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 2012 R2 hosts. Contoso IT staff are in the process of migrating Contoso servers to Windows Server 2019.

Contoso’s IT director realizes that Contoso has an outdated operational model with limited automation and reliance on dated technology.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 has started 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 big concern. There's reluctance to run critical and sensitive systems "in the cloud." As system administrator, you'll need to address these concerns. In early research, you've discovered that Azure provides change tracking and both inventory and file-integrity monitoring. You've decided to investigate this security features to determine whether they can help to address your colleagues' concerns.

In this module, you'll learn how to implement and manage Change tracking and Inventory. You'll also learn how to manage tracked files, and how to implement File Integrity Monitoring.

Learning objectives

After completing this module, you will 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, multi-factor authentication).
  • Windows PowerShell scripting.
  • Automation and monitoring.