Introduction

  • 3 minutes

Scenario

Contoso is a medium-size financial services company in London with a branch office in New York. Most of its compute environment runs on-premises on Windows Server. This includes virtualized workloads on Windows Server 2016 hosts. Contoso's IT staff are in the process of migrating Contoso servers to Windows Server 2025.

Contoso’s IT director realizes that Contoso has an outdated operational model with limited automation and reliance on dated technology. The Contoso IT Engineering team is exploring Azure capabilities. They want to determine whether Azure services might assist with modernizing the current operational model through automation and virtualization.

As part of the initial design, the Contoso IT team asked you, their lead system engineer and server administrator, to set up a proof of concept environment. This environment must verify whether Azure services can help to modernize the IT infrastructure and meet business goals.

Security is a core priority for Contoso. There's reluctance from the security team to run critical and sensitive systems "in the cloud." As system administrator, you need to address these concerns. You'll explore change tracking and both inventory and file-integrity monitoring to determine whether these features can help to address the concerns of the security team.

In this module, learn how to implement and manage Change tracking and Inventory. Also learn how to manage tracked files, and how to implement File Integrity Monitoring.

Learning objectives

After completing this module, you'll be able to:

  • Implement Change Tracking and Inventory
  • Manage Change Tracking and Inventory
  • Manage tracked files
  • Implement File Integrity Monitoring
  • Select and monitor entities
  • Use File Integrity Monitoring

Prerequisites

To get the best learning experience from this module, it's important that you have knowledge and experience of the following areas:

  • Managing Windows Server operating system and Windows Server workloads in on-premises scenarios, including AD DS, DNS, Distributed File System (DFS), Microsoft Hyper-V, and file and storage services.
  • Common Windows Server management tools.
  • Core Microsoft computes, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies.
  • Implementing and managing IaaS services in Microsoft Azure.
  • Microsoft Entra ID.
  • Security-related technologies (firewalls, encryption, multifactor authentication).
  • Windows PowerShell scripting.
  • Automation and monitoring.