Establishing a New IT Department for Alliance Residential Company

Alliance Residential Company, one of the largest multifamily housing real estate developers in the United States, needed to rebuild many of its internal corporate support departments, including the IT department, after its sale of its management division.

Since its launch in 2010, Microsoft Azure has gained popularity and trust with customers on a global scale. Azure is a public cloud offering that provides solutions for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). However, as with any cloud provider, there are concerns around security and breach issues (i.e., how safe is my data?), as the solutions are hosted in a cloud service provider (CSP) data center.

Microsoft has issued an Exchange Server Security Update on April 13, 2021 for companies with an on-premises deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016 and 2019. This affects both on-premises and hybrid deployments of Exchange Online. Exchange Hybrid users are less affected. However, the FBI’s recommendation is to patch this vulnerability as soon as possible.

It goes without saying that 2020 has been the most chaotic year of our lifetime, and changes we have experienced this year are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future—if not indefinitely. The way that we collaborate with each other at work, the way our children are educated at school, and even how we spend our personal time with clubs, family, and church have changed.

It’s an irrefutable truth: COVID-19 has quickly changed the modern workplace. At the onset of the pandemic, many businesses rushed to put temporary solutions in place to protect their employees and keep up their operations. Because these solutions were only meant to be short-term, they are now starting to show their weaknesses and concerns around their reliability and security are beginning to arise. The result: Obstacles are looming everywhere for CIOs.

Microsoft has announced that a March 2020 security update for Windows Server will disable unsigned LDAP connectivity in Active Directory DS and LDS. There has been an identified, critical exploit of LDAP where an elevated permissions exploit can be performed via unsigned LDAP.