Automation in daily IT has become a standardized necessity rather than an advantage. Power Automate Desktop builds on the inherent robotic process automation of Power Automate. The solution allows you to automate all of your repetitive desktop processes. But the best thing is that the application is now free for all Windows 10 users!
Windows Sandbox is an application that creates a Windows instance fully separated from the host. It creates an isolated and secure environment where you can run files and applications without affecting the host — great for testing purposes. Once you close the sandbox, everything there is permanently deleted.
Getting comprehensive information on each and every virtual machine (VM) is a pain. To make things easier, Microsoft introduced Azure Resource Graph. You can now use a simple PowerShell script and receive contextual VM data at scale across your given set of subscriptions. No need to surf through every single one separately anymore.
Azure DevOps is a very powerful product that encompasses the whole application lifecycle, including DevOps capabilities. Release Pipelines is one of the features that helps automate the testing and delivery of desired applications to end-users on multiple stages. But to use it properly, you should know how to couple it with PowerShell Tasks.
Keeping up with priorities, subscriptions, resource groups, and other policies in a hyper-converged environment can be quite challenging. Azure Policy helps receive an aggregated view of your environment via a compliance dashboard. It simplifies enforcing standards and allows you to effortlessly and minutely address any issue.
With cybersecurity nowadays, you can never be too sure. And having to maintain it at scale can prove quite straining. Azure Sentinel, a cloud-native software imbued with AI functions, can help simplify that process for you. Have a birds-eye view of your entire HCI via a convenient dashboard and benefit from Microsoft’s years of cyber intelligence experience.
There isn’t always time or possibility to mess with scripts. Thanks to Azure Logic Apps, you can automate and orchestrate your infrastructure or application deployment without writing a single line of code. And Microsoft Graph can be used to assist with exposing REST APIs and client libraries to access data on a wide set of Microsoft 365 services.
Azure Front Door, a scalable and secure entry point for web applications and global HTTP(s) load balancer, has been available in GA over a year now. To that end, you can use the tool for multiple versatile scenarios. Use it, for instance, with Web/Mobile Apps, Cloud Services, and VMs – or combine it with on-prem services for hybrid deployments and smooth cloud migration.
You can’t have it all, and this is true even for the best things in life. It’s possible to schedule automatic shutdowns of VMs in Azure (one of the ways to cut Azure costs). But you can’t use the same Azure Portal to schedule their automatic boot-up the same way. A way out of it is to use PowerShell, however, there’s another trick you might like better.
Working for an MSP demands a lot of toggling between browsers. For each separate tenancy, managing Azure resources demands multiple browsers and tabs. Thankfully, this turmoil has been solved: Azure Lighthouse comes to save the day. You can now allocate customer Azure resources and manage permissions from a single console!
