A Microsoft Entra emergency access account, also known as a “Break Glass Account”, is a special account set up for accessing Azure resources in emergency situations. This account typically has higher permissions and is only used when conventional access routes are not available. This could be, for example, a service outage, so that no multi-factor authentication can be performed via a mobile phone. The use of emergency accounts is strictly controlled, monitored, and restricted.
An essential aspect of using cloud services is ensuring availability and performance. Outages or performance problems have a significant impact on today’s business processes and lost revenue, image damage and angry customers.
Azure Service Health is a free service from Microsoft Azure. The service provides real-time information in a dashboard about the status and performance of Azure services. The service continuously monitors resources and proactively informs about service problems.
SMB over QUIC is a network protocol used by Windows. It allows secure, shared use of resources such as files on the network. To use SMB (Server Message Block) without QUIC, TCP port 445 is required. Some Internet providers block TCP port 445 for security reasons. Therefore, it is not possible to connect to a file share on Azure by SMB successfully.
To bypass the blocking of TCP port 445, there are several options to choose from, including the following:
- VPN (Virtual Private Network), e.g. AlwaysOnVPN
- Third party software, e.g. MyWorkDrive
- SMB over QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection)
Low network latency between virtual machines generally contributes to optimized performance. The proximity placement group feature in Azure ensures that virtual machines within the same proximity placement group are physically located in the same datacenter.
Proximity placement groups in Azure are particularly suitable for services and workloads (ERP, databases, real time services) with low latency requirements.