Archive for the ‘Active Directory’ Category

SharePoint 2010 Security: Adding an SSL Certificate to Your Hosted SharePoint Site

June 11th, 2012
Posted by: admin

By Bill Peters
AIS Network Director of Sales

SSL certificates create secure (HTTPS) connectivity between your Web server and your visitors’ browsers.  If you are transmitting sensitive information via a Web site, such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers or other personal information, you should secure it with SSL encryption to safeguard against others seeing your data.  If you do not use an SSL certificate, then you are vulnerable.

SharePoint Security

SSL certificates aid in ensuring data security for your hosted SharePoint site.

In a SharePoint environment, SSL certificates can easily be added to a hosted site in order to secure it.  There are different kinds of SSL certificates but I won’t address that in this blog.  Rather, this is about SharePoint 2010 security and the recent request by one client that we add an SSL certificate to his existing hosted SharePoint site with us.

In preparation, I asked him what domain name he wanted on the SSL certificate.   Unsure of my question, he responded, “Doesn’t the domain name have to match the domain of the (AISN) network?”

Here’s how I explained it to him.   In his case, the server hosting his SharePoint is a member server in the Active Directory domain called aisn.local.  Web sites which serve Web pages from this server (SharePoint included) can be addressed by either an IP address or a domain name.  This Web site domain is not the same type of domain as the Active Directory domain in which the server resides.  And actually, Active Directory domains such as aisn.local cannot be present on the Internet.  The ‘.local’ indicates to the Internet that it is a private, not a public, domain name.

That said, it is possible to have an SSL Certificate for either type of domain.  The real question is what are you going to use it for?  That was for my client to decide.

As I explained to him, if you intend to use the SSL Certificate for Server Identification, then we can get a certificate for you for “yournamehere.aisn.local”.  You would use this type of certificate when, for example, you remote desktop to the server.  It would guarantee that you are connecting to the right server.

If, however, you want to use the SSL Certificate for identification of your SharePoint Site, then you can pick any public name you want.  In this case, the domain must be registered publicly in order to get a public SSL Certificate.

So, for example, if you chose to address your SharePoint Site by the name “sp.yournamehere.com”, you would need to make sure that the domain name “yournamehere.com” is registered to you.  Then, you can define “sp.yournamehere.com” in IIS on your SharePoint server. You would also need to configure the public DNS for yournamehere.com such that the “host” known as “sp” points to the IP address on the server.

That explanation seemed clarify things for him.  I told him that I thought he was looking for the latter, but we do not know what his host and domain names are.  It appeared to me that he was addressing his SP site by IP address currently.  In order to assign an SSL certificate, it needs to have a full name.  We cannot register it to an IP.

Have more questions about hosted SharePoint 2010 and hosted SharePoint security?  Send me an email and I’d be happy to help.

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Outsourcing Hosting: Talking Points for the C-Suite (Part II)

June 2nd, 2012
Posted by: admin

By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President

We are often asked, “How do I make the case to upper management that outsourced hosting of our mission-critical data and apps is the way to go?”

AISN

If you are considering outsourcing your hosting, you may need to prepare some talking points for your C-suite executives.

First, because many businesses rely upon their Web site as their primary public face and their IT infrastructure as their office backbone, Internet downtime is simply not an option. “Always on” is mission-critical to business performance.

Next, if you are dealing with aging IT assets, growing application portfolios to manage, or capital spending cuts due to the economy, then you are like most businesses evaluating hosting solutions for your mission-critical data and applications, and we can help guide you through that process.  IT departments everywhere are finding it’s tough to do more with the same or even less staff.  That’s why hosting has major appeal.   It minimizes your operational risk exposure, makes your business more efficient and agile, and knocks down the high fixed cost of IT.

Here are some talking points to consider:

Better—Hosting decreases your risk

  • Frees up your capital for other projects
  • Guarantees you’re always online (with a 100% Service Level Agreement)
  • Helps you avoid poor server purchasing decisions
  • Offers complete scalability, freeing you to upgrade your server or capacity without service interruption
  • Deploys your solution rapidly and provides expert monitoring, 24x7x365
  • Allows you to focus on growing your business by managing operational and strategic risks that you would not be able to handle in the event of a catastrophic loss

Faster—Hosting extends your resources

  • Cuts your labor/staff training costs to stay ahead of the technology curves
  • Enables you to tap more expert talent, faster and for less cost
  • Allows your people to focus on core business needs that accelerate business growth
  • Provides instant staffing for the “what if” scenario that may occur
  • Improves your access to new technologies while eliminating the need to hire more expertise
  • Offers increased flexibility, so that your IT can be more agile and move as the business does

Cheaper—Hosting delivers the best dollar value

  • Delivers consistent, affordable IT coverage 24x7x365 with virtually no downtime
  • Eliminates big capital expenditures on hardware and data centers
  • Frees up your IT budget and staff for other strategic initiatives
  • Enables you to better predict monthly IT costs and therefore reallocate precious resources
  • Grows with you as you grow—at the same superior service level and without requiring you to over-purchase capacity upfront
  • Provides a quicker return on your investment that’s provable

Clearly, just how much you improve your risk management and exposure, efficiency, and cost savings depends on the hosting provider that you select.

We can help you draft your internal proposal or determine honestly how—and if—your company would benefit from hosting services—either traditional or in the cloud. Contact us!

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