Yearly Archives - 2021

Happy Holidays, and looking forward to 2022

Happy Holidays, and looking forward to 2022

The end of another year is fast approaching. And that means (besides that the holidays are coming) it’s time for my annual review process. As a self-employed person who identifies as a rebel (meaning that I don’t take direction from myself or others very well), this is something that I have...
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More details on Microsoft Defender for Business (MDB)

More details on Microsoft Defender for Business (MDB)

Perhaps the biggest Microsoft product announcement this year for SMB customers was Microsoft Defender for Business, an Enterprise-grade endpoint security solution which is based on the wildly successful Microsoft Defender for Endpoint product. As previously noted on this blog, MDB will be included with Microsoft 365 Business Premium, which we...
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Introducing Microsoft Defender for Business: you heard that right... it's *included* with Business Premium

Introducing Microsoft Defender for Business: you heard that right… it’s *included* with Business Premium

Remember a couple of months ago when Microsoft announced Microsoft Defender for Endpoint P1? Many critical eyes in the community quickly pointed out that Business Premium customers were apparently left out to dry, even though the SMB is where we need the most help when it comes to endpoint security....
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Announcing the Microsoft 365 SMB Data Protection Toolkit

Announcing the Microsoft 365 SMB Data Protection Toolkit

Update March 2023: This product has been updated significantly, and renamed too. It is now called The SMB Guide to Data Protection and Microsoft Purview in Microsoft 365 Business Premium Plans. It still contains the written guide as well as supporting materials such as scripts and templates to help you...
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Automating third-party software deployments and updates with Intune and Scappman

Automating third-party software deployments and updates with Intune and Scappman

Hey folks! For those of you in my audience who work at Managed Services Providers (MSP's), I wanted to introduce you to a product called Scappman that I am really excited about. Rarely do I come across something like this, which solves such an important problem in just the way I...
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Multi-tenant management for Microsoft 365, and other things

Multi-tenant management for Microsoft 365, and other things

IT service providers are constantly looking for more efficiency, and better ways to manage their customers' hardware and software assets. In the Microsoft realm, we finally have Microsoft 365 Lighthouse, which is now in public preview. Some of my MSP customers have raised question marks around its current feature set...
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The three opportunities for MSP's moving forward

The three opportunities for MSP’s moving forward

The writing has been on the wall a while now; with a mass exodus to cloud services such as Microsoft 365 from traditional on-premises infrastructure, it was only a matter of time before those selling MSP services had to either evolve or die off. And with recent high-profile attacks against...
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Fast and Free Incident Response Tools in Microsoft 365

Fast and Free Incident Response Tools in Microsoft 365

As part of the SquareOne Summer Security Series, our group recently explored the topic of Incident Response in Microsoft 365. This was a very well-received course, and I felt a blog post was in order to cover off on some of the important content from that segment, which I think...
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Simple Sensitivity Label design for the SMB

Simple Sensitivity Label design for the SMB

In the recent updates to the CIS Controls (v8), one of the most noticeable changes was the re-prioritization of Data Protection (now Control #3, up from #13 previously). This control calls out a number of safeguards: inventory of sensitive data and data classification is among them. Sensitivity labels can help...
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Education and Governance: your weapons to combat fear and enable modern workplaces

Education and Governance: your weapons to combat fear and enable modern workplaces

I had lunch with a colleague recently who expressed skepticism over my (admittedly non-conventional) methods for migrating users from a legacy file server to OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint. "Some things work better in Theory than they do in Practice," he says. Well, that's funny because I built my method from actual...
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