It is not every day I need to add users in bulk to Active Directory, but when I do, I usually need to write a script that can be quiet time-consuming. It just so happened that I came across a tool to make this process a little easier today. Its name is ADUC Tool, and it allows you to import users from a CSV file or build them based on pre-configured settings. The tool is based in PowerShell, but it has a GUI. While this is a no-frills option, it is free and is very customizable for any organization.

Check it out. 

With each new release of Windows, we continue to find more features and functions that Microsoft has rolled into the new build. Some of them are very welcomed and some are a little misunderstood or mildly annoying.

Would you have guessed that unstructured data is growing at a rate much higher than structured data?  By 2020, IDC estimates that 80% of a typical businesses data will be unstructured.  

When cryptoware attacks your organization, it is often too late to do anything about it -
ransomware deploys incredibly fast. Once on a machine, it can take just minutes or even seconds to encrypt files and make them inaccessible. If the machine has a shared network drive, those files can be encrypted, too. What do security analysts suggest these days? Plan, Pray or Pay.

True Cybersecurity by Kaspersky Lab

2017 marks Kaspersky Lab’s sixth year as a “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Looking into 2017, I am heading into the year championing the latest technology trends.  Avoiding the hype is always a challenge in our industry, as there are a lot of great technology ideas out there, but few of them are actually executed on properly.  My crystal ball tells me that the below trends are going to be top of mind in 2017.

I was recently working with a customer on ADFS claims rules and thought to share the experience of how to make some simple customizations within ADFS to lockdown authentication to Office 365 services, in this case. The requirement was that if the authentication connection came from an External IP not listed (any of their many remote locations), then block the connection UNLESS you are part of a specific AD group.

The datacenter transition is AGAIN among us.  Years ago, it was moving from big iron (datacenter V1) to commodity X86 servers to standardize and give people the freedom of operating system choice.  Soon after, server virtualization took the world by storm.  To match the compute virtualization craze, storage virtualization and automated tiering simplified our storage lives.  In our industry, we really look at the migration from a physical to virtualized datacenter as datacenter V2.