Enterprise labs, design patterns
Microsoft Foundry is the renamed Azure AI Foundry: one Azure resource with projects. The resource is free; what bills while idle is search, private networking, firewalls and forgotten fine-tunes. Real UK South prices and where it sits in a landing zone.
Entra Cloud Sync is Microsoft’s direction for syncing on-prem AD to Entra ID, but devices, scale, sync rules and AD FS can still pin you to Connect. Five questions that decide it, the 7 April 2027 Connect deadline and its auto-upgrade trap, and the migration gotchas.
Entra Connect Sync vs Entra Cloud Sync in 2026: which one, and the April 2027 deadline Read More »
MFA was built on something you have, know and are. AI agents have, know and are none of it, yet they act with your identity. Here’s why that breaks authentication.
You Can’t MFA an AI Agent Read More »
AI agents don’t need to borrow your credentials. Entra Agent ID, SPIFFE and five open-source Microsoft projects give agents their own identity. Here’s the toolbox.
The Agent Identity Toolbox: Stop Your AI Agents Signing In as You Read More »
We spent a decade teaching users never to approve a prompt they didn’t start. AI agents make unprompted prompts routine. Here’s the attack vector nobody sees coming.
The Approval Reflex: When Your Agent Triggers Your MFA Read More »
Most service desks are measured on how fast they close tickets and never on how few arrive. Here is the loop that keeps the queue full, and the diagnostic that shows which half of it should not exist.
Your Ticket Volume Is a Defect List, Not Demand Read More »
Every organisation has a joiners, movers and leavers process. Almost none of them run all three legs. The joiner leg gets done well, because somebody is standing in reception on Monday morning unable to work, and that failure is loud, immediate and embarrassing. The leaver leg gets done adequately, because HR chases it, because there
Joiners, Movers and Leavers: Why Movers Break Your Permission Model Read More »
Every competent person running a Microsoft estate already knows the permissions are wrong. They do not need a tool to tell them that. Ask anyone who has administered SharePoint for more than a couple of years whether there is content in the tenant reachable by people who have no business reaching it, and you will
Agent Access and the Permissions You Forgot You Granted Read More »
Updated 1 October 2026: the growth restrictions are now in force, and the series list and retirement dates below follow Microsoft Learn’s current retirement and capacity restrictions page. In July 2026 Azure emailed subscription owners about older VM series. The email waves a comfortable 2028 retirement date at you, so most people archived it and
Azure Has Put Your Old VMs on the Clock: How to Find Out If You’re Affected Read More »
When should you create a new Azure subscription versus a new resource group – and why “more subscriptions” stopped being a bad idea. A cloud architect’s decision guide, with the history of what changed.
Azure Subscription vs Resource Group: A Decision Guide (2026) Read More »
