Douglas Palazeke
Microsoft 365 and Azure security engineer, and the author of the CertAmount field guides, exam guides and practice-question books.
Background
Douglas Palazeke is a Microsoft 365 and Azure security engineer. His fifteen years ran from a support center in 2012 to senior engineering roles at managed-service providers and, from October 2023 to June 2026, Cybersecurity Engineer III at Patriot Consulting Technology Group, a Microsoft security consultancy.
At Patriot his work was recurring, read-only Microsoft 365 and Azure security posture assessments for organizations within a base of about 1,500 customers: Conditional Access, identity protection, MFA and PIM, Secure Score, OAuth app permissions, email hygiene, DLP and EDR coverage, licensing, and domain health, turned into risk-ranked remediation reports. On top of the assessments he handled contracted Tier III troubleshooting and implementation projects, including NPS extension MFA, Purview Endpoint DLP, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and Defender for Office 365. The decade before that was managed-service engineering: migrations, Active Directory, virtualization, networking and disaster recovery, remote monitoring and management across about 500 managed clients, and end-to-end Microsoft 365 and Azure projects across Intune, Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams, Entra ID, Conditional Access, Azure Virtual Desktop, and endpoint security.
Certifications, active: Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert; Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate; Microsoft 365 Certified: Administrator Expert; CompTIA Security+.
Certifications earned, since retired by the vendor: Microsoft 365 Certified: Security Administrator Associate (retired 2023); VMware Certified Professional (retired 2025).
Education: Bachelor of Technology in System Administration, State University of New York at Cobleskill, cum laude, 2011.
Every scenario in the field guides is checked in his self-built lab: a domain controller, Microsoft Entra Connect, Azure Arc, Defender for Servers, Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Sentinel with unified XDR, Defender for Cloud Apps, and the Microsoft 365 E5 and Business Premium feature set.
When Microsoft Learn and a book disagree, Learn wins, and the correction is logged on the errata page with its date.
The books: a companion page for each field guide, and the exam guides, practice questions and collections, by exam.