In this blog from the Azure Advent Calendar 2019 we discuss building a secure data solution using Azure Data Lake. Data Lake has many features which enable fine grained security and data separation. It is also built on Azure Storage which enables us to take advantage of all of those features and means that ADLS is still a cost effective storage option!

This post runs through some of the great features of ADLS and runs through an example of how we build our solutions using this technology!

Building a secure solution on Azure can be a daunting task. Using Azure Functions and Managed Identities, we have built up a pattern for giving services access to one another, woithout the need to store credentials. These managed identities can be given access to necessary resources. For example, they can be granted roles and added to access control lists in ADLS Gen2 accounts, or the ability to access keys in key vault. This means that data can be securely accessed without needing to store connection strings or app passwords.

This blog post details how we used Azure Policy to enforce Azure resources were tagged with appropiate tags and ensured tags were inherited from parent resource groups where possible.

The complexities around Azure Active Directory can be difficult to understand. This post runs through some of the key concepts – AAD apps, service principles, managed identities, and walks through an example of how to set some of this up!

This week I received an email from someone who asked how they could use our free Thought Leadership content to help their organisation move to the cloud. I realised that although we’ve released a lot of content, we’d never talked publicly about the rationale behind them and how they are all interconnected. Our Thought Leadership […]

Guest Blogger – Barry Smart (Former CTO & Partner, Hymans Robertson) Barry was the CTO at Hymans Robertson, the largest independent firm of consultants and actuaries in the UK. He is responsible for leading the firm’s technology strategy. The firm is turning increasingly to technology to enhance and extend the services it provides to clients. […]

Read about how we set up automated backups of our office security camera footage and used Power Automate to alert us if anything went wrong

Choosing the right cloud platform provider can be a daunting task. Take the big three, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform; each offer a huge number of products and services, but understanding how they enable your specific needs is not easy. Since most organisations plan to migrate existing applications it is important to understand how […]

Guest Blogger – Barry Smart IT Director & Partner, Hymans Robertson Barry is IT Director at Hymans Robertson, the largest independent firm of consultants and actuaries in the UK. He is responsible for leading the firm’s technology strategy. The firm is turning increasingly to technology to enhance and extend the services it provides to clients. […]

Guest Blogger – Barry Smart IT Director & Partner, Hymans Robertson Barry is IT Director at Hymans Robertson, the largest independent firm of consultants and actuaries in the UK. He is responsible for leading the firm’s technology strategy. The firm is turning increasingly to technology to enhance and extend the services it provides to clients. […]

We produced a booklet to coincide with our Future Decoded talk “The 100 Year Start-up: Embracing Disruption in Financial Services“, where we examine the challenges and opportunities in the Microsoft Cloud for the Financial Services Industry, covering the following topics: Security, Privacy & Data Sovereignty Data Ingestion, Transformation & Enrichment Big Compute Big Data – […]

There is a lot of hype about the blockchain – usually wrapped up with talk about Bitcoin and crypto-currencies. In this article, we look at its impact on trust, and auditability in financial services, and why it may (or may not) be appropriate for your solutions.

In this post we review the FCA’s guidelines for the adoption of cloud services by FinTech businesses, and help you to understand their impact across the value chain.