IamITgeek – aka Shabaz Darr

Tag: Hybrid

Azure Spring Clean: Azure Identity Management: Azure AD, Hybrid and Azure AD DS — March 22, 2021

Azure Spring Clean: Azure Identity Management: Azure AD, Hybrid and Azure AD DS

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Salaam, Namaste, Ola and Hello!

Welcome to the #AzureSpringClean 2021! It is my pleasure to be opening up this event and taking part in it for the 2nd year running! This is an amazing community initiative dedicating to promoting well managed Azure tenants. You can catch all the updates from https://www.azurespringclean.com/

The following post is in relation to Identity management in cloud, specifically Microsoft. In my experience there are three main services with Azure Identity Management:

  • Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)
  • Hybrid AD
  • Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure AD DS)

I will discuss how each works, in what scenarios you can make best use of them and finally some pros and cons for each one.

Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity management service which integrates with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams to name a few of the services. Like most Azure Cloud services, Azure Active Directory (or Azure AD for short) has different levels of features, all dependent on the subscription you assign the user. The four main levels are:

  • Azure Active Directory free
  • Azure Active Directory Premium P1
  • Azure Active Directory Premium P2
  • Pay as you go feature licenses

Azure Active Directory free provides user and group management, self-service password change for cloud users and SSO capabilities in Azure, Office 365 and certain 3rd party SaaS apps. You can also have integration with on-premises Active Directory but this will be discussed further in the Hybrid section

Azure Active Directory Premium P1 has all the same features and capabilities as the free version but has more support with hybrid users, advanced administration including dynamic groups and cloud password write back capabilities.

Azure Active Directory Premium P2 has all the same features and capabilities as Premium P1 but also, P2 offers Active Directory Identity Protection to help provide risk based conditional access to your applications and critical company data.

Pay as you go feature license: These are additional feature licenses, such as Active Directory Business-to-Customer (B2C). B2C can help provide identity and access management solutions for your customer-facing applications

Azure AD can be used in a few different scenarios, for example: If your Infrastructure is fully Microsoft 365 and you are using Azure AD to manage user accounts and groups, Exchange Online for email, SharePoint online for Document management, Teams for collaboration and telephony and Intune to manage Windows 10 device and security. Another scenario you can use Azure AD is in a Hybrid environment, where you need to Synchronize Active Directory on-premises users and groups with Microsoft 365. This will be discussed further in the Hybrid Section

Pros of Azure AD include:

  • Centralized administration of users through different locations
  • Comprehensive Organizational Unit management via a single interface
  • Microsoft Integrated Security

Cons of Azure AD include:

  • No integration with on premises applications unless they support SAML or requires further configuration and resources (Hybrid)
  • Has a massive reliance on Microsoft 365 so any outage can cause a lot of issues

Below is a two part video series I did on Azure Ad with a demo look around the portal!

Azure Hybrid Identity

Azure Hybrid identity requires both Azure AD and Active Directory on-premises. To achieve Hybrid Identity with Azure AD, one of three authentication methods can be used:

  • Password hash Synchronization (PHS)
  • Pass-through authentication (PTA)
  • Federated (AD FS)

These authentication methods also provide single-sign on (SSO) capabilities which allows to automatically sign in to apps on corporate devices which are connected to your corporate network

Password Hash Synchronization can be configured (as with all three methods) using Azure AD connect utility. Azure AD connect synchronizes a hash, of the hash, of a users password from an on-premises Active Directory instance to a cloud-based Azure AD instance.

Active Directory on premises stores password in the form of a hash value representation, of the actual user password. To Synchronize your password, Azure AD connect sync extracts your password hash from the on-premises Active Directory instance. Extra security processing is applied to the password hash before it is synchronized to the Azure Active Directory authentication service. Passwords are synchronized on a per-user basis and in chronological order.

Pass-through authentication allows users to sign in to both on-premises and cloud-based applications using the same password. This feature is an alternative to Password Hash Synchronization , which provide the same benefit of cloud authentication. You can combine pass-through authentication with Single-sign on features so when users are accessing applications on their corporate machines inside the network they do not need to type in their passwords.

Federated (AD FS) is a collection of domains that have established a trust. The level of trust may vary however, but typically includes authentication and almost always includes authorization. You can federate your on-premises environment with azure AD and use this federation for authentication and authorization. This sign-in method ensures that all users authentication occurs on-premises. This method allows administrators to implement more rigorous levels of access control. There is much more to Federation but that is out of the scope of this blog post!

These three different methods of Hybrid authentication all have various scenarios which they support. Password Hash Synchronization is ideal for if you have an on-premises Infrastructure but have recently started your journey into Microsoft 365 with a few services like Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Password Hash Synchronization will allow users to have a single password and also have single-sign on when on the corporate network.

Pass-through authentication is ideal for businesses wanting to enforce their on-premises Active Directory security and password policies into the Cloud identity.

Active Directory Federation can provide additional advanced authentication required for smart-card based authentication or third-party MFA.

Password Hash Pros:

  • Cloud scale/resilience since this all native Azure AD with no other reliance during authentication
  • Provides breach replay protection and reports of leaked credentials since the stored hash can be used t compare against credentials found on the dark web

Password Hash Cons:

  • If the Active Directory Account has been locked, restricted hours set or password expired it will not impact the ability to logon via azure AD

Pass-through authentication (PTA) Pros:

  • This is lighter than using federation and establishes an inbound 443 connection to Azure AD not requirement any inbound port exceptions
  • Any Active Directory account restrictions like hours, account lockout, password expired would be enforced

Pass-through authentication (PTA) Cons:

  • Legacy authentication (Pre 2013 Office clients) may not work with PTA

Federation Pros:

  • Supports 3rd party MFA and custom policies/claims rules
  • Certification based authentication

Federation Cons:

  • Large amount of Infrastructure required
  • Firewall exceptions needed with the ADFS Proxy
  • Can limit scale/availability

You can find a two part video series below where I cover Hybrid AD including a demo of Azure AD connect below:

Azure Active Directory Domain Services

Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure AD DS for short) provides managed domain services such as:

  • Domain Join
  • Group Policy
  • Lightweight directory access Protocol (LDAP)
  • Kerboros/NTLM authentication

You use these domain services without the need to headaches of having to manage, deploy and patch a domain controller in the cloud. Azure AD DS integrates with your existing AD tenant which makes it possible for users to sign in using their existing credentials. You can also use existing groups, and users accounts to secure access to resources which provides a smoother ‘lift-and-shift’ of on-premises resources to Azure.

Azure AD DS replicates identity information from Azure AD, so works with Azure AD tenants that are cloud-only, or synchronized with an on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) environment. The same set of Azure AD DS features exist for both environments.

Azure AD DS offers alternatives to the need to create a VPN connection back to an on-premises AD DS environment or run and manage VMs in Azure to provide identity services. The following feature of Azure AD DS simplify deployment and management operations:

  • Simplified Deployment experience: Azure AD DS is enabled for your Azure AD tenant using a single wizard
  • Integrated with Azure AD: User accounts, group membership and credentials are automatically available from your Azure AD tenant.
  • NTLM and Kerboros Authentication: With support for NTLM and Kerboros authentication, you can deploy applications that rely on Windows-integrated authentication

Much like Azure AD, Azure AD DS can be used in a Hybrid environment to include integration with on-premises applications. Below is a video that goes into much more detail along with demo on Azure AD Domain Services!

I hope you enjoyed this blog! Keep an eye out on Twitter for #AzureSpringClean and stay tuned for much more amazing content this month!

Azure Back to School: Hybrid Identity, Hybrid Device and Hybrid Exchange — September 7, 2020

Azure Back to School: Hybrid Identity, Hybrid Device and Hybrid Exchange

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Salaam, Namaste, Ola and Hello!

Welcome to the 7th September instalment of the ‘Azure Back to school’ month. This is another great initiative setup by Dwayne Natwick (@DwayneNcloud) to share various topics with the community on all things Azure. My blog for this is around Azure Hybrid Identity, Hybrid Device and Hybrid Exchange. You can follow the whole month using the #AzureBacktoSchool on twitter and also on the following link: https://azurebacktoschool.tech

I have done a lot of projects in the last 12 months for customers where they are starting there cloud journey, and rather than going ‘all or nothing’, they are taking a hybrid approach and using on-premises services along side cloud services.

In this blog I am going to go discuss Azure Hybrid options available from a SaaS (Software as a Service) perspective and how best to configure them. The three main areas I touch on will be:

  • Hybrid Identity (Azure AD and Active Directory on-premises)
  • Hybrid Device (Intune and Group Policy)
  • Hybrid Exchange (Exchange Online and Exchange on-premises)

Hybrid Identity: Hybrid Identity is where the user objects are stored and managed in Active Directory on-premises and synchronised to Azure AD. To achieve hybrid identity with Azure AD, one of three authentication methods can be used, depending on your scenarios. The three methods are:

  • Password Hash Synchronisation
  • Pass-through Authentication
  • Federation

All three methods are configured using Azure AD Connect tool which is traditionally installed on a domain controller within the on-premises Infrastructure. Password Hash Synchronisation is an extension to the directory synchronisation feature implemented by Azure AD Connect sync. You can use this feature to sign in to Azure AD services like Office 365.

Azure Active Directory Pass through Authentication provides the same benefit to Password Hash Synchronisation, however you would use pass through authentication if you want to enforce your Active Directory on-premises (Group Policy) password policy onto your users. There are some key benefits to using pass through authentication:

  • Great user experience
  • Easy to deploy and administer for the IT team
  • Secure as no passwords are stored in the cloud, only on-premises
  • Can be highly available by installing multiple agents on premises

Federation is where two or more domains have established trust between them. The level of trust can vary but typically includes authentication and authorisation.

You can federate your on-premises environment with Azure AD and use this federation for authentication and authorisation. This sign-in method ensures that all user authentication occurs on-premises. This method allows administrators to implement more rigorous levels of access control. As you can see, all three methods share a common theme, which is that the identity details and authentication process is controlled by the on-premises part of the hybrid setup

Hybrid Device: I have found recently that a lot of businesses want to start their journey into the cloud by utilising the MDM service available in Azure, which is Intune. The main issue with this has been that traditionally Group Policy is embedded for a lot of businesses and they use this to ensure all corporate Windows based machines follow the same security guidelines.

Since Intune has come into the picture as a Cloud MDM platform, it has slowly started to develop features that are also available in Group policy, but unfortunately no where enough for Intune to replace it. This is where having Hybrid device management allows you to have the best of both worlds. You can continue to manage devices with Group policy but also take advantage of some of the great features in Intune.

This specific feature is known as ‘Hybrid Azure AD Join’. User Azure AD Hybrid joined devices if:

  • You have Win32 apps deployed to these devices that rely on Active Directory machine authentication
  • You want to continue to use Group Policy to manage device configuration
  • You want to continue to use existing imaging solutions to deploy and configure devices.
  • You must support down-level Windows 7 and 8.1 devices in addition to Windows 10

When setting up your Infrastructure for Hybrid Azure AD join you need to ensure you have configured Azure AD connect for Hybrid devices as well as configuring Group policies to add specific URLs to Intranet Zone assignments and a Group policy to enable automatic enrolment. You then need to ensure that the machines you wish to be Hybrid Azure AD Joined reside in the Organisational Unit you link the various Group policies to. For a full list of prerequisites, have a read of this link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/devices/hybrid-azuread-join-plan

Hybrid Exchange: In its standard default configuration there is no link between Exchange on premises and Exchange online. You cannot have mailboxes in both platforms using the same domain without some sort of Hybrid configuration.

A hybrid deployment enables the following features:

  • Secure mail routing between on-premises and Exchange Online organisations.
  • A unified global address list (GAL), also called a “shared address book.”
  • A single Outlook on the web URL for both the on-premises and Exchange Online organisations.
  • Mail routing with a shared domain namespace. For example, both on-premises and Exchange Online organisations use the @yourdomain.com SMTP domain.
  • Centralised mailbox management using the on-premises Exchange admin centre.

Some companies implement Exchange Hybrid when they are planning on migrating to Exchange Online from on premises Exchange via either a staged or cut-over migration method. A hybrid deployment involves several different services and components:

  • Exchange Servers
  • Office 365 subscription that includes Exchange online
  • Hybrid Exchange configuration wizard installed on-premises
  • Azure AD Authentication
  • Azure AD connect Synchronisation

A common mistake made when implementing Hybrid Exchange for migration purposes is that once the migration is completed you should decommission Exchange on premises. The reason this is a mistake is due to the fact that within this implementation you will have configured Azure AD synchronisation between Active Directory on premises and Azure AD, where the user objects stored in Active Directory are synchronised to the cloud.

In an on premises Exchange environment, Active Directory objects get a lot of information from Exchange servers, and in turn with the AD synchronisation process this is then sent to the identity objects in the cloud. If you decommission all your Exchange servers on premises, this automatically removes all Exchange attributes from the Active Directory account, which in turn will synchronise with Azure AD accounts which will have a massive impact on your email service. Therefore Microsoft recommend you should have at least one Exchange Server that stays on premises in a Hybrid setup.

Big thank you to everyone contributing this month and another big thanks to Dwayne for all his hard work putting this together.

Hope you find this helpful, if you would like any more information feel free to tweet me @shabazdarr or ask a question in the comments section below! Until next time, ‘IamITGeek’ over and out!

Using MS Teams with on-premises Exchange — March 9, 2020

Using MS Teams with on-premises Exchange

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Salaam, Namaste, Ola and Hello!

I have been working with a lot of customers in recent months who have a large on premises footprint but want to start the journey into using cloud services. In my experience, the first step tends to be migrating email services to Exchange online which gives the business the start of a new Hybrid Infrastructure.

Once users start adopting Exchange online features, one of the services that soon follow is Microsoft Teams and today I am going to detail a recent experience I had with a customer who has a massive Virtual Environment which includes a multi server Exchange on premises Org. They were looking to start their Cloud/Hybrid journey, however rather than Exchange Online, they wanted to look at integrating Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a cloud native app so the full feature set is supported when you have an Exchange Online mailbox. The scenario I had was an existing Exchange 2013 on premises org on the latest CU with no Microsoft 365 tenant and a customer wanting to look at adopting Teams for meeting rooms and collaboration.

Understand pre-requisites. We know what the end game is: Utilise Microsoft Teams and integrate this in a Hybrid environment. Knowing this, the next step is to document the pre-requisites which will allow us to get to that end goal, as this then helps understand our step by step process. The following are pre-requisites for integrating and using Microsoft Teams functionality in a hybrid environment:

  • Exchange 2016 Exchange Server (with CU 15 as a minimum)
  • Hybrid Exchange configured
  • Microsoft 365 tenant with relevant licenses
  • Hybrid Identity (identity object in Active Directory on premises and Azure AD)

As I mentioned earlier, the existing Exchange Org was 2013 so we needed to create a new Exchange 2016 Exchange Server into the existing Org and ensure it had CU 15 at least. At this stage the plan was to only migrate the internal IT Team to the new server to allow testing before rolling out Teams to the wider user groups. For full instructions and understanding on how to install Exchange 2016 I would recommend the following article: https://practical365.com/exchange-server/installing-exchange-server-2016/

Once we had the Exchange 2016 server integrated into the existing Exchange Org we needed to create and configure the Microsoft 365 tenant. Working for a MSP came in handy as we were able to provision this via the CSP platform and get tenant up and working fairly quickly. For full instructions and understanding on how to configure a Microsoft 365 tenant I would recommend the following article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/education/deploy/create-your-office-365-tenant . It does not cover the CSP element but does explain how to configure the.

We now have a working Microsoft 365 tenant and an on premises Exchange Org with a 2016 CU 15 server. We now needed to create the Hybrid configuration which in this case is both Identity and Exchange Hybrid.

To create the identity Hybrid we installed and configured Azure AD connect on one of the existing on premises domain controllers. I would recommend the following article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/set-up-directory-synchronization . In this scenario we wanted ‘Password Hash Synchronisation and to enable Exchange Hybrid option in the utility.

Once the relevant identities were synchronising between Active Directory on premises and Azure AD we could install and configure the Hybrid Exchange wizard. This needed to be installed on the Exchange 2016 server and also required some public DNS record creations. I would recommend the following article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/hybrid-deployment/deploy-hybrid. One of the important requirements of using Teams in a Hybrid environment is ensuring OAuth authentication is configured and working, and with Exchange 2016 the Hybrid Exchange wizard automatically configures this.

Once the above configuration was completed and in place we were able to deploy Microsoft Teams to a device and login with Office 365 credentials (synchronised with on premises Active Directory). This then allowed the end user to use the Teams functionality like Calendar, meeting room licenses and other collaboration available in the app. The one caveat to this is that the users mailbox needed to be on the Exchange 2016 database to make use of Microsoft Teams fully.

I hope you have enjoyed this short blog. The main purpose of it is to just share a recent experience I have had in the hope if you come across a similar scenario that it might help you! Please feel free to leave a comment, but until next time IamITGeek over and out!!