How to Manage Your Azure AD and Office 365

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our webinar. How to manage your Azure ID and office 365. Get a trip on your environment. Even in the cloud auditing, reporting management automation in shortcomings of native tools. This webinar is supported by knowledge world. The speakers today are me Martin Ko around the founder and principal Analyst at copy a Cole and Charles McDonald. We VP of technology at knowledge world, before we start some general information and some housekeeping information, and then we will directly dive into the agenda. Copy. A call is an Analyst company.

We are providing enterprise it research advisory services, decisions, support, networking for it professionals. So our research services, our advisory services suppose end user organizations and vendors. And through our events amongst our events, there's our flagship event, the European identity and cloud conference, which will have its 10th and anniversary.

This year, it'll be held May 10th to 13th and Munich, and there's the digital finals world, which we will run in September this year in Frankfurt to terminate the letter event. And we'll focus on topics around FinTech, blockchain and all that stuff. While the European identity conference focus, identity cloud and all the related topics of information, security, governance, and digital transformation, some guidelines for the webinar, you are muted centrally you, so you don't have to mute or unmute yourself. We control these features.

We've all record the webinar and the podcast recording will be available tomorrow. There will be a Q and a session at the end. So you can answer questions, time using the questions to go to webinar control panel. But usually we pick these questions at the end. Sometimes we answer questions in between as a side note, the slide X also will be available. The slide X also will be available for download. So you don't have to care about this. We will send them to you. So this is let's have a look at the agenda. The first part will be done by me.

I will do a presentation around requirements for and benefits of managing hybrid infrastructures, centrally forcing a holistic approach on access governance. In the second part, and Charles McDonald will talk about implementing governance for hybrid infrastructures and getting a grip on Azure active directory and office 365. So we will focus on this. I would say already reality of many, many organizations having both in place. They still have clearly an active directory on premise.

There's some stuff running office wise on premise, and there's a lot of active directory office, 365 and other stuff happening in the cloud. And then finally we will do the key data session. So that's our third part of this presentation. And all this sort of happens in the context of what we quite a while ago called the computing TRICA. So the computing TRICA, it's something that is already a reality. We have basically three types of evolution, which are, which we are facing here. One is cloud computing.

So the change in the deployment models, we have social computings, which are the user populations. And we have mobile computing, which are the device types. And so what we see is we see more and more types of things happening in the cloud. So we see the move from on-premise to observing private cloud and public cloud, which is already reality. We see this area of social. Computings where we move from internal users to totally different groups of users we have to deal with. And we have this mobile computing part.

And when we look at this cloud part and what is happening here, we have to manage different environments. We have to manage hybrid environments. So this is sort of the underlying foundation of what is happening here. And for all these areas, basically we must solve. And regardless of whether something runs on premise around the cloud, we must solve some challenges. And these challenges include the administration part, the authentication part, the authorization part on the auditing part.

So, so you speak very traditional for a, we have an identity and access management, administrative users. So managing identities, authenticating them, also science them, authorizing them and auditing them. This is something we have to solve in a well, so that and consistent. So we need to do this for all types of users, all the devices, and in particular, we need to do it for all deployment models. We need to move forward to a situation where we are able to handle all this in a consistent or meaningful way for all deployment models we use.

And this is, I think one of the big challenges because we are somewhat okay. I would phrase it for our premise world, but we are clearly facing challenges when it comes to the cloud world. So probably we, we use more cloud service that we're able to really manage most scenarios in most organizations today. And we need to find way, find, you need to find ways to better manage that. So what is this about? This is about getting a CRI and all what happens here. So we go back, so to speak a little bit traditionally.

So we had the user accessing the client applications from inside frequently sort of proprietary access. And we had web applications, Federation came in and right now we are seeing more and more types of also external users accessing it, whatever we have here. And in particular, also cloud services, we need to manage the access to the cloud services. We need to get a grip on that environment. We need to be able to support us as well, regardless of how we do it.

If finally, if it's Federation or research, which is not ideal, a local management of users and the access of these applications, but all this environment is something we need to manage. And regardless of the wise, so in fact, what we are facing, so to speak from a management administration perspective is that we are moving to reward a world frequently of more silos, not less. So we have more and frequently to some extent proprietary environments, we need to be able to manage.

And so with the clouds, things are not getting simpler, at least not for this very long transition period from pure premise to pure cloud, but they're getting more complex because we have another level of complexity. We have less Cris, less access to these environments. We have sometimes different ways to handle them. We might have both the on premise and the cloud word. So things are getting more complex and we need to find ways to solve that. This is the challenge we are facing today. And here we need to, to find ways to solve this.

So what we need to do is we need to balance the needs of security and compliance on one hand versus agility and cloud. So we have our core. We need to be able to, to manage our identities. We need to be able to, to, to provide additional services. What are the administrators allowed to do our syndication access Federation? And we need to scale what we have out to the cloud to move to the social world. We need to, to do this thing, to extend this thing to our bigger world. We need tools that help us prodding this scale out to support the new types of environments we have to manage.

And within that world, then again, it's not only about a high level, big identity access management story. So many of you will be probably familiar with, or we have this identity provisioning tool. It helps us managing the users across the services that might even have a cloud connector for whatever Azure idea of it, 365 or Salesforce com or name it. You might even have some access governance here, but that still is the challenge of that.

Something we know on premise as well, the challenge of managing the system level, and this is one of my five favorite slides because it shows the still rightly underestimated challenge. So even when we are good at implementing an overarching identity and access management, so across the systems, we have some management, maybe even of roles, we have to staff in place. We are good in provisioning users. We have good in granting them access. We are even good in maybe revoking access. Then still the problem is that we have an underlying frequently hierarchical structures and systems.

For instance, in the active directory, if you look at our traditional on premise directory, we have the active directory global groups. We have local groups, we might have a complex nest structure of entitlements. If you look at SharePoint, things don't get easier or simpler. SharePoint is a very complex piece TA when it comes to access controls. So we have obviously very massive challenges in that area, and we need to find ways to solve that. And when we transform this challenge to the world of cloud, we trust sort of so to speak at another set of systems.

So we have our idea, our SharePoint assistance, who might have some, some control in our own premise environment. But right now we have SharePoint on office 365. We have Azure ID, we have whatever else and we add sort of first assistance to list below. And then we need something which provides us inside into the details of the system, which standard identity provisioning does not do. So we need to add the capability of managing this consistently as the system level, I ideally cross the system at another capability.

So this is you might call it entitlement and access governance, the Analyst Analyst missing, sorry for that. We need to add new capabilities. And so the brave new world in fact is when we look at the reality, the organization start was, was Microsoft active directory and Microsoft office, something most organizations have in place. So if you look at the market, share Microsoft task was ad's office. It's very huge. We see many, many organizations moving to office 365, and it's very interesting to observe.

So even in, let's say the, the countries which are considered being a little bit more reluctant regarding the move to such as Germany, where I come from, even there, we see many even very large organizations already having made the shift from in particular exchange to office 365, sometimes also from other platforms to office 365. So we see a clear momentum here, which automatically means once you have office 365 exchange share, Porwal all this stuff. You also have Azure active directory because it's the foundation for office 365.

So when doing the shift, you automatically land up with something new. You have to solve the integration of Azure ad on your, on premise ad for SSO cetera, various ways to do it.

Yeah, quite a big number of options, but still it means you have different environments to manage. You need to get a CRI in all of these. You might rely on you while you add a functionality of Azure ad then where you have a lot of new features around that. And at the end, you, you might say, I do a lot in the, the cloud space, but still hybrid ad where you still have some on premise. Some in the cloud and even hybrid office will remain relative for quite a while for most organizations. So we need to get a crit. We need to manage this.

This is what we really need to do step by step by understanding this evolution and getting ready to manage this. So what we really need is we need one management Azure ad on premise, ADR, not this P environment nor are on premise SharePoint, office 365 SharePoint nor anything else. And clearly we need also something which helps us to cover different types of cloud services in a consistent way. So we need to implement a consistent management access governance across booths on premise and cloud environment.

And this is where, where I want to hand over to Charles McDonald for his part of the presentation. So I will unmute him and make him the moderator. So he will go more into detail and show how you could do this, what you can do here, how this works potentially. And this is right now, the second part of the presentation. So knowledgeable what we are, we're basically leading for audit, reporting and learning and management in the Microsoft ecosystem for their platforms like office 365 and Azure ad.

We launched at Microsoft dig ignite about the middle of last year after roughly two years of research and development for 100% SA based solution. And we're, we're built entirely on top of Microsoft Azure. So as Microsoft Azure provides new features and new functionality, we get to take advantage of that.

We get to scale out as they scale out and, and all the features that they provide, we get to take advantage of we're a connector based to technology, which means that any new platforms that Microsoft puts out or any, any company out there of any interest to us, we can put a connector together for and provide the same four pillars of, of management, the auditing, reporting, learning, and management for those different platforms, Just see here. So what do we have? We have a holistic approach to the cloud where we do the alert, audit report and manage.

So for the auditing we gain full, we allow the customer to gain full visibility and administrator and user activities and let them know who did what, when they did it, where they did it across the office, 360 fived environments with a very simple interface to the, to that data alerts. Our, our platform provides visibility into unstructured data and allows us to provide alerts for, for the customers on any kind of misuse.

It might be going on in those, in those environments reporting again, kind of ties in with the auditing where we allow the customer access to, to all the data they have available to them through office 365 Azure ad. And we do that with a whole bunch of built-in reports, roughly 200 plus reports for things like mailbox, traffic, group, group details, user details, anything that's in office 365 Azure ad we have reports for, and then management. What we do as well with the, with the platform is allow people to come in and do the, the three main things.

We just talked about auto alert and report, but also allow them to manage those 365 NAD environments all from within the knowledge of all platform. There's no need to jump around to two or three different tools to go off and do, you know, some sort of action based on what they see in a report or get an alert on. They can do it right from right from within our, our single platform.

Again, the architecture, we just kind of went over all that, but what we have now, we have exchange in office 365 connector. We have a Dropbox and a box connector currently in, in prototype. We have one drive connector. Salesforce is on the pipeline as well. We store data using the big data technology.

If, if people are familiar with that, it makes sense in terms of the reporting and the analytics and we're multitenant, which means, you know, customer can come in and have X number of organizations under, under that. So level of management and not have to worry about you creating one for everybody going through the different portals, different logins and whatnot. We provide a single source for all the different levels of, of organizations.

So the main question we get is, do we, do we really need third party solution for what we're, what we're looking at in terms of managing office 365 and Azure ad and the, and the honest answer is that not necessarily. And by that, I mean, if you're a small enough customer, 10, 15, 20 users, then something like the knowledgeable platform might be overkill.

I'm not saying it is even customers that size can get very good value out of things like the reporting and the auditing, but we really become more interesting to customers in the 15 above range where multilevel admins are, are involved in the day to day management, the day to day operations of the business, things like that. Once we get up into the, into the big customers, 10,000, 20,000 hundred thousand users, we become really interesting.

We, we that's where the true value in something like the SA SA based platform for these different technologies, like 365 and Azure ad and the single roll up for all the different pillars of day to day operations becomes, becomes important. So again, consider your requirements. What are your compliance mandates? What kind of detail do you need out the out the app, the app being 365 ad, and how quickly do you need access to your data? So with five common requirements that we, that we normally see are simplified delegation auditing.

So to make it easy to delegate out who can do what in the environment and what is happening when they do those operations. So the auditing against delegated actions to be able to do automation with scripting, technically with office 365 ad, if you know PowerShell and you're trusted enough in the, in the hierarchy for your company to run the PowerShell commands against office 365 ad, you can do it. A lot of people find it's not easy to maintain, not easy to track, not easy to find out what they did historically.

So again, this is where a platform where like knowledge fault, where we track every single part of the actions that are being taken. Who's taking them, what objects are taking them on, what parameters are they setting on those objects or, or systems in the 365 Azure ad? We audit all that. We keep track of it for as long as someone's a customer. So at any point, someone can come in and say, well, what happened to my distribution list group that has 10 new members, we can easily use our audit logs to figure out who did it when they did it.

And what other actions would've been taken around that time, flexible branding. When, when you come into the Porwal, it's branded for the, the knowledge vault, all the reports are branded knowledge vault with the knowledge vault design colors, but as a customer, they're able to use their own logo, use their own colors for reports or anything that reports, alerts and whatnot that are gonna get sent out on behalf of, of knowledge vault.

So things like when you subscribe to report general report output would have the branding for, for a customer if they prefer to, to use their own and then live and historical analysis. Again, this falls back into the auditing and the reporting where historically we can take any memo data that, that the customer has. So if they subscribe on January 1st, 2014, and two years later, they need to see that data. They have access to it. There's no retention period in terms of what we collect and how we store it. It's basically for the life of, of the customer subscription.

So the common use case assessment of migration. So these are the four different things, assessment of migration, security, audit, and compliance, audit, and learning and management and government. So these are the four things that typically happen in, in a run of a business over, over its lifetime. So assessment and migration would be typically at the, at the onset of the, of the deployment. So we can help ensure project success by setting and monitoring, secure configs and, and user activities. And we can track and report on user adoption by org department or, or business unit.

Again, these are new terminologies in terms of the, of the cloud infrastructure, but the adoption of organization direct and business unit. But this is what we help with at the, at the initial stages for, for migration. So once we're up and running security audit and compliance, we streamline the processes and help reduce costs.

And we automate those compliance activities of again, over 300 reports and, and alert templates, we identify an alert and report on user and admin activity with unparalleled granularity is what I refer to just in the last slide there, where yes, you can run PowerShell and you can do some of the actions. Well, you can do all the actions, not, not in the simple one click like you can with our Porwal, but you can do it, but then you lose the, the ability to quickly and easily figure out who did it when they did it and what they, what they operate on.

And this is what we provide from the, from the base of the platform. So we audit configurations and activities to enforce internal, external compliance, again, same idea around what's happening on the 365 Azure ad environments. And who's making those changes.

Again, we, we track all that, and it's not just through our Porwal that we track all that, any changes that are made through through the system itself, if someone's running para show in the back, and we do track all of that, all of that information make it available through our, through our internal audit reports.

So we can, the management and governance we manage enforce and automate 365 ad tasks using geographical libraries is what I, we just went over again, just on the, in terms of quickly and easily performing tasks about needing to know PowerShell, without needing to know what's happening under the covers without having to ho together two or three different actions to do a single task, that that's usually generic enough that it should be rolled up. So we simplify time consuming and repetitive processes to help improve efficiencies and service support. So assessment of migration.

So we have on-prem exchange inventory and reporting the office 365 years of migration tracking and, and trending. So again, that's the historical stuff over the life of a migration and ones. They're up there to see what the, the trending is, is looking like. So we can set monitor secured configurations, we setting the appropriate access and audit levels along the way, so that there's no window where someone's migrated up, can do actions before we have auditing turned on. We take care of all that under the covers, we can track and report in user adoption.

Again, we refer to that already, or department or business unit. We can monitor license usage and allocation optimize associated costs. So in our dashboard, which you'll see when we get to the demo, we get to see very, very quickly. Once you first get in how many licenses you have and how many are utilized fairly good for, for helping to optimize those costs that you might be incurring. Then we can automate the status reports and alert on suspicious suspect activities.

And this will be the subscription to reports to get a report email to, to your inbox every morning, based on you might, you might be interested in message track. You might be interested in any deals that are changing and the same for the alerts. So more real time than getting, getting a report, but both are both are available to any customer. So we can identify user admin activities. We audit config changes, security changes, tracking logs, audit logs. We can check compliance with organization policies.

So we have a bunch of compliance reports that can be run at any time against the data that we collect in store for the customers. And that'd be for auditing purposes. We verify auditing permission and configuration to make sure nothing's changing in environment. That's going to allow people to do suspect activities. Things like let's turn off mailbox auditing.

You know, we get, we can verify that we can notify on that and make sure the changes aren't happening now respond, audit requesting minutes and not days. So because we have all the data available because we store it in long-term storage. We process it into our Cuba on a monthly basis. When we want to go off and do an auto request, it's basically as quick as it's clicking through the button and getting the data back in the view, there's no need to purge or post, sorry, pull it out of a subsequent system, bring it in and do a report. We have it right away.

We can confidently manage access and permissions. We enforce usage policies and we can help automate forensic activities so we can track tens and usage over time.

And again, this is for more for the management of governance. This is as your, as your operation is running, your organization is running. We can defend service level agreements. We can boost operational efficiency and we help reduce repetitive manual tasks. All right. So if you want ready to jump into demo, Martin? Yes. Go ahead.

I'm gonna, okay. Yeah. I'll just run through then. Okay. So what we're looking at here is the main Porwal.

So once, once you've signed up is a customer and configure your connector to go off and allow us to get the data that, that we need to show for the reporting, the alerting and whatnot. This is the main view that that comes in. So this is the first dashboard that, that you're gonna have access to shows us the list of how many auto reports, the alert templates that we have. How many of the alert templates are enabled? How many reports we have, what do we have subscriptions to and management actions for the different systems?

So in this case here, we have SharePoint office 365 Azure ad underneath that we have a little quick search, so I can come in and very quickly say, I wanna see what Rob did over the last, over the last seven days. So we can very quickly within this main dashboard, do a quick run Quick, always relative. So we'll just let this go. There's a lot of data right now is our, this is our test environment for the most part. So we come through, we see that Rob did fold. Mines means he opened up a folder.

We get to see what it was when it changed or sorry, when the action happened, any, any actions that he would've taken over over that same timeframe, the last seven days would show up here. So if you made changes, the distribution groups and whatnot, that's what we'd end up seeing. So here we get to see just a quick overview of what's happening in the environment. So we're collecting on 27, uses 24 mailboxes.

Again, all these are performing properly. We're not seeing any years along the way, just gives you an overview of what's happening in, on the back end of our system. In case you're looking for data that may not be there. 365 license is the license utilization I was referring to earlier. So we have plan E four, we've got the E one plan 16 out of the 18 are, are used. Just stuff like that. Very quick view into, into what's happening there down below, we have some change, some reports in terms of what's happening in the, in the environment.

So forwarding and what kind of activity do we have when we saw people forwarding emails, mailbox permission did to change permission, same ideated access, how many mailboxes were added to the environment or change the environment that allowed for unaudited access? That's an important one for things like determining, if mailbox is shared, delegate out to someone and we don't have auditing turned on, we being the customer, we can't do any auditing in terms of what they're doing. So they could be going in their deleting messages.

They could be forwarding messages, whatnot, and we wouldn't be able to track that without the, the on audited access turned on. That gives you a nice little view into what that is. So the first part is always always reporting. So if we jump into, into the reporting, we get a list of all the different categories and the, and the pillars that we, that we hit here. So we have office 365 exchange Dropbox, which is in preview. We have ad with the, with a bunch of reports and all this stuff here. So if we come down to something like the traffic reports either always interesting for, for customers.

So if we come into traffic, we can say, show me the email traffic by mailbox. Very quickly. We can jump down in here and we can see how many were sent, how many received, who the received sent, what the counts were. We can drill down into, you know, I'll come down into this one here and we can see who we sent it to what date and time it was. What was the size of it? Whatnot all very quickly from, from a couple of clicks, you have access to that data. All these reports as well can be subscribed to.

So if you find a report that of interest, go in, subscribe to it, tell what date and time, what format you want the report to be delivered in. And, and then every morning, every day, whatever time you're, you're checking your mail, you'll get those, those reports delivered to you. Alerts very similar to technology to the, to the reporting, just on a more real time basis, where we can come in and, and define different types of alerts that are gonna happen against the office 365, the exchange Azure ad environments.

And, and we've, we've categorized some of them as the high. Some of them is medium. Some of them is low. You can do custom ones as well, where there's certain operations, that, that when they happen in your environment or, or categorize as a high alert, you may wanna get notified of that immediately, as opposed to, to waiting for a report to run. So in this case, here's things like litigation hold being enabled or disabled or mailbox a mail user was deleted.

These are all categorized as high because they have a definite impact in things like auditing auditing requirements, in terms of the litigation or people not being able to get mail or finding out what happened to their account, if their, their accounts are deleted. And again, all these can be configured to, to trigger against whatever subset of data that you're looking for. So you can set up for a particular user particular group, or just let it run against all of them.

It really doesn't matter in the back end, just as long as the, the filter is something that, that applies with the environment. So the auditing, again, auditing is a more, more special type of reporting.

If, if you wanna think of it that way, where the auditing goes and, and focuses solely on the changes that were happening in the environment, the reporting is, is more, how is the operation running? So what kind of mail is being sent? What kind of groups are being, being used and what whatnot, the 365, the Azure ad and whatnot, auditing is more what's happening to those objects. What's how are things being, being done in the system?

So in 365, we can come in and take a look at, and again, this, this may not have any, any good data here because of the, yeah, this one here's not gonna happen, but the, what would happen in, in a real environment with a bunch of changes happening against, against objects, you'd see all the different, the different actions that were taken in the environment who made them basically the, the same thing we saw in that quick, quick view up above. So in the management, this here is where we would do the actions against, against the actual system.

So in here we see, we can do mailbox forwarding, remove mailbox forwarding. I'm not gonna read all these, but create shared mailbox. We can convert a mailbox. We can modify group membership. These are all the actions that typically, if you're gonna be doing this on through office 365, Porwal, some of them have exposed up as a high level dialogue form, or fill in the data, go off and create.

But a lot of these, most of them actually you'd have to run some sort of PowerShell script that you either copy off from the web modify for your environment and, and run that way, or can use something like the knowledge, all platform to come in and do the, do the same thing with the very simple, let me just see if I can get one. That's not gonna cause any grief here. I do modified group so I can pick, I can tell you, so here I can come and I can pick my user. I'm not gonna actually do the, do the action here. I don't think, but so we, two steps.

We picked the user, picked the groups that he wants to be, that we wanted to be a part of. I can submit it and it's gonna go off. And now we see complete, the change of request have been successfully applied. So we just went and added Chuck to the, to the dev group.

Again, very simple, very, very clear as to what's happening, what's going on and provide these same sort of actions, the same wizard based approach for all the different systems that we have today, which are the Azure ad 365 in the SharePoint. One. Now the thing with the management actions as well is if we, if we think back to a 365 ad, if you want people to run, run actions against those, you basically grant them PowerShell access to, to those, to those environments. Then really whatever they wanna do at that point, they have the, they have the actions or they, sorry.

They have the words to run the PowerShell. They can put whatever script they want in that power sh go off on it. You're basically trusting them with the keys to the kingdom, with that access, with the power, sorry, with the knowledgeable platform, we provide a layer on top of that, where we can delegate out access to some of the actions here, or we can give them all the actions. We can give them some for ad, but none for office 365, what have you all using our, our delegation model?

So if we come in, we can come in and we can say, let's add someone and I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to pick myself. I'm just gonna, I won't actually commit this. Let's do Nick again. So doing that now we pick the action. So if I wanna, I can delegate all of the management actions to, to Nick, or I can come in and just pick a subset. So I could say, I only, I don't want him to do create new user. I don't want him to delete any new users and I don't wanna do anything with groups let's say, and I can go through.

And then once we have the scope down to what we want Nick, to be able to run, then that's all he's going to be able to do. So when he comes in, the only thing he's gonna be able to do with a set of actions that we've delegated, doesn't matter what else he does. What else we've granted him in terms of managing what he can run. We've delegated out only the ability to do the, the things that we want. So he can't run a script that goes off and does anything else in the environment.

He can't do anything nefarious in terms of, or by accident something that's gonna bring the, bring the org down in terms of deleting the wrong mailboxes. It's scoped exactly what his, his job duties duties entail. So quickly just go into the branding as well. So if we come down to reports into configuration, this is where we can pick, pick or define any kind of branding for, for that. A customer would want, you can place a header, go off, pick whichever one you want, change the colors, submit it, boom.

And at that point, any reports or anything that that gets generated on, on behalf of knowledgeable for the customer would use that branding. And that is it for the demo. So I'll just minimize that. And that is it from my end. Thank you, Charles. And that's brings us to the Q a session. So it's time for all the, to Japan to raise their questions so that we can go through them. And I already have some questions in front of me.

So, Chuck, what, what got you interested in developing this platform? This extensible platform for cloud applications?

Well, about, about four or five years ago, I joined up with Christian Athal. Who's a CEO at knowledge vault and, and we worked at a company called Blackbird Blackbird group incorporated. And what we did at the time was we focused solely on, well, at the beginning, again, reporting and auditing for active directory. And at that time active directory was on-prem it wasn't, there was no, no future in terms of, you know, nothing on the roadmap, really in terms of out in the cloud or any kind of management like that.

So we spent two and a half, three years working on, on the black Blackbird platform at the time it was called Blackbird management server, I think, which was a very similar backend technology as what we see at knowledge vault here, where we had, again, a connector based model at the time, it was called modules where we could go off and do full reporting on, on ad exchange. We did backup restore for ad things like that.

So when, when, when we sold that company, we sold that company, I think at the end of 2012 to, was it, I think it was beyond trust. I took a little bit of time off Christian went and started up knowledge vault. We kept in touch over over the years, obviously.

And then as I think it was the summer, last year I approached by, we started talking about coming on board and I was looking at the technology and, and seeing the similarities to what we did with, with Blackbird, seeing the, the opportunities in front of it, for, for the stuff coming from Microsoft, the office 365, the ID and the importance that that customers are seeing and moving to that, and really couldn't say no had had to come on board to, to see what it was all about. Okay. So another question I have here is how are you interacting with these cloud platforms?

So what is the way way to interact and, and how do you also ensure that it remains compatible and the cloud service provider makes changes, etcetera. Yeah. Okay.

So again, with, with the, with the slideshow that went through what we are as a connector based platform. So we already a connector that sits between what you see in our, our view and all the reports, all the audit, all the alerting. And it sits between that and the end system, which would be 365 ad.

So, and is a neat thing with the cloud. If, if Microsoft updates office 365, it basically gets updated for everybody.

So when, and if that happens, we make changes or we make additions to, to our connector. That takes that data normalizes what our views gonna look like. And for the most part, we're, we're gonna get it seamlessly if they had new feature or, or something that new, new platform that we're interested in, then we either run new connector or we put the new feature support in, you know, actions, alerts, reporting, whatnot. And we just render that up in the UI. So it's definitely, it's definitely forward thinking in terms of that.

And, you know, we never really have to worry about unless, unless they completely change the entire back and about how to get data, we're, we're always gonna be safe. Okay. So another question which came trust in us, what is the difference between the office risks five dashboard and the, or Azure dashboard? Or are there any differences or is it the same?

No, the dashboards for, for those would be specific to those types of environments. So only 365 would be more, more email based in terms of what, what information gets rolled up in the dashboards, where the Azure rate would be more, you know, object based and group based and, and kind of infrastructure based based views and what the, what the dashboards are rendering up. Okay. Another question I received here is do you provide segregation of duties, capabilities for support each, between the management for system teams and auditing and the it security team?

Yep, absolutely. There's a, there's a concept in the, when, when you invite a user to, to your organization, there's a, there's a section where you can define what role they have, you select, what role they want. So you can make them an organization user, which means they can do everything in the, in the organization. You can say that they're only a management action user, which means they can only run a delegate set of actions. There's a report user and a audit user where you can say they can only run reports or audit views, things like that. It's granular down to that level. Okay.

Another question, where are you hosting your data center? We host a data right now. Currently we host in the, in the us, and we also have one in the Netherlands for the customers over, over in the UK that, that are required by law to, to keep the data off of, off of us sites. And the second half of this year, I believe we're also opening or, or supporting the, the Germany data centers. And these are your own data centers or Azure or Amazon They're Azure. Yeah. These are all Azure data centers. This is all hosted by Microsoft. Yeah.

Everything that we do is stored with the, with the Microsoft platform. So the Azure, all our table storage, all those services are, are, are the ones hosted by Microsoft.

So, so when collecting data, how do you adhere to the strict privacy laws in Europe? And in particular in Germany, notably, there are other European countries which have stricter laws in Germany, but I think termin commonly is considered being the ones with the most strict laws. So how do you adhere to this privacy loss over here or, Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's two parts.

So one is, we're the data stored, which I would kind of answered where if we, we can keep the data stored, basically if there's a data center that a customer has to go to then, and as long as Azure Microsoft has has a data center in that section, we're done, we're done for that part. The second part to that is there's a lot of customers that have security requirements where things like personal information addresses, home phone numbers can't be stored.

So when we go off and collect the data, there's when, when through the wizard based configuration, we can, we can scope out certain piece of information that we'll never collect. We won't even look at that information or store it away for, for any of these systems. So if someone doesn't want phone numbers put in, ever they go in, they can filter that out. And it doesn't matter how we try to get is not gonna, it's gonna be an exclusion regardless. We don't even, we don't even look at the data. Hmm. Okay. Another question I just received.

Are you doing, or do you maybe already have MFAs or multifactor factor indication somewhere in the future? Two factors. Yeah. There's two factor indication right now. We're going through a POC of one customer where we've gone through the whole process of setting that up and, and getting it going. And there there's no issues with it. Okay. Does the solution support the hybrid deployment or, and if so, how, or is it trust cloud based deployment? It currently it's, it's Mo sorry, mainly cloud based, but we do have hybrid connectors for exchange and which is already out there.

Something people can download, install, go from, go from the ground up with that. We have Azure, sorry. On-prem ad connector right now in, in testing.

Not, not generally available just yet, but it is, it is on the, on the roadmap for releases here. Okay, excellent. I think we've gone through all the questions. So then thank you to all the attendees for, oh, there's another question coming. Just a very, very, very open question at the end, but anyway, you might want to comment. So are you compliant to existing audit rules or maybe let's, let's phrase it differently. So are your deployments driven by auditors? Are you seeing the auditors in, in, in, at your customers when you're deploying your solutions?

So what is the perception of the auditors around your solutions? Do you have experience on that?

I don't, I don't have any visibility on that at this moment. It's a question.

If, if you want, you can just forward that over to me and I can get, I can get Christian or one of our other SES. They gave a quick run through any kind of engagement you would ahead there.

Okay, perfect. We'll do so anyway, we will do that with questions, which haven't been answered.

So again, thank you to all the attendees for listening to this. Could a call webinar. I hope to have yes. Attending one of our upcoming webinars. We have a series of webinars sooner in one of our upcoming events.

Thank you, Charles, for your presentation and demo on the inside. You provided into that solution and yeah. Have a nice day. Okay.

Thank you, Martin.