Hello, and welcome to Pluralsight. Welcome to the course, Windows Server
2022: Secure On‑premises and Hybrid Infrastructure.
This is the first module in the course, and its title is
Secure the Windows Server Operating System.
My name is Tim Warner. I'm happy to be your instructor. In
this module, we have a number of goals,
all of which are aligned to exam AZ‑801, part of the Windows Server
Hybrid Administrator Associate certification. In this module, we're going
to start by configuring exploit protection in Windows Server and then
review a number of Defender services.
There's Windows Defender Application Control, Windows Defender for Endpoint,
Windows Defender Credential Guard,
Defender SmartScreen, and then we'll finally, we finish things up
by looking at good, old‑fashioned Group Policy.
So, yes,
there's a lot of AI, artificial intelligence, at play here, and
that's a theme that runs through not only this module,
but really much of the course.
Let's proceed. This course, Windows Server 2022: Secure On‑premises and
Hybrid Infrastructure, consists of six modules. We're doing the first one
right now on securing the Window OS, and then,
as you see from a thematic standpoint,
we'll take a look at each major subsystem of Windows Server through
the lens of security. We'll look at hybrid cloud Active Directory
account security, then we have, well, actually it looks like two
modules on that, secure and configure.
Then we've got remediate Windows Server security issues using Azure.
Then we look at Windows Server network security, and
finish with Windows Server storage.
As I mentioned,
everything I'm teaching here is directly aligned from exam AZ‑801. As
you can see in this flow chart, in order to earn your Windows Server
Hybrid Administrator Associate certification,
you need to pass two exams: one, AZ‑800,
Administering Windows Server Hybrid Core Infrastructure, and this one,
Configuring Windows Server Hybrid Advanced Services.
Now it doesn't matter whether you pass 800 or 801 first,
you just need to know that it isn't until you pass the second of those two
exams that you earn your Administrator Associate credential. You should also
know that the Associate, Expert, and Specialty tier exams in the Microsoft
cert portfolio have a one‑year validity, and when you're at your six‑month
mark, you'll start to get invitations via email from Microsoft to renew your
credential, and guess how you do that? It's a free online assessment at
Microsoft Learn. Actually, now would be a good time to remind you that I've
created introduction courses for both AZ‑800 and the AZ‑801 skill paths here
at Pluralsight, and if you haven't looked at those introduction courses,
I strongly suggest you do, so you can learn all of these details.
I like to make sure that my students know where to find the
exercise files in the full Pluralsight web player,
not on a mobile app. You'll want to go in the course
interface over to Exercise files, where you'll see a
button called Download exercise files.
That operation will bring down a single ZIP archive,
and once you unzip that ZIP file,
you'll find a PDF of the slide deck for each of the six modules in the
course, and there will also be one or more supplemental files.
I almost always include a links list that consolidates any references to
the Microsoft docs that I mention during the training,
and I also will habitually include script files.
This course in particular is pretty heavy on the PowerShell,
so I will share the source code of those files with you as
well for your learning success. Now let's get into the content specifically.