AAD Conditional Access

What is Conditional Access on AAD: Microsoft AAD with conditional access allows for users or groups to verify themselves more securely as after the login attempt an additional check is required to identify if the account may be compromised/at risk or is good.  Microsoft use algorithms and a ton of collated information to determine the risk on the attempted login.  A simple example would be a users location is unusual or logging in from different places in the world in too short a period.

• First factor Authentication happens before conditional access. 
• Setting up conditional AAD access 
• Conditional Access is part of Azure MFA
• Configure conditions for access
• Easy to bypass MFA if a used is a ADFS federated user or coming from a specific IP range (head office location) or region.  Can also allow a one time bypass if a user loses there phone.
• Required Azure AD Premium licences

Azure DevOps/TFS Basics

Overview:  There is a lot you can do with Azure DevOps to monitor your projects.  A couple of simple charts can be used to motivate (or demotivate) your team.  Start simple and build...

Knowledge Transfer/Support Handover

Problem:  Projects that I tend to work on are complete by Scrum teams filled with specialist and specialist contractors who move on after project completion.  Support is generally handled by dedicate people/teams offshore.

Hypothesis: Having high quality support people working alongside you throughout the project is not very common due to costs.  I believe there are key points to cover to ensure that the operational support is effective.  Too many companies merely focus on checklists and the ops team don't get a fundamental understanding of the system.

Resolution:
1. People/Support: Understand the domain - Hard
2. People/Support: Understand the architecture - Easy
3. People/Support: Understand who is responsible for level 1- level 3 support and what that entails.  Easy if done correctly.
4. People/attitude: Hire patient collaborative, eager people in support (most key point) that want to learn and take ownership. Easy if done correctly.
5. Knowledge base - have a wiki or equivalent.  The same issues always present, so document and have an answer that can help your uses.  I also like to record mp4's for different levels of support.  Record the sessions as it is too easy for level 3 people to say they never got a handover or covered something.  This allows people to look back, easily train additional users.  Easy if done correctly.
6. Ensure you have automated tests, they are a great source of how your system works.  And if a fix has to be released, it also easy to validate that the original logic still works.  Hard but it returns great benefits if used.