platform. If you are just beginning to consider your migration, a sample of tools and methodologies are outlined below to help you get started.

 
Tools
 ~ Windows Server Migration Tools
Windows Server 2012 offers a built-in migration solution called Windows Server Migration Tools (install as a feature). Use this tool to ease the process of migrating server roles, features, OS settings and data from Windows Server 2003. The source server must be running at least Server 2003 SP2 or R2. It will handle both 32bit and 64bit. Find the Microsoft guide to this tool here.
 ~ AppZero
Microsoft Partner AppZero offers a tool which extracts and encapsulates only the target applications you want to migrate. You can choose to run the application in the encapsulated form on the destination server, which enables continued portability. This is handy for use in hybrid environments where you might want the flexibility of running the application on a server in the cloud, or in your on-premises environment. With the application encapsulated, you can continue to easily move them between those environments. Or you can choose to ‘dissolve’ the application to the destination server. This enables it to run as if it were natively installed. Learn more about how AppZero can help migrate your workloads, and provide ongoing flexibility.
 ~ Windows Server 2003 Migration Planning Assistant
This isn’t so much of a tool as it is a workflow type assistant with will help you work through the steps you need to focus on to identify the applications you really need to move. You may find legacy applications which your organization isn’t using any longer, or that so few people are using them that you can help them find alternative solutions and not actually migrate those apps. Get started with the Migration Planning Assistant.

 
Methodology
 The Migration Planning Assistant steps you through a methodology which helps you identify the applications, features and roles, services and data which you may need to migrate to a supportable platform. Your team may also use this methodology independent of the Planning Assistant.
1. Discover
The first step is to identify all the servers and applications running on Server 2003. Use the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) to help with identification. You may also decide to enlist the help of Microsoft Partners to help with this, and the entire process.
 2. Assess
Now that you have identified your at-risk servers and applications, it’s time to take a critical look at what they are, and how they will fit into your migration plan.
Type – What is it? What does it do?
~ Server Roles
~ Native Microsoft application
~ Third-party
Criticality – How important is it to your organization?
~ Mission Critical
~ Important
~ Marginal
~ Retire/Replace
Complexity – How many resources and how much time do you need to dedicate to each app?
~ Low
~ Medium
~ High
Risk – How long can you live without the app if it is unavailable during the migration?
~ Low
~ Medium
~ High
3. Target
What is the destination platform? You may decide to move it to a Microsoft Server 2012 R2 server running in your own datacenter. Or you may want to leverage the flexibility and potential cost-savings of Microsoft Azure. Should the server be physical or virtual? Perhaps this is a messaging or collaboration solution you want to run in Office 365.
4. Migrate
You have combed through your environment and identified the applications you need to migrate. Now decide who has responsibility for actually migrating the apps and plan the move. Again, you may utilize tools for the migration, or identify a Microsoft Partner to help you with the process.

 
Conclusion
How you get there is definitely important and these tools and steps will help you. The most important thing is to get started now. With time on your side, this doesn’t have to be a difficult process. Good luck!

# 5 – Familiarity
One of the reasons organizations have tended to stay with XP for so long is their employees are familiar with it. Like an old friend, it’s comfortable and easy to deal with. However churn among your IT administrators and other employees has changed the dynamic. Most people are now more familiar with newer operating systems. When new associates sit down in front of XP, it is likely to be dramatically different (and disappointing) than the more up to date operating systems they use at home and at their previous job.
#4 – Speed and Productivity
Windows XP typically takes at least 30 seconds to boot and often much longer. Windows 8.1 can boot in about 10 seconds. That 20 seconds can easily turn into 5 minutes or more of lost productivity every day when you walk away to do something else while XP boots.
#3 – Web Browsers and New Applications
More applications, business and personal, will be developed to be used via a web browser. It takes extra time to develop new applications which are compatible with old browser versions. Over the short term, many new applications just won’t work with XP.
#2 – Office 2013 and Office 365
Office 2013 and Office 365 ProPlus are not supported on Windows XP. Office 365 only supports software and operating systems which are still in mainstream support. The cloud and other popular software packages are leaving you behind!
 
(Drumroll please…)
#1 – Security
The XP operating system came to market in 2001. Time Warner and AOL merged that year. Although XP lasted longer than that disaster, the security implications of sticking with XP any longer could likely create a security disaster in your desktop environment. Hackers now know every way to compromise your OS. Do you think they are not already taking advantage of this potential bonanza?
 Conclusion
Don’t put it off any longer. Perficient has the experience and talented staff to help you ease this transition.

With the release of Windows Server 2012 R2 comes many great new features, including a improved virtual machine named generation 2.
Generation 2 virtual machines provide quite a few enhancements across the spectrum of Hyper-V VM technology. Perhaps most notable is the removal of legacy emulated hardware. Removal of the legacy network adapter, IDE controller, floppy controller, serial controller (COM ports), and PCI bus, results in a more efficient VM. You should see faster boot times, and quicker installations from .iso. How does a VM boot without these integral components? Where necessary, they have been replaced with software based versions.
Other enhancements include:

• Replaced BIOS with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface)
  • Faster boot times
  • Support for boot volumes up to 64TB (Uses GPT instead of MBR)

• Enhanced Security
  • Smaller attack surface
  • Secure Boot – Prevents unauthorized firmware, drivers and OS from running during boot.

• Expansion of data and boot disks while VM is running. Nice!

• Complete reliance on VHDX file format resulting in much better performance (VHD’s are no longer supported).

• Enhanced Session Mode
  • This allows device redirection and the ability to control display configuration when connected via the Virtual Machine Connection tool.

Some things to keep in mind with generation 2 machines:

• Guest OS environments must be 64 bit, and only supports Server 2012 and Windows 8 or later.

• Physical CD/DVD pass-through is no longer available. Although you can still attach physical disks to a VM, it is strongly discouraged due to the fact that any reliance on physical hardware makes live migration problematic.

• Generation 2 is a feature of Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1. Keep this in mind if you try to live migrate a gen 2 machine to a Windows Server 2012 host. You can live migrate a generation 1 machine between 2012 R2 and Server 2012 hosts, but not generation 2.

• You currently can’t officially convert a generation 1 machine to generation 2. Although there are PowerShell scripts which can make this happen, it isn’t supported by Microsoft. Hopefully, there will be a supported utility soon.

• RemoteFX is not supported.

This is not an exhaustive list of the features of the new generation 2 virtual machine in Windows Server 2012 R2, but it is hopefully enough to get you interested. If you are ready for a deep dive, here is more information.
Next time you create a VM, choose generation 2.