RunAs Radio

More application platform pieces make your life better! While at Build in Seattle, Richard sat down with Buu Lam of F5 to discuss F5's latest offering, NGINX as a Service in Azure. Buu discussed how F5's products have evolved to run in the cloud, not just on their hardware. While you could run them as virtual machines or containers, providing them as services in Azure is better. You purchase the service in the marketplace and as part of your Azure billing. The conversation digs into the advantages of the services model in terms of updating and instrumentation, as well as reducing the complexity of your infrastructure as code.

Links

• NGINX
• Kubernetes
• BIG-IP Next
• F5 Distributed Cloud
• NGINX as a Service on Azure
• DevCentral at F5

Recorded May 21, 2024

What are the hard parts of machine learning? Richard chats with Lynn Langit about her work helping the Mayo Clinic improve patient outcomes using machine learning to understand patient data better. Lynn talks about the challenges of multi-modal data analytics - taking all the different data collected from a patient, like an X-ray or video, along with treatment notes, to create an overall picture of treatment and outcome. Then multiply that by thousands of patients, making a complicated data problem with huge challenges in testing and validation. How do you know that the machine learning model is correct? The key to practical machine learning is in the fundamentals - working on each step before you jump to the more complex goals!

Links

• Lynn on GitHub
• BiomedCLIP
• Evaluation Metrics and Statistical Tests for Machine Learning
• GitHub Copilot Workspace
• Gemini in BigQuery
• Basic Bioinformatics for IT
• HistoGPT

Recorded May 17, 2024

Have you rolled out Microsoft Defender for Cloud? Richard chats with Yuri Diogenes about the bundle of tools under the Defender for Cloud moniker. Yuri describes Defender for Cloud as a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). This Gartner term covers the various elements that go into a cloud-native application, including APIs, servers, containers, storage, resource manager, and more! Defender for Cloud integrates with Microsoft Purview to understand data sensitivity, and Microsoft Sentinel helps detect breaches or data misuse. It also offers attack path analysis and remediation so you can get ahead of the attackers to close off potential breach risks before they happen! Check the links in the show notes for great resources, including an ebook on CNAPP strategy!

Links

• Defender for Cloud
• OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks
• Defender for APIs
• Microsoft Sentinel
• Data Security Dashboard
• Attack Paths
• Microsoft Purview
• Cloud Security Posture Management
• Microsoft Copilot for Security
• Security Remediation with Governance
• Defender for Cloud ServiceNow Integration
• CNAPP Strategy Ebook

Recorded May 13, 2024

How can Microsoft Copilot make your intranet better? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about her experiences adding Copilot into the intranet via the Copilot Studio and Viva Engage. Susan talks about the challenges of getting your intranet data in order - most notably, archiving old information so that it doesn't clutter up a Copilot with out-of-date and inaccurate data. The conversation explores making smaller Copilots focused on specific domains, like company policy. It's still the early days for copilots, so there are some challenges to getting things done right, but the potential is there!

Links

• Restricting SharePoint Search
• Copilot with Commercial Data Protection
• M365 Copilot
• Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Copilot for Viva Engage
• Viva Connections
• Viva Suite
• Answers in Viva

Recorded May 10, 2024

How are your company's Apple devices connected to the enterprise? Richard talks to Michael Epping about the recent additions in Entra that support the authentication of Apple MacOS and iPadOS devices. Michael discusses Apple's Secure Enclave as the equivalent of Trusted Platform Management in Windows. With Entra Platform SSO, you can now use that authentication to access Azure resources and, ultimately, on-premises Kerberos-secured resources! These features are still in public preview but fully supported, and more is coming!

Links

• Microsoft Intune
• Windows Autopilot
• Microsoft Entra Hybrid
• Microsoft Entra SSO Plug-in for Apple Devices
• Apple Secure Enclave
• Integrate Apple Devices with Microsoft Entra ID
• Apple Automated Device Enrollment
• Entra Conditional Access
• macOS Platform Single Sign-on
• Join a Mac device with Microsoft Entra ID

Recorded May 13, 2024

How can you use PowerApps to extend the functionality of other apps? Richard talks to Christina Wheeler about her efforts to teach folks to use PowerApps to add the functionality they need to Dynamics 365 and elsewhere! Christina talks about her move to Microsoft, shifting from SharePoint to PowerApps, but still essentially doing the same thing - finding customer solutions. The conversation ranges over the power of the Dataverse to provide access to all sorts of data and the emerging role of the Microsoft Copilot Studio to build custom copilots for your organization.

Links

• Dataverse
• Connect to Dynamics 365 from Power Apps
• XrmToolbox
• Model-Driven Apps in Power Apps
• Canvas Apps in Power Apps
• Microsoft Power Fx
• Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Microsoft Bot Framework
• AI Copilot
• Power Up Program
• Power Platform Conference

Recorded April 26, 2024

Two old guys talk about Windows AGAIN? Richard brings back Paul Thurrott for the tenth time to discuss Windows more. This time, the discussion focuses on the end of life for Windows 10 - currently October 2025. Paul discusses how it used to be April 2025, but that's not enough time. Is it enough time now? The conversation spans other Windows-related topics, including alternative versions like Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop. And what about Windows 12? There is a bit of speculation at the end of a longer show - weigh in with your thoughts on what's next for Windows!

Links

• End of Support for Windows 10, 8.1, and 7
• Windows Autopilot
• Windows Copilot
• Microsoft Intune
• Windows 365
• Microsoft Entra
• Azure Virtual Desktop

Recorded April 26, 2024

Machine learning models need updating - what's the reliable way to do it? While in Romania, Richard sat down with Annie Talvasto to talk about her work helping to build DevOps practices around machine learning: Building repeatable processes for data ingestions, cleaning, organization, model building, and deployment. The challenges are the arrays of skilled people needed to operate and evaluate the pipeline - it takes domain experts to know if the machine learning results are accurate and valuable. Tooling can help, but it is only in the early days. If your organization is keen to get machine learning into the company, you need to do some careful planning!

Links

• Jupyter Notebook
• Pandas
• MLFlow
• Azure Machine Learning

Recorded April 20, 2024

How's your identity governance? Richard talks to Jef Kazimer from Microsoft about Entra's capabilities to help you have robust governance around identity. Jef talks about the lifecycle of identity - when someone joins the organization and a new identity gets created, privileges changing as roles evolve, to the eventual offboarding when that person departs. The same sort of cycle exists for devices, too - the question is only how much work you must do to get through those cycles. Entra offers tooling to get identity changes out of your support tickets - make your life easier with effective identity governance!

Links

• Microsoft Entra
• Conditional Access
• Microsoft Entra Permission Management
• Road to the Cloud
• Entitlement Management
• My Access Portal
• Just Enough Administration
• Privileged Access Workstation
• Entra Lifecycle Workflows
• Azure Logic Apps
• Usage and Insight Reports in Entra
• 425 Show

Recorded April 26, 2024

How does artificial intelligence fit in with SQL Server? At the Microsoft Fabric Conference in Las Vegas, Richard sat down with Muazma Fahid and Bob Ward to discuss the AI developments in SQL Server. Muazma talks about SQL Server as a crucial source of data for building machine learning models and the new features added to make SQL Server a key store for vector data and other elements of machine learning. There's also Copilot for Azure SQL Data to help with diagnostics in your databases and to use natural language to write queries - it SQL Server Natural Language Query all over again, but certainly better than ever.

Links

• Responsible AI Practices
• Phi-2
• Retrieval Augmented Generation
• Copilot for Azure SQL Data
• JSON in SQL Server
• RegEx in SQL Server
• sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint
• SQL AI

Recorded March 27, 2024

Have you downloaded the latest version of PowerShell? While at the MVP Summit in Redmond, Washington, Richard sat down with Sydney Smith to discuss some of the features in PowerShell 7.4. Sydney talks about the successful delivery of PSResourceGet and PSReadline, two long-in-development features that have reached their so-called "1.0" state. The conversation also digs into the ongoing challenge of some sysadmins sticking with PowerShell 5.1, the last of the Windows-only versions. Today, PowerShell 7 has feature parity with 5.1 and many new features that improve the quality, security, and capabilities of PowerShell. Try the latest!

Links

• PowerShell 7.4
• PowerShell on GitHub
• PowerShell in Visual Studio Code
• Get PowerShell

Recorded March 11, 2024

How can GitHub Copilot help you? Richard chats with Damian Brady at NDC Sydney about the power of GitHub Copilot to help you understand and write the bits of code you need - whether you're using PowerShell, understanding a RegEx expression, or trying to get a Bash prompt right. GitHub Copilot and help to explain the code you've got, even across workspaces - so you can find all the scripts that changes might impact. And if you think it's time to rewrite some old scripts into more modern languages, GitHub Copilot can help with that, too!

Links

• GitHub Copilot for Business
• GitHub Dependabot
• GitHub Code Scanning
• GitHub Copilot in the CLI

Recorded February 14, 2024

As Artificial Intelligence enters our organizations, how do we secure them? While at NDC in Sydney, Richard sat down with Sarah Young to discuss the challenges of securing these new technologies. Sarah talks a bit about the fundamentals - in the end, AI technology is just more software and needs all the same authentication and authorization that other apps need. However, there are some unique aspects and potential exploits that you can address through tooling and education. We're all learning these new AI technologies and how to apply them in our organizations - training is essential!

Links

• Azure OpenAI Service
• System Message Framework and Template Recommendations for Large Language Models
• Microsoft Purview
• Microsoft Entra
• Not with a Bug, But with a Sticker

Recorded February 14, 2024

How can Microsoft Copilot for Security help you? While at NDC in Sydney, Richard chatted with George Coldham about Microsoft Copilot for Security - combining GPT-4 with information about Microsoft security products and your organization's resources in Azure to provide guidance and insight into making your company more secure. George talks about how it's early days for this copilot - and it's only in preview so far. Bringing together the vast array of security products that Microsoft makes, Microsoft Copilot for Security brings the ability of Large Language Models to summarize data to help you understand where the organization's security vulnerabilities exist and how to address them. You want to get in on this preview!

Links

• Microsoft Copilot for Security
• Unified Security Operations Platform
• Microsoft Sentinel
• Microsoft Security Portals and Admin Centers
• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Microsoft Entra
• Microsoft Purview
• Microsoft Priva
• Kusto Query Language
• Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence

Recorded February 13, 2024

What can GitHub do for you? While at NDC London, Richard chatted with April Edwards about how GitHub can help sysadmins - and everyone in your organization! In the end, GitHub is an engine for managing work, with GitHub Actions kicking off workflows that can send messages, run all sorts of code, activate scripts, and more. Ultimately, you get a good report of what happened - or didn't happen. And over time, those scripts can mature to be more reliable and detailed - and keep a record of every change.

Links

• GitHub Actions
• Pester
• Dev Containers
• PowerShell 5.1
• GitHub Advanced Security
• GitHub Code Scanning
• Dependabot
• GitHub Copilot

Recorded February 2, 2024

Aren't we all platform engineers? Steve Buchanan says yes! But there's more to it - and Steve talks about the mindset of looking beyond individual products that we might have skills with and owning the entire problem of providing platforms for your organization to get work done. The conversation dives into the many products that can help our applications function better and the challenge of making them secure and fast. Are containers the solution? Possibly! It's your platform; focus on the fundamentals and go further!

Links

• VS Code
• File Server Resource Manager
• Azure Kubernetes Service
• Kubernetes Namespaces
• Open Service Mesh in AKS
• Microsoft Defender for Containers
• Azure Chaos Studio
• Azure Virtual Desktop
• GitHub Codespaces
• AKS with Azure Pipelines
• Azure Draft
• Security Copilot

Recorded February 5, 2024

What do you know about large language models? While at NDC in London, Richard sat down with Dr. Jodie Burchell to discuss how machine learning has reached this new technological milestone. Jodie talks about different types of machine learning and how large language models fit into the landscape. The conversation explores where LLMs come from, what they are good at, and what they should not be used for. They are not intelligent and certainly not a panacea for work - but they can be valuable when used correctly!

Links

• GPT-2
• Microsoft AI Supercomputer
• GPT-NeoX-20B
• Jodie Burchell on .NET Rocks
• Anthropic
• GitHub Copilot
• Retrieval Augmented Generation
• The Busy Persons' Into to LLMs by Anderj Karpathy

Recorded February 1, 2024

Have you upgraded to TLS 1.3? While at NDC in London, Richard chatted with Scott Helme about his work moving companies onto the latest version of TLS. But do you need to? Scott talks about how SSL 2 and 3 were used until they were broken by the black hats, leading to a panic to update quickly. While there is no evidence that TLS 1 and 1.1 are breached, they are already deprecated - and are slower than the later versions. Want a performance boost? Move to TLS 1.3!

Links

• KeybaseAPI Root Certificate Expiry
• Let's Encrypt
• Brownout Notice at GitHub
• When Logging Causes Security Incidents
• Deprecation SHA-1
• Google Post Quantum Encryption

Recorded February 1, 2024

How are we going to manage the use of M365 Copilot? Richard chats with Martina Grom about her experiences helping organizations prepare for M365 Copilot. Martina talks about getting your data estate in shape - and the challenge that represents in terms of identifying what data should be available within an organization. The conversation also digs into the larger picture of the Microsoft Graph - all the information about how people interact on M365, the resources they create and use, and the potential the Graph offers to help with productivity. It's still early days, but it's never too early to work hard on ensuring we have the right governance in place to allow Copilot to help the company succeed!

Links

• SLRProject
• Microsoft Delve
• Microsoft Purview
• GitHub Copilot Policies
• Data, Privacy, and Security for M365 Copilot
• Extend Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365
• Manage Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 with the Copilot page
• Manage access to public web content in Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 responses
• Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 Requirements
• Protect your sensitive data with Microsoft Purview
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Readiness Assessment

Recorded January 5, 2024

What's coming next for Windows Server? Richard chats with Jeff Woolsey about the latest information around Windows Server vNext! Jeff discusses how customer feedback influences Windows Server and the challenges of moving folks to the latest versions. Server vNext is designed to live in a cloud hybrid world and includes improvements for interacting with Azure, but it also has plenty of on-premises features. The conversation turns to Active Directory and its ongoing modernization to make it more secure, robust, and scalable. The same goes for the rest of the Windows Server - coming soon!

Links

• Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition
• Azure Arc
• Storage Spaces Direct
• Windows Server vNext Talk from Ignite

Recorded December 14, 2023

How does your company organize information? Richard chats with Emily Mancini about the metadata in SharePoint. Emily points out that if you're using Teams, you're using SharePoint - it's all under the hood. And that means any files are being tagged with metadata whether you do it intentionally or not. Taking control of your metadata can mean more effective searches and managing surprises with tools like M365 Copilot. Metadata can help you protect sensitive data and make existing data visible to the people needing it. Spending a few hours with it can make a huge difference!

Links

• Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Community
• Left Uncharted
• SharePoint
• Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Microsoft 365 Governance Questions
• SharePoint Term Sets
• SharePoint Content Types
• Emily's Blog Post of Building Metadata in SharePoint Online

Recorded January 4, 2024

How do you manage cloud-native applications? While at Ignite in Seattle, Richard chatted with Brendan Burns about ongoing efforts to develop tools to make building and operating cloud-native applications more manageable. Brendan discusses the challenges around building apps with Kubernetes and how next-generation tools like Radius and Dapr try to address those problems to make it easier to make the right choices. There's a powerful intersection between sysadmins and developers when making manageable applications in the cloud!

Links:

• Radius
• Kubernetes
• Azure Kubernetes Service
• Azure Resource Manager
• Azure Bicep
• Open Application Model
• dapr
• .NET Aspire

Recorded November 16, 2023

Is there a strategy for buying software licenses? Richard talks with Mary Jo Foley about her new role at Directions on Microsoft, including her experiences around the multi-day workshops on effectively buying software licenses today. Mary Jo talks about understanding the entire landscape of software licenses your organization needs, how they are used, and how you can build a strategy to negotiate a better licensing cost for your organization. You already do much of the work for this, but bringing everything together is a challenge - but worth it!

Links:

• Directions on Microsoft
• Dynamics 365
• Copilot for Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Purview
• Microsoft Priva
• Microsoft Security Copilot
• Licensing Boot Camp

Recorded December 14, 2023

How can artificial intelligence help sysadmins? While at Ignite in Seattle, Richard talked with Gil Pekelman of Atera about their AI for IT product. Gil talks about developing smart instrumentation for IT and extensively monitoring machines and networks to give you a broad overview of your infrastructure. Then OpenAI expanded its capabilities - allowing users to submit report requests to a large language model that can act as a copilot or an autopilot, able to resolve tickets or prepare them for a sysadmin to act quickly.

Links:

• Atera
• OpenAI
• Azure OpenAI Service

Recorded November 16, 2023

How is the Power Platform evolving? Richard chats with April Dunnam about the latest on the Power Platform - especially the emergence of Large Language Models like Copilot. April talks about how it's possible to use Copilots in Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Automate to help you build your automation - and how writing prompts can help you think through what you're trying to make. The conversation also digs into providing Copilots to users so that you spend less time creating UX and more time building features that the users can request. It's a Copilot world - we're just living in it!

Links:

• Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit
• AI Copilot Overview
• Copilot in PowerBI
• Power Automate Copilot
• Responsive Layouts in Canvas Apps
• Building a Multi-Language Power App
• Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Power Apps Connectors
• Microsoft Copilots
• Power Apps Prompts

Recorded December 11, 2023

Active Directory is still part of our lives - but can we make it more robust? Richard talks to Jerry Devore about his ongoing blog series on hardening Active Directory. Jerry talks about credential drift - decisions made in the past to turn down (or off!) security features in AD that made sense at the time but are no longer relevant. Most of these efforts only consume time - no products are involved, or the products are free. Check out the links in the show notes for Compliance tools that can help you find vulnerabilities in your infrastructure, including AD.

Links:

• Pass-the-Hash White Paper
• MITRE ATT&CK
• Windows LAPS
• Enable NTLM 2 Authentication
• LDAP Signing
• Forest and Domain Functional Levels
• Credential Guard
• Microsoft Intune
• Security Compliance Toolkit and Baselines

Recorded November 20, 2023

Another year of doing more with less? While at Ignite in Seattle, Richard sat down with Erin Chapple to talk about her work on Azure Infrastructure and the challenges around the cloud - more instances of everything, more to manage, more to pay attention to. And yet, budgets are not increasing! Erin talks about improving utilization within the cloud and broadening monitoring to cover everything you care about on-premises or on any cloud. And then there are the new copilots. Work to set up? Perhaps. But Azure Copilot can help you understand what's happening in your Azure tenant and how to utilize it more effectively. You can do more with less!

Links:

• Azure Copilot

Recorded November 16, 2023

For the last show of 2023, let’s look back at the year and speculate about 2024. Richard flies solo to talk about what he’s learned the past year and some thoughts about going forward into the next year. Economic concerns continue to play a significant role in sysadmin life – companies are holding back on spending but still expecting all the services. And new technologies like large language models look to play a significant role in our lives – if we choose to take advantage of them!

Links:

• Large Language Models in Business with Ulrika Hedlund
• Getting Ready for M365 Copilot with Karoliina Kettukari
• Patching in 2023 with Sami Laiho
• Responding to a Ransomware Attack with Dana Epp
• Plan for Windows 10 EOS with Windows 11, Windows 3655, and ESU

Recorded December 22, 2023

What's an Azure Arc Guest Configuration? Richard talks to Jodi Boone about the freshly renamed Machine Configuration for Azure Arc. It turns out "guest" is a problematic word - but being able to set policy around machine configurations can make your life much easier. Jodi talks about using existing policy templates, along with Desired State Configuration, to customize configurations so that they can be applied to multiple virtual machines on Azure, on-premises, and in other cloud environments.

Links:

• Configuration for Azure Arc-enabled Servers
• Desired State Configuration
• Azure Automation State Configuration
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes
• Azure Management Services
• DSC Extension for Linux
• Setting up a Machine Configuration Authoring Enviroment

Recorded November 3, 2023

The holiday season is upon us! What do you get your favorite sysadmin? Richard brings back his friends Joey Snow & Rick Claus to discuss some of their favorite sysadmin gifts this year. From simple gadgets that flashback to the early days of tech to the newest and latest versions of favorite products, there's an incredible array of goodies here. Please share it with the folks who struggle to find the perfect present for the sysadmins in their lives!

Links:

• Meater 2
• Floppy Disk Coasters
• Anker 747 USB Charger
• Dig2Go
• Surface Pro 9
• Slim Run Ethernet
• Obsbot Tiny 2
• Alpaca Hoodie
• Anker Portable Charger
• Anker GaNPrime Power Bank
• Ember Temperature Control Smart Mug 2
• Rocketbook Core Reusable Smart Notebook
• Tetris LED Lights
• Mandalorian Stand for Echo Dot
• NES Entertainment Flask

Recorded November 17, 2023

Can M365 help modernize your workplace? Richard chats with Sharon Weaver about her work helping companies migrate into M365 and how it helps provide more options to workers. Sharon talks about how the pandemic accelerated the process and the challenge of finding a new normal today. The conversation also dives into good information architecture for helping with productivity and using tools like Viva Insights to understand more about how you work - and your coworkers!

Links:

• SharePoint Online
• Microsoft Teams
• The Power of Full Engagement
• Microsoft Viva Insights
• Community Days

Recorded November 1, 2023

We're all using zero trust - but are we using it well? Richard talks to Nicolas Blank about his work helping to develop the Zero Trust Adoption Framework. Nicolas talks about resisting the buzzword effect and avoiding looking at zero trust as a set of products because it isn't - it's really about the people and processes in your organization that keep things secure. The conversation also digs into the tabletop exercises needed to create priorities for security - not everything in your organization needs the same level of protection or effort. It pays to work through scenarios!

Links:

• Zero Trust Adoption Framework
• Microsoft Entra ID
• Ransomware Recovery Readiness
• MimiKatz

Recorded October 12, 2023

How do telcos use the cloud? Richard talks to Jennelle Crothers about her work with Azure Operator Nexus, a set of services and tooling for telecommunications companies. Jennelle talks about a meeting of the minds between telcos like AT&T and Microsoft - both organizations have a lot of infrastructure, but the cloud is also an architecture that can help provide more sophisticated and resilient services. It's an area of the cloud you may not have seen much of, but it will impact devices going forward - this is our connectivity we're exploring here!

Links:

• Introducing Azure Operator Nexus
• Azure Operator Nexus
• What is Azure Operator Nexus?
• Azure Stack
• Rancher

Recorded October 12, 2023

So, what's Microsoft Entra all about? Richard chats with VPN guru Richard Hicks about his experiences with Microsoft Entra. More than just a new name for Azure Active Directory, Entra includes essential tooling to provide secure access to all sorts of services - and not only Microsoft ones! Richard talks about how Azure Conditional Access can be applied across all types of Microsoft products and with Entra Application Proxy, you can access your internal services and servers. Many of the capabilities are in preview now - but the future looks bright for Entra and Conditional Access!

Links:

• Microsoft Entra
• Microsoft Global Secure Access Client
• Azure Conditional Access
• Microsoft Entra Private Access
• Microsoft Entra Application Proxy
• RDP using NPS and Entra
• Microsoft Secure Access Service Edge
• Implementing Always On VPN

Recorded October 10, 2023

How do large language models fit into your organization? Richard chats with Ulrika Hedlund about the challenges sysadmins face with large language models in their company. Ulrika talks about how employees are already using large language models like ChatGPT - potentially risking leaking company data. Tools like Bing Chat Enterprise bring the same capabilities as ChatGPT but with a focus on keeping company data secure. Once you're comfortable with Bing Chat, you can explore Microsoft 365 Copilot, which can index company data as part of its model. Training is essential, as is good data protection management, but the productivity benefits can be huge!

Links:

• Bing Chat Enterprise
• Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Copilot Licensing

Recorded October 10, 2023

How does green fit into IT? Richard talks with Mike Halsey about his book The Green IT Guide. Mike starts out talking about not waiting for government regulation - there are things we can do today to reduce our organization's environmental impact. The trend is to keep PCs longer, but what happens when you need new ones? There are more organizations than ever for repurposing old PCs and other devices and recycling. The conversation also digs into right-to-repair, with replaceable batteries and upgradable parts. We can do a lot just by including environmental impact in our buying decisions!

Links:

• The Green IT Guide
• Framework Laptop

Recorded October 12, 2023

How do you choose an Azure data storage solution? Richard talks to Nicole Stevens about her experiences helping companies move data into the cloud - typically in SQL Server. The obvious answer is Azure SQL, but that doesn't always make it the best solution! Nicole talks about a customer moving to Cosmos DB for the unstructured data capabilities and a lot of speed. But does the price make sense? All these factors are in play in choosing a data storage solution, and there is never one right choice - often, a mix of services makes the most sense!

Links:

• Azure SQL
• Azure Cosmos DB
• APIs in Cosmos DB
• Azure Table Storage
• Azure Queue Storage
• Azure Messaging Services
• dapr - Distributed Application Runtime
• Microsoft Certifications
• Data Architecture Guide
• Data Landing Zones
  Azure Security Baselines

Recorded September 6, 2023

What can large language models do for you and your organization? Richard chats with Seth Juarez about the reality behind large language models like ChatGPT – how they are built, what they are good at, and most importantly, what they are not suitable for. Seth talks about the tremendous hype around these technologies and how to cut through the noise to focus on the value they can provide. As an IT Pro, you will be asked how to utilize large language models, so it is helpful to clearly understand their potential and help your company benefit from them while minimizing the risks.

Links:

• ChatGPT
• GitHub Copilot
• Microsoft Security Copilot

Recorded September 18, 2023

Ready to inject a little chaos into your systems? Richard talks to Kelly Shortridge about her book Security Chaos Engineering. Kelly discusses the challenges of modern cybersecurity - how do you find weaknesses in your infrastructure and security systems? This leads to a discussion about challenging assumptions by exploring the workflows that exist in your infrastructure today. Exploring the workflows shows where assumptions exist, and that opens the door to testing them. There's sure to be some low-hanging fruit you can deal with, but eventually, you're left with tests that have to be set loose on your system - and you'll find out how resilient you really are!

Links:

• Fastly
• Security Chaos Engineering
• Deciduous

Recorded August 22, 2023

It's episode 900! Richard brings friend Dana Epp onto the show to talk a bit about the last one hundred episodes of RunAs Radio - and a little look to the future as well. With Dana around, you know there will be lots of security conversation. Over the past hundred shows, ransomware has had quite the story arc, especially around Exchange Server and other products. The conversation then turns to more future-looking topics, including the various Microsoft Copilots being built - could these be tools to help sysadmins? Probably a topic for episode 1000!

Links:

• Windows Sandbox
• Microsoft Viva
• Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Recorded September 15, 2023

Your SharePoint is on-premises (at least for now), but you want to take advantage of some of those cool SharePoint Online features - is there a way? Richard talks with Sandy Ussia about her talk at the Thrive Conference in Slovenia about how on-premises SharePoint can use Power Automate and other tools to create powerful workflows. Sandy discusses the limits of the free version of Power Automate and how paying for the premium edition lets you build workflows that will more than cover the license cost. The conversation also dives into the subscription model of on-premises SharePoint 2019, which looks to be the final destination for on-premises SharePoint, with ongoing support and features being added!

Links:

• Thrive Conference
• Lightning Tools
• Upgrade to SharePoint Server Subscription Edition
• Power Automate and SharePoint
• Power Automate Desktop
• Power Automate Pricing
• SharePoint On-Premises Data Gateway

Recorded August 1, 2023

How do PowerBI and Microsoft Fabric work together? Richard talks to Mike Carlo about his experiences with Fabric so far. Mike explains how it is early days for Fabric and something you should experiment with, not roll out to production. The conversation dives into how we structure data analytics and the potential of Fabric to bring forward more of the pipeline work that analytics needs - so you can explore and get results faster. This leads to the idea of a new relationship between analysts and data engineers, one where you generate results first, then can optimize them with back-end engineering. There is enormous potential in PowerBI and Fabric together to change the data analytics game!

Links:

• PowerBI.Tips
• DataBricks
• PowerBI
• Azure Synapse Analytics
• Microsoft Fabric
• Azure Data Factory
• The Infinite Game

Recorded August 4, 2023

2023 has been a challenging year for sysadmins so far - how do we do more with less? Richard talks to Sonia Cuff about the current climate for IT in organizations and how we can still be successful. It's not all about building new things but being more efficient. Sonia talks about measuring more precisely - making sure that the expenses that IT has get assigned to revenue centers so that you're not cutting indiscriminately but associating costs with income - then those costs will more naturally adjust. The conversation also dives into new technologies that can be explored on the basis that they can improve efficiency - like large language models and their associated products. There's still a lot to do, but with a slightly different focus!

Links:

• Reality-Based Leadership
• Azure Sticker Shock
• FinOps Foundation
• ChatGPT
• M365 Copilot
• Old People's Home From 4 Years Olds

Recorded July 27, 2023

How would your organization report a data breach? Richard talks to Troy Hunt about his experiences with Have I Been Pwned and some good and not-so-good breach reporting. Troy talks about the importance of planning - making decisions about how to report is hard to do when you're under stress. And who do you report to? Are there regulatory requirements? What about your customers? Most people want to know if the data they entrusted to you has been stolen. And if you did want to contact every customer involved in a breach, how would you do that? This is a conversation for the C-suite, but you can start it!

Links:

• Have I Been Pwned
• security.txt
• Beg Bounty

Recorded July 17, 2023

Are you ready for M365 Copilot? Richard talks with Karoliina Kettukari about what we can expect from M365 Copilot and how you can help your organization prepare for it. Karoliina discusses the more straightforward aspects of M365 Copilot we can expect, such as taking advantage of more of the features in the Office suite of products like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The situation is more interesting when considering how Copilot could surface information from within your organization. Now you need to be thorough about identifying sensitive information and data governance as a whole. Plenty of policy and training is needed around these tools, but the benefits could be huge!

Links:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Microsoft Copilot Sales
• Office Delve
• Collaboration Governance

Recorded August 8, 2023

What is Microsoft Fabric, and why do you want some? Richard talks to Andrew Snodgrass of Directions on Microsoft about Microsoft's recently announced Fabric product. Andrew explains that Fabric is an effort to integrate the various data products, including PowerBI, DataLake, Data Factory, and Data Warehousing, under a standard banner. It is early days for Fabric, but it's a great time to take it out for a spin for those who haven't dug into Azure data analytics products. But if you have existing implementations of PowerBI and many other data products, test carefully - the migration paths aren't simple!

Links:

• Microsoft Fabric
• Azure Synapse Analytics
• Azure Data Factory
• Power BI
• Fabric Workspaces
• OneLake
• Kusto Query Language (KQL)
• Parquet Files in Fabric
• Microsoft Purview
• OneLake File Explorer

Recorded July 12, 2023

PowerShellGet V3 is getting close to release - what should we expect? Richard chats with Sydney Smith about the key features of PSG3 - especially the support for third-party and private repositories. Sydney talks about how developing the tool in the open on GitHub has helped steer the module into a great version. While there are some breaking changes, there's also a Compat module to help bridge the gap. And now PSG3 is part of PowerShell 7.4 - so we should see some exciting news this fall!

Links:

• PSReadLine
• PowerShell 7.4 Preview
• PowerShellGet
• PowerShell Gallery
• Artifactory
• PowerShellGet 3 Beta
• PowerShellGet on GitHub

Recorded July 10, 2023

How does Azure continue to evolve and grow? While at Build in Seattle, Richard chatted with Azure CTO Mark Russinovich about the evolution of Azure and where it is going. Mark talks about the challenges of the recent explosion in large language models like GPT3 and ChatGPT - the sheer amount of cloud computing resources necessary to generate these enormous models, much less operate them at scale. The conversation explores ongoing innovation in architecture and hardware design, including a discussion on the results of Project Natick, the underwater data center experiments of a few years ago. There are more innovations to come!

Links:

• Project Natick

Recorded May 25, 2023

What are your options for upgrading to Windows 11? Richard talks to Julie Andreacola about her experiences helping organizations make the move from Windows 10 to 11. Julie talks about the power of Windows Update for Business Deployment Services to simplify the OS update while still giving the users some control - you can set a deadline for when they must update, but the user can pick a time within that deadline to let it happen. Applications don't have a problem with the OS update, since, under the hood, it's Windows 10.1. Same for group policy - do some testing, but expect things to go well - the migration to Windows 11 looks good!

Links:

• Windows 11 Onboarding Toolkit
• Focus Assistant
• Windows 11 Live Captions
• Windows Update for Business Deployment Service
• Windows Autopilot
• Windows Update for Business

Recorded June 16, 2023

Integrated communication is everywhere! While at Build in Seattle, Richard talked with Bob Serr, the VP of Azure Communication Services (ACS) at Microsoft. Bob discusses how ACS provides tooling to integrate voice, text, and video into any application through Azure. This leads to a broader conversation about the power of deeper communication, especially for difficult discussions like tech support. Can adding video make it easier to diagnose a problem? And what is the role of the new large language model technologies coming from OpenAI in providing automated communications? There are a lot of possibilities available today!

Links:

• Azure Communication Services
• Azure OpenAI Service

Recorded May 25, 2023

How do you secure the sprawling array of services your organization depends on? Richard talks to Karinne Bessette about her experiences working with companies with virtually no internal infrastructure - using Software-as-a-Service products from various providers and finding their glue to keep multiple bits working together. Karinne talks about putting together teams to understand how workflows function first - then trying to put some governance around it. Single sign-on is a great place to start, but the solutions depend on what tools you're using. This is the new reality we're working in - we must find a way to secure it!

Links:

• Azure Single Sign On
• Okta
• Zero Trust
• Data Loss Prevention
• Azure Purview
• Microsoft Syntex

Recorded June 5, 2023

Windows 11 is coming to your organization - do you know how to deploy it? Richard talks to Johan Arwidmark about the need to get to work testing the deployment of Windows 11: Microsoft isn't giving us much of a choice about moving to it! Johan discusses the available deployment strategies, including Configuration Manager, Intune/Autopilot, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and more. Odds are, you will have to make some changes to how you deploy Windows to make things go smoothly with Windows 11, so it's a good time to get testing!

Links:

• Windows 11
• Support for Windows 11 in Configuration Manager
• Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
• Windows Autopilot
• Microsoft Intune
• PowerShell Deployment
• PSAppDeployToolkit

Recorded May 30, 2023

Whether you know it or not, Power Platform apps are proliferating! While at Techorama in Antwerp, Richard chatted with Luise Freese about her work with companies discovering that users are building Power Apps at alarming rates. Luise talks about the ability of users to find solutions in the Power Platform tools, often because they have enough security privileges (or demand them) to get access to data and systems... without many controls in place to ensure those resources are used correctly or securely! This leads to a conversation around providing guide rails for Power Platform developers, using security and governance. Get your telemetry cranked up - likely, you already have Power App proliferating!

Links:

• Create Reusable Custom Functions
• Component Libraries
• Dynamics 365
• Microsoft Dataverse
• Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit

Recorded May 16, 2023

It's 2023 - are you able to keep your systems patched? Richard talks to Sami Laiho about the emerging patching crisis. Sami talks about how MFA and user security have improved enough that they are no longer the primary path of exploitation for ransomware. Today, the main way to get breached is through unpatched computers. But patches are risky and can occasionally cause downtime - so we control when patches are installed and (hopefully) test extensively. Is it worth it? Is it better to be down for an hour due to a lousy patch versus down for months due to a breach? It's time to talk to leadership about a change of tone around patches - and get moving faster!

Links:

• Microsoft Authenticator
• Windows Autopatch
• Center for Internet Security
• Sami Laiho Website

Recorded May 10, 2023

Should you use Windows Server Update Services or Windows Update for Business? Richard talks to Aria Carley about the different update mechanisms available today - and some new ones that are coming! Aria talks about how Windows is evolving to routine, incremental feature updates - but that can be challenging for managed workstations. The conversation explores the roles of Configuration Manager, WSUS, WSUB, Group Policy, Intune, and the new Azure Update Management tools. Plus, a hint of what is to come - could there be an Update Copilot in our future?

Links:

• Configuration Manager
• Azure Update Management
• Microsoft Intune
• Windows Server Update Services
• Windows Update for Business
• Widows Client Roadmap Update
• Windows Autopatch

Recording May 4. 2023

What does high availability look like in 2023? Richard chats with Allan Hirt about his work with high-availability solutions today - not just on-premises but also in the cloud. Allan talks about the frustration folks had with moving workloads in the cloud during the pandemic panic, lift-and-shifting workloads focusing on getting things working quickly rather than cost-effectively. The results can be costly, to the point where some folks considering moving back off the cloud again - but does that make sense? Allan talks about creating high availability efficiently wherever you want to run your workloads!

Links:

• Always On on SQL Server with Azure VMs
• SQL Server 2022
• Azure Regions and Availability Zones
• Operations Manager

Recorded May 11, 2023

Are you using Microsoft Sentinel? Richard talks to Cloud Security Advocate Sarah Young about Sentinel, Microsoft's Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. Sarah talks about the role of the SIEM in creating a common place for all security-related data to arrive. She mentions some of the many tools in the Microsoft suite to feed into Sentinel - Defender for Endpoints, Identity, and Cloud as examples. Specialized analysis tools send summaries to Sentinel, but Sentinel can also process raw logs as well - make sure you need the data because billing for Sentinel is connected to the number of ingress sources. There's a lot to learn, but also a lot of great documentation and information to work from. Check the show notes for links!

Links:

• Microsoft Sentinel
• ArcSight
• Defender Security Alerts
• Defender for Endpoint
• Defender for Identity
• Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2022
• Defender for Cloud
• What is CSPM?
• Security Baselines Blog
• Microsoft Security Copilot

Recorded April 6, 2023

Are your finance people suffering from Azure sticker shock? Richard talks to Aidan Finn about his experiences with organizations discovering they spend far more on Azure than expected. Aidan talks about designing systems based on on-premises requirements where hardware is over-provisioned, and new features in Azure are added without a thought to cost. Getting finance involved in an Azure migration from the beginning can help mitigate the shock and balance features and costs. Plus, there are great tools for cost management in Azure that can allow for budget projections, catch unusual spending early, and point out opportunities to save money with specific services available today!

Links:

• Azure Firewall Premium
• Azure Advisor
• Cloud Adoption Framework
• Azure Pricing Calculator
• Microsoft Cost Management
• Azure Monitor
• Azure Reservations
• Azure Hybrid Benefit

Recorded April 6, 2023

Is your organization ready to respond to a security incident? Richard talks to Paula Januszkiewicz about her experience helping organizations respond effectively when a security incident occurs. Paula talks about detection - attackers often have breached your infrastructure months before their attacks become visible. Once you've detected a potential breach, the next steps are to determine where the breach comes from, or as Paula says, who is patient zero? And what are the indicators of compromise? It's not enough to slam the door shut on an attack - how do you keep it from happening again? The conversation explores the idea of threat hunting, of understanding what the black hats are doing by being able to respond effectively to isolate exploited machines but not necessarily shut them down. An attack is an opportunity - seize it!
Links:

• Cqure
• Attack Surface Reduction Rules
• Local Administrator Password Solution
• Security Information and Event Management
• Azure Sentinel

Recorded April 4, 2023

Is your Exchange server one of the vulnerable ones? Richard talks to Gareth Gudger about the ongoing security concerns around on-premises Exchange servers. The conversation addresses a blog post by the Exchange server team about restricting access of potentially vulnerable Exchange servers to Exchange Online. But, as Gareth explains, this has to do with hybrid Exchange, where your on-premises server can access Exchange Online in a privileged state. What is the right thing to do to limit exploits in Exchange? Keeping up with the latest versions, patching, and ultimately maintaining your entire infrastructure, especially Active Directory - all play a role in securing on-premises infrastructure. Stay vigilant!

Links:

• Blocking Email from Vulnerable Exchange Servers
• Tony Redmond's Comment on the Blog Post
• Deprecation of Remote PowerShell
• Re-enabling or Extending RPS
• Exchange Online PowerShell v3
• Exchange Server 2013 End of Support
• Turning off your Last Exchange Server
• Office 365 for IT Pros

Recorded April 4, 2023

Moving to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) has never been easier! Richard talks to Jen Sheerin about her work with the Azure Virtual Desktop Accelerator tools. Jen describes how moving workloads to AVD is part of the Cloud Adoption Framework that helps you integrate virtual desktop workloads with standard security and licensing practices. The conversation explores the different folks who use the accelerator - even for greenfield implementations of new virtual desktops! There are more great tools to help you optimize your AVD implementation. Check the links in the show notes!

Links:

• Azure Virtual Desktop
• Remote Desktop Services
• Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework
• AVD Remote Desktop Web Client
• Bicep
• Azure Virtual Desktop Accelerator
• Virtual Desktop Optimization Tool
• Windows 10 vs Windows 11 Benchmark
• License Universal Print

Recorded April 7, 2023

Large Language Models like ChatGPT are all the rage, but how will they impact work going forward? Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about the role of LLMs in the Windows ecosystem. Paul digs into the history of ChatGPT and how this whole wave of technology started more or less by accident until Microsoft grabbed on and created BingAI. Now with announcements for Copilot for security and M365, where else can the technology go? The conversation digs into the power of having a tool that can help you make sense of all the products you own and to go down the checklist of the right things to do when taking on a new task. We're still in the early days for large language models - the next version of Windows should be interesting!

Links:

• OpenAI
• Microsoft Security Copilot
• Microsoft Viva
• Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Removing the Bing Button from Microsoft Edge 111

Recorded April 3, 2023

The demand for effective data analytics within organizations continues to grow – how do you build your analytics team? While at SQLBits in Wales, panelists Maria Zakourdaev, Falek Miah, and Anupama Natarajan discussed their experiences with building teams - from recruiting to training, up-skilling, and retention. The discussion spans the different roles, including architects and data modelers, that help to provide the data sets analysts need. Do you train from within, hire into the role, or use consultants? There are many choices for growing your data analytics team!

Links:

• SQLBits

Recorded March 18, 2023

Ready to get some zero trust security inspiration? Richard chats with George Finney, author of Project Zero Trust, a fictional narrative about a company dealing with a security breach and the efforts to make the company more secure. George talks about the challenges of being a security professional and learning to speak to leadership in terms they can appreciate in their efforts to improve security overall. The conversation digs into the reality that security is about people, most of all, not so much as the problem but as the only viable solution. Want some help getting more resources for security? Read and share this book!

Links:

• Project Zero Trust
• Zero Trust Maturity Model
• Well Aware Security

Recorded March 21, 2023

How do you measure the productivity of your team? Richard talks to Angela Dugan about her work at 3Cloud, supporting groups that are primarily work-from-home and working with remote clients. What do you measure when you can't be face-to-face? Angela talks about using objective and subjective measures - time spent on a project- and how people feel about the work they are doing and the people they are doing it with. The conversation also turns to skill growth as part of measuring a team - making new skills portion of the work, sharing them with the team, and growing your value as an employee!

Links:

• Microsoft Viva

Recorded February 23, 2023

Are you ready for more IPv6 in your life? Richard talks to Pierre Roman about recent support added to Azure Active Directory for IPv6 - specifically around Conditional Access. Pierre talks about how in the past, IPv6 addresses weren't a part of Conditional Access - but now they are. This could cause problems for folks connecting to an Azure tenant via IPv6 if those IPv6 ranges aren't included as named locations. Even if this update hasn't impacted you yet, it can - changes to your ISP or when connecting to the internet can result in IPv6 access being required - don't get locked out!

Links:

• Google IPv6 Adoption
• Pierre's Blog Post on IPv6
• IPv6 Support in Azure Active Directory
• Azure DNS FAQ

Recorded March 27, 2023

Does multi-cloud make sense? Richard chats with Phoummala Schmitt about her explorations into building workloads that can survive a cloud outage. Phoummala begins the conversation with some definitions because most organizations are multi-cloud already, using more than one cloud provider. Referencing Gartner and Thoughtworks, the term "polycloud" covers that idea. Then the hard part - a workload that needs perfect uptime, even in the face of a cloud provider outage. That is a more complex and expensive proposition, but it is possible once you work through the details. The question is - is it worth it?

Links:

• Polycloud
• Kubernetes
• Kubernetes Cloud Controller Manager
• Azure Arc

Recorded February 16, 2023

Secure remote file access without OneDrive or VPNs? Richard chats with Ned Pyle about the power of SMB over QUIC. Ned talks about the ongoing battle to put older versions of SMB to bed and how QUIC is becoming the de facto standard for moving files around, both within the network and across the internet. While a lot of business files can be served effectively from OneDrive for Business, often, you have applications and infrastructure that depend on UNCs and other file mapping approaches. SMB for QUIC through Azure VMs and Azure Stack HCI allows the same UNC paths to work securely inside and outside your office network. Check it out!

Links:

• SMB1 Product Clearinghouse
• Windows Server
• SMB Compression
• SMB Signing
• SMB over QUIC
• Azure Stack HCI
• Learn SMB over QUIC
• SMB Insecure Guest Auth

Recorded February 3, 2023

What is your approach to incident management? While at NDC London, Richard talks to Hila Fish about her work in incident management. Hila talks about understanding when you have an incident and trying to grasp the scope before acting - is it impacting customer value? The goal is to learn from an incident to stop them from happening, and often immediate mitigations, like rebooting, destroy information needed for later analysis. Making the dashboard lights turn green is not enough - you want to get to a place where they never turn red!

Links:

• Jira Ticketing
• PagerDuty
• Grafana
• Swimm Documentation Engine

Recorded January 27, 2023

Ready to go passwordless? While at NDC in London, Richard chatted with Kyle Kotowick about the FIDO2 specification and how it is being implemented to provide more passwordless options for authentication. Kyle talks about how FIDO2 does not necessarily mean physical keys like the Yubikey - there are more options! The TPM chip in your PC or smartphone can act as the token generator when combined with a second authenticator, like fingerprint or facial recognition in Windows Hello. Ideally, this superior level of authentication is effortless - you use multifactor without even realizing you are!

Links:

• Fido Alliance
• YubiKeys
• Windows Hello for Business
• WebAuthn
• CTAP2

Recorded January 25, 2023

Managing reliability means being available when things go wrong. But how do you make the on-call time productive? While at NDC in London, Richard talked to Lesley Cordero about her work with the New York Times on reliability management teams. Lesley talks about how putting regular sprint work into on-call time causes more problems than it solves - the quality of work suffers, and people get frustrated. Better to focus on preventative work, which is more contemplative. Even better to have an array of preventive efforts that can be worked on over time. The goal is to have fewer outages and more reliability, and that means being able to communicate reliability needs to leadership - document all the things!

Links:

• Honeycomb

Recorded January 25, 2023

Are you ready to move your organization to Windows 11? Richard talks to Michael Niehaus about the upcoming end of support for Windows 10 in 2025 and the pressure to get to Windows 11. Michael talks about how slow Windows 11 adoption has been, mainly because there hasn't been a significant reason to do so. But as of October 14, 2025, organizations will have to pay for long-term support - and it's cheaper to move to Windows 11. The conversation digs into how Microsoft seems to be updating Windows 11, deployment strategies, and the optimal ways to move your workforce to a new operating system.

Links:

• Tanium
• Windows 11
• Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC
• Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
• Windows Autopilot
• Supporting Windows 11 in MDT
• Michael's Blog post on MDT and Windows 11

Recorded January 12, 2023

How do you improve the security of your organization? Richard talks to Jess Dodson about the current security environment we're living in and what you can do to improve your security posture. Jess talks about how breaches happen and what you can do to detect them early before things get worse. The conversation dives into getting more resources - in most cases, improving security means having the time to work on preventative measures, like implementing multi-factor authentication, security information and event management, and setting up Just Enough Administration. And you need the time to review the activities in your network to let you stop a breach before it turns into something worse!

Links:

• Privileged Identity Management
• Just Enough Administration
• Microsoft Sentinel
• Local Administrator Password Solution

Recorded January 20, 2023

How about a free suite of over 500 tools for SQL Server best practices, administration, development, and migration? Richard talks to Rob Sewell about the ever-growing dbatools PowerShell module. While its origins are in migrating SQL Server databases from one environment (and version) to another, the range of capabilities is extensive. Rob talks about the power of repeatability when attempting to do these potentially complex tasks - which is best served by scripting. But why write the scripts when they already exist? The conversation also digs into learning as a DBA, including getting involved with conferences like SQLBits!

Links:

• dbatools
• dbachecks
• dbatools on PowerShell Gallery
• SQL Server Management Objects
• dbatools in a month of lunches
• RunAs at SQL Bits!

Recorded January 10, 2023

Are you ready to move your intranet into the cloud? Richard talks to Susan Hanley about her work helping organizations migrate intranets into Microsoft 365 Sharepoint Online. Susan talks about avoiding lift-and-shift implementations for intranets - or anything going to the cloud. Better to take what you have learned about your intranet and build a governance plan in M365 to migrate content piece by piece. The good news is most of your old SharePoint customizations are now built-in capabilities in SharePoint Online! The conversation also digs into building pages to replace documents and what should be searchable - an intranet migration is a great chance to build an even better intranet!

Links:

• Viva Connections
• Private Channels in Microsoft Teams
• SharePoint News Part

Recorded January 6, 2023

Do your applications need identities? Richard talks to Martin Ehrnst about how all Azure resources, including your applications, need an identity to function well in the Azure ecosystem. Martin talks about registering an application with Azure AD, a process that includes a manifest showing how it should be authenticated and what resources it needs. Then to the more confusing part - the service principals that show up as enterprise applications to provide access to the application within your tenant or even across tenants! The conversation goes further into managed identities and this emerging world of many-to-many identity relationships. Ultimately it's the most powerful way to deal with access rights, but that doesn't mean it's simple!

Links:

• Azure Active Directory
• Azure Entra
• Azure AD Application Model
• Key Vault
• Managed Identities for Azure Resources
• Bicep

Recorded December 14, 2022

How is the DevOps movement evolving, and why should sysadmins care? Richard talks with April Edwards about how DevOps continues to grow with better tools and results! April talks about how often developers lead DevOps initiatives but that so much value comes from operations. The conversation digs into the tools that can facilitate deploying more frequently, measuring more accurately, and understanding how customers work. Everyone writes code these days, even if they aren't developers - and the DevOps cycle also applies there!

Links:

• Azure DevOps
• Policy as Code
• Repeatable Infrastructure
• DevContainers
• Virtual Machine Scale Sets
• Azure Load Testing
• Phoenix Project
• The DevOps Lab

Recorded December 14, 2022

Have you used LAPS? Richard chats with Jeremy Moskowitz about the Windows Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS). Jeremy talks about how the Premier Field Engineers originally developed LAPS at Microsoft to deal with having different local administrator passwords on every workstation in an organization. The passwords change automatically regularly, and sysadmins can retrieve the password for a given machine using PowerShell and other tools. Today there is an updated version of LAPS that works with Azure Active Directory and provides more control over password changes and restrictions - you need this tool!

Links:

• Netwrix Endpoint Management
• Windows Local Administrator Password Solution

Recording December 13, 2022

What are the new governance challenges in M365? Richard chats with Martina Grom about her ongoing work helping organizations provide governance over the growing surface area of Microsoft 365. Martina talks about the challenges around identity and multi-factor authentication and the improvements that Microsoft is making to MFA to make it easier for users to do the right thing. The conversation also turns to data loss prevention and the approaches to minimizing a company's legal exposure to data loss - starting with not storing data if you can avoid it! Martina also talks about the new challenges in governance with Power Apps, including the tools available to help sysadmins see what apps exist, how they touch data, and what privacy and security controls are in place. Governance is an ongoing effort!

Links:

• Microsoft Entra
• Privileged Identity Management
• Privileged Access Management
• Azure Purview
• Data Loss Prevention
• California Consumer Privacy Act
• Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit
• Power Platform Usage Insights
• Changes to Microsoft Authenticator
• Microsoft Purview Insider Risk
• Collaboration Governance
• Cloud Hub for Evergreening
• AtWork Blog

Recorded December 13, 2022

It's the end of 2022, and time to reflect on the work coming up in the next year – what will it be like for SysAdmins in 2023? Richard flies solo for his annual year-in-review show, looking back on last year's predictions (including what he got wrong!) and projecting forward into 2023. Security continues to be a top priority, but the situation has evolved. Current economic conditions likely will impact your business – how does it affect your work? How will the cloud continue to evolve, and how can you take advantage of it? 2022 was another unusual year, and 2023 looks even more so – thanks for sticking with us!

Links:

• CycloneDX

Mary Jo Foley moves on! No, not entirely from Microsoft - away from writing several times a week about the latest enterprise topics. MJ is going to Directions on Microsoft, where she will spend more time on analysis but still communicate it to the world. The conversation digs into current subjects like the state of the cloud and Microsoft's focus on building industry-specific cloud implementations, and precisely what is happening with Windows these days? Lots of great thinking from MJ, as usual, and a hint of what's to come!

Links:

• Mary Jo Foley Leaves ZDNet
• Directions on Microsoft
• Microsoft Industry Cloud
• Windows 10 22H2
• Windows Server 2022
• Azure Arc
• Google Anthos

Recorded November 11, 2022

You're moving to the cloud; how does your application security look? Richard talks with Carroll Moon of CloudFit about moving applications into the cloud with better security and governance using the Azure Landing Zone approach. Carroll talks about the various patterns that allow existing applications to work in the zero-trust environment, with containerization, platform-as-a-service changes, and even desktop virtualization! The blackhats are improving, and the cloud is less vulnerable than existing on-premises solutions, but only if you embrace the cloud security models. New standards for cybersecurity are emerging - are you up to speed?

Links:

• Azure Landing Zone
• Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification
• Microsoft Power Platform
• Microsoft Purview
• Microsoft Defender for the Cloud
• Azure Virtual Desktop

Recorded October 31, 2022

Is Excel damaging your company? Richard talks with Jen Stirrup about how Excel gets used far too much in businesses and for too many things. Jen talks about the lack of data integrity in Excel and how it's easy to make small mistakes that can damage data - and give you little to no methods to detect the damage! While Excel can often be a starting point for a new business opportunity, as soon as it becomes essential, it's time to pivot to tools that can protect data quality more effectively! Don't let your company be the next news story about a flawed spreadsheet!

Links:

• Jen's Blog Post on Excel
• TransAlta Excel Mistakes
• Excel Inquire Add-In
• Snowflake

Recorded October 28, 2022

What do SysAdmins want for Christmas? Richard chats with Rick Claus and Joey Snow about their favorite gadgets for SysAdmins. From the gadgets that help us at work to the toys that make us happy at home, it's a shopping spree of goodies! Share this episode with your loved ones to give them ideas on what to get you for Christmas, you impossible-to-shop-for SysAdmin!

Links:

• DalStrong Call of Duty Knives
• PhotoStick Omni
• Permatrack
• Dr Zzs LED Shop
• Bluetooth Beanie Hat
• Rosewood Block
• Star Wars Ice Cube Blocks
• Ember Temperature Control Mug
• Edge Lit Acrylic
• Reel View
• Galaxy Tab S8
• Floppy Disk Coaster
• AstroReality
• Satechi USB Headphone Stand
• Anker LC40 Flashlight
• LG Laser Projector

The pandemic has put a lot of stress on teams - how do we make them stronger? Richard talks to Stephanie Donahue about strengthening teams and communities as we emerge from the pandemic. Steph talks about the water cooler and happy hour conversations lost the past couple of years and the value they once provided and should again. Does that mean going back to the office? What are the alternatives? Maybe the new tools can help, or we should just have lunch?

Links:

• Weak Ties BBC Article
• Chris Voss Negotiation Training
• Viva Insights
• Meta Quest Pro
• Viva Engage

Recorded October 25, 2022

How are Azure and AWS Billing different? Richard chats with Corey Quinn of Screaming in the Cloud about his experiences experimenting with all the other clouds. Corey talks about his concerns around the security issues with Azure this past year - not the problems themselves, but how Microsoft handled them. The conversation also digs into using Cognitive Services and being unsure what things will cost until the end of the month. What about GCP and Oracle as well? Corey has tried them all and has thoughts!

Links:

• Last Week in AWS
• Cognitive Services Computer Vision

Recorded October 26, 2022

Why do you need Azure Stack? Richard chats with Sarah Lean about the capabilities Azure Stack HCI brings to your organization. Sarah describes the three flavors of Azure Stack, including Hub, Edge, and HCI - short for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure. While all the options act like a part of Azure, they are optimized for different needs, but primarily focus on putting Azure-style compute closer to where you need it, perhaps as part of a machine learning solution, IoT, and so on. Azure Arc plays a role in giving you a broad view of your cloud assets, Stack assets, and regular on-premises resources also!

Links:

• Azure Stack HCI
• Azure Arc
• Azure Stack HCI Pro 2
• FastTrack for Azure

Recorded October 24, 2022

What can SQL 2022 do for you? Richard chats with Bob Ward about the upcoming release of SQL Server 2022 and its evolution toward data anywhere. Bob talks about running SQL on edge devices, on-premises, in containers, virtual machines, and, of course, in the cloud. The management tools like Azure Arc make it easy to take care of all the places your SQL data can now live - and let you be the data administrator you can be! Check out Bob's latest book on SQL Server 2022 and all its hybrid data capabilities!

Links:

• SQL Server 2022
• SQL Server 2022 Revealed
• Microsoft Purview
• Azure Role-Based Access Control
• Azure Data Lakes
• Azure Arc-Enabled SQL Managed Instance
• Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform
• SQL Server 2022 Preview

Recorded October 26, 2022

What is the state of scripting in your organization? Richard talks to Christina Wheeler about Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and its role in the array of tooling in M365 to take existing scripting and wrap it into modern automated workflows. Christina talks about how Power Automate for Desktop can work with an Excel macro to further automation to make an entire process hands-off or reduce the number of touches you need to make. It can be a bit messy at times, but there are lots of tools, and there is always Teams to put a collaborative UI over top of it. Automation has never been easier!

Links:

• Robotic Process Automation
• Power Automate Desktop
• CONA Services
• Azure Logic Apps
• Office Scripts
• Power Canvas Apps
• MS Learn
• M365 Developer Platform
• UiPath

Recorded September 10, 2022

The return of Two Grumpy Old Men Complain about Windows! Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about a year of Windows 11 - the good, the bad, and the meh. Paul talks about the bits of Windows 10X that became Windows 11 and how simplifications in Win11 may annoy power users but are beneficial to regular folks. But nobody benefits from the ads on the desktop - except Microsoft. The conversation turns to the hardware side of the world and the soon-to-be-announced ARM-based Windows laptop. After all, there are already ARM servers in Azure, so when do we get a new generation of great workstations?

Links:

• Thurrott

Recorded September 8, 2022

How can Viva Learning improve your team's productivity? Richard chats with Ulrika Hedlund about how the latest generation of tools from Microsoft helps measure productivity and focus on learning opportunities. The M365 platform can show where employees struggle with tools that lead to learning opportunities - and then measure the results! Ulrika talks about the various kinds of learning needed within an organization, including compulsory learnings for regulated industries, standard corporate training, and then moving more into productivity and industry-focused knowledge. Viva Learning and the related tools make it easier than ever to build custom learning materials that can make learning more specific to your company and fun as well!

Links:

• Microsoft Productivity Score
• LinkedIn Learning
• Viva Learning
• Learning API for Viva Learning

Recorded August 9, 2022

How do you make manageable Infrastructure-as-Code? Richard talks to Joe Duffy about his open-source project called Pulumi, helping you build Infrastructure-as-Code solutions in almost any language for virtually any cloud platform or service. Joe talks about how infrastructure folks are headed down a similar path to developers from a few years ago, needing better source control, testing, and tooling for their infrastructure. And these are solved problems in the development space. By taking advantage of developer tooling, you can make Infrastructure-as-Code that is reusable and modular so that you can solve complicated problems like security implementations once. Then, when changes need to happen, they're made in one place and easy to propagate to all your projects.

Links:

• Pulumi
• VSCode

Recorded September 6, 2022

What can GitHub do for your PowerShell scripts? Richard talks to Barbara Forbes about using GitHub and PowerShell together. Barbara first discusses the fundamentals - using GitHub as your source code repository for PowerShell. It takes some time to learn, but you can start just using it for yourself. Things get more complex when multiple people start to work on the scripts, but they also get better. Then the conversation turns to the fun stuff - using Github Copilot to help you write your scripts, incorporating GitHub Actions to automate testing and deployment. PowerShell code is code and should have all the protections and power tools that GitHub provides!

Links:

• PowerShell on GitHub
• Visual Studio Code
• GitHub Skills
• GitHub Flow
• GitHub Copilot
• GitHub Actions
• Pester
• PSProfiler
• Barbara's Blog

Recorded August 3, 2022

What can a sysadmin learn from a developer? Richard chats with Rick Taylor about his experiences learning from developers to write better code - sysadmin code, of course, like PowerShell, Python, and even YAML. Rick talks about how PowerShell code works across all the clouds and how organizations need well-managed PowerShell the same way developers create well-managed compiled code. The conversation explores the various developer techniques that can help sysadmins be more productive - call it DevOps if you like, but it mostly looks like getting work done!

Links:

• PowerShell for GCP
• PowerShell for AWS
• PowerShell for Azure
• Azure DevOps
• GitHub

Recorded August 9, 2022

Can you use artificial intelligence technologies in data analytics? Richard chats with Priscilla Camp about using cognitive services in PowerBI for image recognition, natural language processing, and even sentiment analysis. Priscilla describes her experience doing analysis on data from the Universal Studio theme parks in Orlando, going beyond simple happy/neutral/sad ranking into analyzing the thousands of comments made by folks in the park. Through sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction, those comments can be turned into actions the park can take to improve people's experiences - and potentially increase revenues!

Links:

• Azure Data Factory
• Azure Synapse Analytics
• PowerBI
• Cognitive Services in PowerBI
• Azure Cognitive Services
• Key Phrase Extraction
• Kaggle
• Learning Cognitive Services

Recorded August 5, 2022

How do you learn PowerShell effectively? Richard chats with Jeff Hicks about his experiences teaching PowerShell from the beginning. Jeff talks about strategies to learn more about PowerShell as you code, not just searching for cut-and-paste examples. The danger of cut-and-paste is that you don't get a chance to understand what you're working on - you need to write some code to get better. This line of reasoning turns the conversation to routine learning, ensuring you're writing a little PowerShell daily to grow your skills - whether that's code you need in your work or more practice-related code. PowerShell is a superpower. You just need to learn it!

Links:

• PowerShell
• VMware PowerCLI
• PowerShell.org
• PowerShell on Discord
• PowerShell Practice Primer
• Behind the PowerShell Pipeline
• Jeff's Blog

Recorded July 26, 2022

PowerApps are proliferating - how do you keep them under control? Richard talks to April Dunnam about managed environments for PowerApps, providing oversight and governance. April talks about the Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit as a way to get started in the governance model with tooling for insights, auditing, compliance, and even helping connect the folks building PowerApps in your organization. It's early days for the tooling, but worth the effort to help get PowerApps to be part of the same application lifecycle management processes that already exist in your organization!

Links:

• Managed Environments
• Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit
• Express Design
• Power Platform Extension for VS Code

Recorded July 15, 2022

On July 8, the Rogers company in Canada had a total network outage for 15 hours - what happened? Richard talks to Dana Epp about what we can learn from an outage like this. Dana talks about having an open root cause analysis to provide detailed discussion without accusation or blame. You understand the potential when you look at how the airline industry has become incredibly safe through open root cause analysis. Outages are bad - but learning from them is what makes up better!

Links:

• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
• Rogers Outage Press Release
• Cloudflare View of Rogers Outage
• CSE Russia cyber threat

Recorded July 15, 2022

Viva continues to evolve - what's the latest? Richard talks to Sandy Ussia about her work with the various Viva modules and approaches to customizing Teams. Sandy talks about how it's possible to shape a Teams experience to fit your organization, including using third-party components - there are many choices! When your Teams is in good shape, there are plenty of new Viva modules to explore, including Topics, a knowledge management system using machine learning to extract critical aspects of your organization. And related to that machine learning module are upcoming Sales and Goals! The Viva family keeps growing!

Links:

• Accessible PowerApps
• Lightning Tools
• Microsoft Viva
• Viva Connections
• SharePoint News
• Adaptive Cards
• Microsoft Viva Topics
• Office Delve
• Microsoft Viva Sales
• Microsoft Viva Goals

Recorded July 15, 2022

What's the best Windows Server and Azure hybrid configuration? Richard talks to Orin Thomas about the new Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate certification. Orin digs into how the hybrid certifications pick up where regular Windows Server certifications leave off, adding Azure's role as backup, extended storage, telemetry, and security solutions. The conversation explores how different organizations implement services like file storage and how Azure can add to those solutions without needing significant user retraining but still add essential capabilities. Hybrid is a logical destination for some organization workloads, and certification can get you up to speed on all the options!

Links:

• Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate
• Azure File Sync
• Azure Sentinel
• Migrating Hyper-V VMs to Azure

Recorded July 5, 2022

Can you migrate group policy objects to Intune? Richard chats with Katy Nicholson about her work modernizing Windows client machines through Microsoft Endpoint Manager, making on-premises Active Directory optional. Katy discusses using the Group Policy Analyzer to understand what policies will work through Endpoint Manager and Configuration Service Providers. The next question is, what policies are irrelevant or obsolete? This leads to a conversation around refreshing security for an organization - why does this policy exist. How is it applied to non-Windows devices? Does it still make sense? Ultimately, all policies are about security, which means getting to zero trust. How does policy work in a zero trust environment, and where do you have to make exceptions?

Links:

• Katy's Blog
• Microsoft Endpoint Manager
• Configuration Service Provider
• Group Policy Analyzer
• Importing Group Policy Objects into Intune
• Azure AD and Windows Hello

Recorded July 5, 2022

How does Microsoft Loop help you collaborate? Richard talks to Stephen Rose about the recent addition of Loop to Teams. Loop uses the Fluid Framework to provide collaborative spaces to create to-dos and other lists with multiple people working simultaneously, marking up and responding to information. Documents and other assets brought into a workspace can be added to emails and other documents while remaining live. Every time you open them, they grab the latest info from the documents in the Loop workspace. Appropriate security privileges still apply, but Loop makes it easier for folks to work the way they want to and take advantage of up-to-date info from the M365 accounts in your organization!

Links:

• Inside Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Loop
• Fluid Framework
• Data Loss Prevention
• Forms
• OneDrive for Business

Recorded June 3, 2022

Your Intranet needs news, and SharePoint can help! Richard chats with Emily Mancini about the power of the News part in SharePoint to keep your Intranet more dynamic with a steady stream of new content. Emily talks about creating an ecosystem of evolving content on your Intranet so that it is more than just a set of links to HR information. The conversation dives into targeting news effectively within your organization to keep it relevant and how a good Intranet is ultimately a reflection of its culture - so take it seriously!

Links:

• SharePoint News Part
• Audience Targeting in SharePoint
• People Web Part
• Microsoft 365 Community Content
• Sharing Is Caring
• How to Share Org-Wide Communication in Microsoft 365
• Emily's Blog

Recorded Monday, June 6, 2022

Windows Admin Center in Azure? Richard talks to Prasidh Arora about the preview of WAC in Azure - giving admins that familiar Windows Admin Center view of Azure Virtual Machines running Windows Server 2016 or later. Prasidh talks about creating a unified view and admin access to your servers, whether they are running on-premises, in Azure, or even on other cloud infrastructures. Installing Azure Arc on a server makes it available from WAC in Azure. The conversation also digs into the privileges challenges - making sure you have rights on the server for WAC's different capabilities. But with WAC for Azure, we're one step closer to a unified view and control of infrastructure.

Links:

• Windows Admin Center
• Azure Arc
• Manage Azure Arc-enabled Servers with WAC
• Azure Stack HCI
• Azure RBAC

Recorded June 3, 2022

How do you keep Windows devices updated? Richard talks to Aria Carley about Microsoft's array of update services, including Windows Update for Business, Windows Server Update Services, Intune, Configuration Manager, and more! The host of products can be intimidating, but Aria lays out their role in your organization in a triangle of cost, time, and risk. The options range from allowing consumer-style automatic updates to controlling every install and the order they take place. Where is your comfort level on the triangle?

Links:

• Windows Update for Business
• Windows Server Update Services
• Microsoft Intune
• Configuration Manager
• Update Management in Azure
• Windows Update for Business Deployment Service

Recorded Wednesday, June 8, 2022

Does your organization have a data culture? Richard talks with Microsoft CVP Rohan Kumar, and Mars VP Santosh Jamadagni about building organizations focused on data rather than opinion to drive the company forward. Rohan talks about getting data out of silos and into the hands of folks that can act on the information to make better business decisions. Santosh discusses how Mars has empowered workers throughout the Mars organization with real-time information. The conversation digs into the need to apply security rules to data as it enters the organization so that it is immediately available to the right people at the right time. Data availability is the key to a data culture!

Links:

• Microsoft Data Platform
• Azure Synapse Link
• Azure Purview

Recorded May 4, 2022

How can Viva Insights improve personal productivity and the productivity of the team? Richard talks to Karoliina Kettukari about the role of Viva Insights - starting with that daily email you likely already get. Karoliina talks about folks using M365 leaving traces of their work and how Insights puts that information to work. Insights help you be more productive by helping you block out time for meaningful work, make sure you follow through on commitments you make, and even identify when you may be working too much. The conversation also explores the management tooling for Insights to help leaders see their team's productivity in the aggregate!

Links:

• Microsoft Viva
• Viva Insights
• Goverance for Teams

Recorded May 4, 2022

Are you ready to turn off your last exchange server? Richard talks with Tony Redmond about the recent announcement by Microsoft around management tools for Exchange Hybrid. Tony discusses how organizations that migrated Exchange to Office 365 are stuck with one last server: The server that hosts management tools. The management tools move to a workstation, but they are PowerShell only. And the process of shutting down your last Exchange Server is very much a one-way trip, at least for now. Should you do it? Tony says it's time to get started!

Links:

• Office 365 for IT Pros
• Retiring Your Last Exchange Server
• Project Monad
• FastTrack Eligibity
• Microsoft Replication Service

Recorded May 2, 2022

How does healthcare function in the cloud? Richard talks to Lynn Langit about her work helping healthcare-related workloads move into the cloud. Lynn talks about how lift-and-shift is a great starting point - it stops analysis-paralysis and gets a baseline on costs in the cloud, which helps plan high return-on-investment activities around workloads. The conversation digs into the visualization challenge: It is hard to see what is being moved into the cloud and how it is operating there. Lynn digs into the cloud-as-architecture side of things since most customers do not know how working in the cloud is supposed to look, and there are distinct differences from on-premises operations!

Links:

• Lynn's Website
• Azure FastTrack
• Microsoft R Application Network

Recorded May 2, 2022

What happens when your neighbor starts a war? Richard chats with Sami Laiho about how his work has changed since the conflict between Russia and Ukraine began. Sami talks about splitting the active directory infrastructure of companies that have offices in both Finland and Russia. The conversation dives into the complexities of making two AD solutions from one - splitting admins, FSMO roles, etc. Then there is the cyber warfare problem - countries bordering Russia have dealt with many cyber attacks over the years and have some excellent practices. Do you?

Links:

• Sami's Blog

Recorded May 2, 2022

What are the technical skills that the modern IT Pro needs? Richard chats with Sonia Cuff about a recent blog post that digs into the array of technical skills she sees today. Many are old standbys, like networking and server configuration. And the cloud is undoubtedly an essential part of the current skill set. But there are newer aspects to explore, like source control for scripts and Infrastructure-as-Code. While you don't have to have every skill, it's worth thinking about how you're expanding your skill set and what new things you can add to be more effective!

Links:

• Sonia's Blog Posts
• Azure Monitor
• Dynamic Thresholds
• Azure Bicep
• Setting up Windows Terminal

Recorded April 21, 2022

In Las Vegas, once again, this is the Q&A session from the SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference in April 2022. Richard moderated questions and answers from SQL luminaries, including Bob Ward, Buck Woody, Pam Lahoud, Bradley Ball, Des Fitzgerald, Davide Mauri, Rie Merritt, and Kevin Farlee. The conversation ranges over Azure SQL migration, new features in SQL Server 2022, challenges in scaling, reliability, disaster recovery, and more!

Links:

• SQL Server and Azure SQL Conference

Recorded April 7, 2022

How can backups protect you from ransomware? Richard chats with Karinne Bessette about how backup technology has responded to the need for ransomware protection. Whether it's intelligent backup tape systems that automatically pop out tapes so they won't overwrite or other air-gap strategies for backups, you need to have a backup you can rely on to recover from a ransomware attack without paying the ransom. Backups can also be a part of the requirements for ransomware insurance - and if your backups aren't sufficient, they can void the insurance! It is also crucial to know what it takes to restore from backup, how long it takes, and the order of things when recovering, even from the ground up. Backups aren't going away any time soon!

Links:

• Malware and Ransomware Protection in Microsoft 365
• Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
• Microsoft Sentinel

Recorded March 25, 2022

Can we move away from Active Directory? Richard talks to Travis Roberts about the prospect of moving organizations off of Windows Active Directory and solely onto Azure Active Directory with Microsoft Intune. Travis talks about the critical aspects of Windows Active Directory - NTLM and Kerberos. Can your organization live without them? That means file shares and printing for most places. Microsoft has recommended that hybrid AD is the long-term solution, and for most sites, that's probably right. But how can you depend on Windows AD less? Can new machines coming into the organization avoid being AD-joined? Lots of great thinking about moving forward with Active Directory!

Links:

• Azure Active Directory
• Azure Active Directory Domain Services
• Active Directory
• Azure Universal Print
• Windows 365 Business
• Microsoft Intune
• Hybrid Azure AD
• Travis' Blog
• Travis' YouTube

Recorded March 3, 2022

How do you manage the sprawl of Teams? Richard chats with Erica Toelle and John Gruszczyk about the governance of Teams, starting with allowing a bit of sprawl in the first place - people give up on tools that are too locked down. You have to leave room to explore! But once folks engage with Teams and the sprawl gets a bit out of control, there are tools to help you protect people and information shared there. John talks about controlling access to different parts of Teams, depending on your role in the organization and external guests. Erica dives into labeling data as sensitive and how the Data Loss Prevention tooling can help protect data and indicate where it might be exposed inappropriately. There are many approaches to controlling sprawl. You can choose what is best for your organization!

Links:

• Microsoft Teams
• Multifactor Authentication
• Access Governance in Teams
• Data Loss Prevention Policy
• Power Automate
• Virtual Agents
• Teams and SharePoint Integration

Recorded March 3, 2022

We all have those problem WiFi devices - how do you fix them? Richard chats with Ryan Woodings about Tonic, the latest product from MetaGeek that helps you analyze WiFi traffic by the device to understand its problems. Ryan talks about tracking WiFi-specific information, including what AP a client is connecting to and all the intimate details of WiFi connection negotiating. Tools like Tonic can identify a broken antenna in a device based on that traffic or just poor decision-making by the WiFi chipset - and what you can do about it!

Links:

• Signifi for Business
• WireShark

Recording March 3, 2022

How do you keep your SQL queries fast? Richard chats with Monica Rathbun about her approaches to SQL Server query tuning. Monica starts with defining the problem - how do we know that the database is the performance bottleneck? The conversation dives into measuring query performance and the power of Query Store, but only on SQL Server 2016 and above, so get upgrading! Entity Framework is a standard tool for developers to automate access to SQL. Still, it can generate some pretty ugly queries, and Monica talks about different ways to improve them, including the old standby of writing a stored procedure. Lots of ideas for folks struggling to make their databases go fast!

Links:

• Monitoring Performance with Query Store
• Common Table Expressions
• Cursors in SQL Server
• SQL Server Profiler
• Glenn's SQL Server Performance Blog

Recorded February 22, 2022

Ready to flex your Bicep? Richard talks to John Downs from Azure Fast Track about configuring Azure resources using Bicep. John talks about Azure Resource Manager (ARM) being the under-the-hood way to create Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service, but folks don't enjoy working directly in the JSON that makes up an ARM template. Enter Bicep, a domain-specific language that generates the JSON for you. Today Bicep is Microsoft's recommended way to build Azure resources, offering access to source control, testing, and automation that makes your Azure site more reliable and easier to maintain!

Links:

• Bicep Docs
• Azure Resource Manager
• Bicep Modules
• Bicep Registry
• Testing Bicep
• Azure AD Privileged Identity Management
• Learn Bicep

Recorded March 3, 2022

What's coming in the next version of PowerShellGet? Richard chats with Sydney Smith about PowerShellGet in general and version 3 specifically. Sydney talks about how PowerShellGet appears like a command in PowerShell but is a separate module installed by default with PowerShell and is getting more features and some breaking changes. But version 3 also includes some compatibility features so that you can use your scripts dependent on PowerShellGet 2 within PowerShellGet 3. While there are some breaking changes, they make it easier to find and install the packages you need from the PowerShell Gallery or any other PowerShell repository you want to access.

Links:

• The PowerShell Gallery
• MyGet
• PowerShell Gallery
• PowerShellGet Preview 12
• Desired State Configuration
• PowerShellGet vNext on GitHub

Recorded February 17, 2022

What can Chocolatey do for you? Richard talks to Gary Ewan Park about the latest version of Chocolatey, including Chocolatey for Business. Originally a free, open-source product for application management primarily targeted at software developers, Chocolatey has evolved into a modern software automation product for managing software deployment on workstations and servers. Gary talks about keeping deployments self-contained and straightforward - use the Internet if you want to, but you can also do all deployments from a local package manager as well. With self-service and central management tools, you should look at the latest version of Chocolatey for Business!

Links:

• Chocolatey
• Chocolatey for Business
• Puppet
• Chef
• Boxstarter
• Chocolatey Community Repository
• Windows Autopilot

Recording February 17, 2022

Is Azure Arc a crucial part of bringing the cloud into your organization? Richard talks with Microsoft CVP Erin Chapple about how Arc helps with digital transformation. Erin discusses the challenges of adding the cloud into an organization from a governance, regulatory, and security perspective, how Azure Arc provides oversight and control for those issues, and more. The conversation also gets into a survey done by Harris Polls for Microsoft that showed how the digital transformation process continues in most organizations, with hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure being a common outcome. All the more reason to use Azure Arc to manage it all!

Links:

• Arc at Ferguson
• Arc at Nokia
• Arc at Siemens Healthineers
• Hybrid & Multicloud Perceptions Survey
• MultiCloud and Hybrid Using Azure Arc with Jeremy Winter
• Inside Azure for IT

Recorded February 17, 2022

How do you secure your email transport? Richard talks to Gareth Gudger about the various additional protocols and approaches essential to transporting email. Gareth reminds us that SMTP, like the Internet, was not designed with security in mind, so we have to add layers to try and improve things. It is an acronym soup of SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, and DANE - but every acronym gets a definition! Sure, there is more to email security than just transport, but arguably, this is the place to start. And after that - focus on identity security!

Links:

• Office 365 for IT Pros
• HAFNIUM Exploit
• MTA-STS for Exchange Online
• Email Encryption in M365
• Advanced Message Encryption
• M365 Maps
• SPF in M365
• Gareth's Blog

Recorded February 15, 2022

Windows Virtual Desktop is now Azure Virtual Desktop! Richard chats with Jen Sheerin about how Windows Virtual Desktop has evolved to become Azure Virtual Desktop - it's much more than a name change! Jen talks about how AVD is fully integrated into Azure, using ARM for configuration, tied in with Insights, and all the other Azure products you count on to manage, monitor, and maintain infrastructure. The conversation also dives into the Azure Fast Track program to help you get started with AVD and the kind of proof-of-concept projects you can build. There are many choices, but the best time to start is now!

Links:

• Windows Virtual Desktop QuickStart
• Autoscale Preview for Azure Virtual Desktop Host Pools
• What is Azure Virtual Desktop?
• Windows Enterprise Multi-session Remote Desktop
• Azure Virtual desktop for on-premises Azure Stack
• FastTrack for Azure
• Azure Active Directory Domain Services
• US Azure Virtual Desktop User Group
• Azure Migrate
• Azure ExpressRoute
• Azure Data Box

Recorded February 15, 2022

It's 2022, time for a new version of SQL Server! Richard chats with Bob Ward about Microsoft's latest release of their ubiquitous database. The conversation starts out with a little bit of history of how SQL Server has evolved over the decades - and how there's still a need for a database in organizations, but the feature set has changed. Bob talks about making hybrid really work, whether it's an on-premises database that backs up and fails over to the cloud, or how tools like Azure Purview can live in the cloud and help monitor and govern on-premises databases. And if you do choose to migrate to the cloud, these hybrid options make life easier - especially with SQL 2022!

Links:

• Azure SQL Revealed
• SQL Server 2022
• Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Azure Synapse Analytics
• SQL Query Store with Erin Stellato
• Azure Purview
• Azure Arc

Recorded January 13, 2022

How does Microsoft Viva work alongside your Intranet? Richard talks to Tracy van der Schyff about her recent projects integrating Viva into existing intranet infrastructures. Tracy explains that Viva, specifically Viva Connections, does not change your Intranet but does assist in organizing access to various aspects of your Intranet with dashboards and the SharePoint App Bar. This leads to a conversation about managing both curation and customization of views of an organization to its employees. A single view doesn't work for everyone, and uncontrolled customization leads to chaos - where is the balance? The new tools in Viva can help!

Links:

• Microsoft Viva
• Viva Connections
• Viva Learning
• SharePoint App Bar
• Microsoft Yammer
• Microsoft Viva in Docs
• Microsoft Viva Essential Training
• Microsoft Viva Roadmap
• Microsoft Viva Blog
• Microsoft Viva at Ignite
• Tracy's Blog

Recorded January 17, 2022

The Internet Explorer 11 desktop application retires and goes out of support on June 15, 2022. Are you ready? Richard talks to Joel Hawks about what retirement actually means - the IE11 icon disappears, and only the Edge browser remains. But IE is not gone, it runs inside of Edge instead. Joel talks about getting away from depending on IE at all, by going through an evaluation process of web applications to see whether or not they actually depend on IE, or can run properly using the Edge rendering engine. There are a number of tools to help with this migration, including the Microsoft FastTrack service - give them a call!

Links:

• Enterprise Mode Site List
• Site Discovery with SCOM
• Disable Internet Explorer 11 Policy
• Cloud Site List
• Azure AD Application Proxy
• Edge Setup Guide
• Edge Policies
• Microsoft FastTrack

Recorded January 13, 2022

It's 2022, how do you manage your client machines? Richard chats with Julie Andreacola about modern client management. Julie talks about how the pandemic accelerated the need for modern client technologies, including being able to provision and configure computers that will never be in the office. The conversation digs into Windows Autopilot and Microsoft Intune compared with more traditional deployment and configuration approaches. While the new approaches are broader and don't have as many detailed options as the old approaches, security is a key strength in modern client architecture - and that could be the key driver to change up your client management approach!

Links:

• Microsoft FastTrack
• Windows Autopilot
• Microsoft Intune
• Azure AD Joined Devices
• Windows 11
• DFCI on Surface Devices
• Deploying Win32 Apps via Intune
• Windows 365 Cloud PC
• Azure Virtual Desktop
• M365 Data Loss Prevention

Recorded December 27, 2021

Back in Las Vegas and in person, this is the Q&A session from the SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference in December 2021.

Bob Ward, Anna Hoffman, Buck Woody, Bradley Ball, Tim Chapman, Pedro Lopes, and a host of other great SQL speakers fielded questions from an audience of database professionals and developers - and the questions are wide-ranging!

Links:

• SQL Server and Azure SQL Conference

What's a security audit, and why do you need one? Richard talks to Paula Januszkiewicz about auditing security, technical reviews, and so-called penetration testing. Paula talks about needing outside experts who focus on the scope of exploits out in the world today to help make sure all aspects of your company's systems are reasonably secure - there is no such thing as perfect security! The conversation gets into the details around finding a good auditor, what to expect from them, and what they will expect from you - a good security audit takes time, and is a conversation!

Recorded December 21, 2021

Getting your Public Key Infrastructure right can be tricky - and getting wrong can be very bad. Richard talks to Richard Hicks about the right way to go about setting up and operating a PKI infrastructure in your organization. Different from the public certificates you use for websites and servers, Richard focuses on how to use certificates to authenticate and authorize users and devices. Tools like Intune and Autopilot can help you get certificates out to devices and users, as well as bootstrap new equipment security into your infrastructure. There's a lot to learn!

Links:

• Server Certificate Deployment
• Active Directory Auto-Enrollment
• Certificates in Intune
• Windows Autopilot
• Certificate Connector for Microsoft Intune
• Hybrid Azure AD Joined Devices
• Azure AD Kerberos Authentication
• Richard Hicks Blog
• Implementing Always On VPN

Recorded December 13, 2021

2021 was a tough year for security - how can we do better in 2022? Richard chats with Jess Dodson about working to get better at information security in your organization. Jess talks about the log4j exploit as a great example of "what don't we know" - and the need for a software bill of materials as part of your configuration management database. Having a list of the libraries that internal applications depend on helps you respond in a time of crisis, being able to answer the question "where are we vulnerable?" This leads to a conversation about better DevSecOps - where development, security, and operations all take security seriously and help each other to help the organization succeed!

Links:

• Power Apps
• Azure Sentinel
• Software Bill of Materials
• Configuration Management Database

Recorded December 20, 2021

Happy holidays! Another year, another set of predictions around the life of IT Pros – now in 2022! The pandemic continues to evolve, with new variants appearing and vaccination levels getting high. Will the pandemic still be a significant factor next year? What about back-to-work plans? Or is working-from-home the new normal? The past year was tough on the security side of things with notable ransomware and business-email-compromise attacks – are you prepared? What will we be doing differently in the next year? And how did Richard's predictions from last year stand up to reality? Thanks again for listening!

Recorded December 2021

Does your organization need hybrid identities? Richard talks to Sonia Cuff about Hybrid Active Directory, connecting your on-premises Active Directory infrastructure to M365 and Azure. There's essentially no choice in larger organizations - too many identities and applications exist that replicating identities would be a huge problem. But what about a small organization? Sonia talks about folks living in the Small Business Server and Windows Essential worlds that really could make a go of moving entirely in the cloud without hybrid - but it all comes down to applications that the organization needs. The conversation also digs into modern identity using password managers and authenticators - even going passwordless!

Links:

• Azure AD Connect
• Microsoft Intune
• Azure Arc
• Microsoft Authenticator
• Passwordless Identity

Recorded November 25, 2021

Basic authentication is going away in Exchange Online - how will it impact you? Richard talks to Greg Taylor about the long-planned end of basic authentication support in Exchange Online. Greg talks about the fundamental vulnerability of basic authentication systems like POP and IMAP - and how many systems still use them by default. Too many business email compromise and ransomware attacks happen through an email hack, and getting rid of basic authentication will help. Basic auth goes away in October of 2022, and Greg discusses the many ways that Microsoft is assisting IT Pros to get to secure email protocols running before that happens!

Links:

• iOS 11 Supports OAuth 2
• Exchange Web Services

Recorded October 25, 2021

What's your adaptability quotient? Richard chats with Sara Caldwell and Angela Dugan about the ideas behind the adaptability quotient - the ability to respond to change. The pandemic certainly forced a lot of change on a lot of folks - and different people coped with the changes in different ways. Sara talks about thinking about your ability to adapt and strengthening that ability, starting with asking for help where needed. Angela digs into the changes that have happened for her and Sara just recently with the acquisition of their company - more opportunities to adapt! Change is inevitable. It's just a question of what we keep from the past and what we let go of: How are you adapting?

Links:

• Adaptability Quotient
• Miro
• 3 Cloud Solutions

Recorded October 25, 2021

Christmas Gifts for IT Pros! Richard chats with Joey Snow and Rick Claus about their favorite gift ideas for your favorite IT Pros. Yeah, IT folks are hard to buy for, but here are some stocking stuffers and other gifts you will be excited to receive. Whether it's items that will help you work more effectively, home automation to make living a little easier, or maybe just something geeky and fun, there are many cool things to choose. And if you're an IT Pro listening to this show, share the list of links with your loved ones - maybe you'll get some good stuff!

Links:

• ROG Strix XG32VQ
• LG 49 inch Monitor
• Dell 43 inch 4K Monitor
• Smartphone Controlled Paper Airplane
• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• Echo Show 15
• Echo Show 10
• Amazon Astro
• Sky Lie Laser Galaxy Projector
• Home Assistant Blue
• Glencairn Glass Leather Travel Set
• Polaroid OneStep+
• Anker Nano Pro
• Anker Portable Power
• Pureport
• iFixit Repair Kit
• iFixit Magentic Project Mat
• Oculus Quest 2

Recorded October 29, 2021

Windows 11 Ships! So now what? Richard chats with Mary Jo Foley about her thoughts around the release of Windows 11. Mary Jo talks about how quiet the conversation has been around Windows 11, other than a few bits of outrage like the TPM requirements - which, as it turns out, aren't actually required. Is there a reason to move to Windows 11? Most IT folks seem happy to wait for further updates - there's nothing wrong with Windows 10. Maybe operating system releases just aren't as exciting as they used to be?

Links:

• Upgrading to Windows 11
• Windows Weekly
• All About Microsoft

Recorded October 22, 2021

Is the cloud secure? Richard chats with Screaming in the Cloud's Corey Quinn about the latest spate of security issues in AWS and Azure - and the responses to those issues. Corey talks about the risks the cloud providers are creating, not being clear when an exploit is found, to let people know how much visibility they have into the problem. Mitigating an exploit is not enough - you have to be able to answer the question about whether or not the cloud is secure. The alternatives are worse!

Links:

• CosmosDB Exploit
• Insecure AWS Buckets
• Azure Container Services Exploit
• Microsoft Zero Trust
• Amazon Zero Trust

Recorded September 9, 2021

Should you inject a little chaos into your systems? Julie Gunderson says yes! Richard chats with Julie about how deliberate failing portions of your system teach you more about your dependency and resiliency. But it's not just about breaking things - you need to build a hypothesis around how you see the reliability of the system and then create tests to challenge that reliability - and how to recover quickly if the test does harm to productivity! Julie talks about starting small, maybe just a development pipeline before moving on to more significant systems like production. The goal is to be resilient, but you're only resilient if you test!

Links:

• Chaos Monkey
• Gremlin Bootcamps
• Page it to the Limit Podcast

Recorded October 12, 2021

Episode 800! Richard chats about making 800 episodes of RunAs with Microsoft Technical Fellow Jeffrey Snover. The conversation digs into the state of the IT business today, with the huge role of the cloud and digital transformation, and how it impacts the nature of work. Jeffrey talks about how the artificial intelligence in M365 is emerging as a tool to help people be more productive, by watching what they're working on and helping them to organize their information and efforts better. This leads to a discussion about privacy, understanding objectives and key results, and the ultimate goal of any system - better outcomes. Could this actually be the next generation of Microsoft technology? Hopefully it won't take another 800 shows to find out!

Links:

• The Strength of Weak Ties

Recorded October 11, 2021

Is ransomware getting worse? Richard talks to Microsoft VP of Cybersecurity Ann Johnson about the state ransomware today. Ann quotes Sutton's law: "Why do criminals rob banks? Because that's where the money is." An increasing number of cybercriminals have successfully extorted money from companies using ransomware. So yes, ransomware is becoming more popular amongst criminals and will continue to do so until it doesn't pay. Ann explains that the Zero Trust Security Model is essential - as are data backups that you know how to restore! Beyond our efforts at the IT level, Ann talks about ongoing relationships with organizations like the FBI to go after cybercriminals at a higher level, shutting down infrastructure and charging the criminals with crimes. Ransomware is getting worse, and it's up to us to fight back!

Links:

• Cybersecurity During the Pandemic
• RiskIQ
• Afternoon Cyber Tea with Microsoft's Ann Johnson

Recorded August 23, 2021

What's the right way to have virtual desktops in the cloud? Richard talks to Aidan Finn about a virtualization project he was involved with that started with Citrix Cloud, which runs in Azure. Aidan talks about the number of virtual machines involved in a large-scale VDI implementation, many of which are infrastructure and plumbing. Why own the plumbing when you can get it as a service? The conversation then digs into Azure Virtual Desktop, which doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Citrix Cloud, but does simplify implementation a great deal. No virtualization implementation is ever simple, but working at the platform level can make it easier!

Links:

• Citrix Cloud
• Remote Desktop Services
• Azure Virtual Desktop
• Packer
• Azure Monitor
• Azure VM Image Builder
• MSIX

Recorded September 9, 2021

How do you add custom audio, video, and text communications into your organization? Richard chats with Mary Anne Noskowski about Azure Communications Services (ACS), a set of APIs and tooling that brings the features of Teams communications into custom applications and more. Mary Anne talks about Teams integration, providing a means to customize the guest access features into Teams via ACS. The conversation also digs into a few different scenarios for optimizing customer, vendor, and employee experience in communications. It's early days for ACS, but they are taking the reins from the Skype for Business APIs - and it's the same APIs that Teams depend on, so you know they will scale!

Links:

• Azure Communication Services
• Azure Active Directory
• ACS on Microsoft Mechanics
• ACS Health Care Demo App
• ACS Retail Demo App

Recorded August 5, 2021

Are you stuck in the print nightmare? Richard talks to Jeremy Moskowitz about the ongoing battle over potential exploits through the point-and-print system in Windows. Jeremy talks about the discovery of the vulnerability in July 2021 and how it has led to a series of patches and registry key changes to resist a potential exploit. Meantime, people need to print! There are several workarounds with Group Policy, and Jeremy's own PolicyPak has some practical solutions. If you put some time into thinking through how your organization prints, you can find a solution that works and is secure!

Links:

• July Windows Print Spooler Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
• August Windows Print Spooler Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
• RestrictDriverInstallationToAdministrator
• Group Policy Settings for Controlling Printers
• Ultimate Guide to PrintNightmare
• PDQ Deploy

Recorded September 9, 2021

Making mistakes with reporting or analytics can lead to mistakes in business and a loss of trust - now what? Richard chats with Melissa Coates about building mechanisms in tools like PowerBI to make it easier to get correct results. Melissa talks about having a diligent core of analytics and a flexible edge - making sure the expert data stewards and building data flows and repositories for accurate analytics, allowing the self-service PowerBI users to explore. Sure, everyone needs some guard rails, but over-governance leads to tools going unused. Let them experiment and find value, then look at how to keep things under control!

Links:

• Coates Data Strategies
• PowerBI
• Azure Purview
• Azure Data Catalog
• PowerBI Adoption Roadmap

Recorded August 5, 2021

How does your organization work with files in Microsoft 365? Richard chats with Jason Moore about the role of OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, and the many tools available for files, folders, and lists in the M365 world. Jason talks about how under the hood, every file ends up in some pretty standard spots, like Azure Blob Storage - so you know that compliance, governance, and policy are consistent. The conversation also ranges over how different organizations come to different solutions based on their past experiences and skill sets - there's a lot of choice for a reason!

Links:

• One Drive for Business
• M365 To Do App
• M365 Lists
• Ransomware Detection and Recovery in OneDrive
• M365 and Microsoft Defender
• OneDrive Personal Vault
• OneDrive Photo Storage
• Sharing OneDrive Files and Folders

Recorded August 6, 2021

Does Windows need a package manager? Richard talks to Sarah Lean about Windows Package Manager, aka winget. Of course, there have been package managers for Windows before winget, and Sarah talks about her favorite, Chocolatey. But winget is destined to be a part of Windows itself and opens the door to some great deployment automation. The conversation also dives into exporting - making a copy of the manifest of applications currently on a workstation. Could we get to full local workstation localization, where you could build and re-build workstations on demand? Maybe some next-level hot-desk workstations are possible!

Links:

• Windows Package Manager on GitHub
• Chocolatey
• InTune, aka Microsoft Endpoint Manager
• AZCopy
• Techielass - Blog of Sarah Lean

Recorded August 13, 2021

It's a hybrid and multi-cloud world - how do you manage it? Richard talks to Microsoft VP Jeremy Winter about Azure Arc and its ability to work across on-premises and multiple clouds to give you a view of your whole infrastructure - and ways to govern, manage and secure it! Jeremy talks about the role that Kubernetes plays in the hybrid world to help manage applications and how Azure Arc helps you manage Kubernetes itself with consistent security and implementation policies. It takes some training, but Azure Arc can play a key role in your infrastructure and application modernization!

Links:

• Azure Arc
• Azure Arc Enabled Data Services
• Azure Kubernetes Service
• Azure FastTrack
• Containerizing Java Applications
• Azure Stack
• Azure Security Center
• Azure Stack HCI

Recorded August 5, 2021

There's value in the data your organization has gathered - do you know how to use it to help your company succeed? Richard chats with Jen Stirrup about the new tools and techniques for data analytics. Jen talks about how cloud-based tools like PowerBI and Power Automate open the door to rapid interaction of analytics so that folks can get value in a short amount of time, and you can bring new capabilities quickly. The conversation digs into getting beyond data-driven reporting into more insight-inspired: That good analytics can help you understand the true value of different customers, even to the point of recognizing that some customers are actually costing you money!

Links:

• Power Automate
• Microsoft Forms/a>
• PowerBI
• Jen's Blog

Recorded July 8, 2021

How do you respond to a ransomware attack? Richard talks to Dana Epp about dealing with a ransomware attack. Dana discusses making a plan - if you don't have a plan already, dealing with an attack is very difficult. And make sure your plan exists outside of your regular network since one of the first things you're going to do during an attack is shut down the network. The conversation focuses on how ransomware attacks are a crime and need to be treated accordingly - it's a business problem, not just a technical problem.

Links:

• Canadian Center for CyberSecurity
• Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
• Ransomware Detection and Recovery in OneDrive
• Azure Backup
• Twilio

Recorded July 19, 2021

How can Azure AD Conditional Access help to protect your organization? Richard chats with Nitika Gupta about the tooling available to detect and react to unusual sign-ins and access to data. Nitika talks about how Conditional Access lets you set policies in place to require additional authentication and even lockout an account when certain things happen - like a change in device, application, location, and more. The conversation also digs into providing additional security requirements for company leadership and admin accounts - the kinds of accounts that, when exploited, can do significant harm to the company. 

Links:

• Azure AD Conditional Access
• Microsoft Cloud App Security
• Microsoft Endpoint Manager
• Passwordless Authentication for Azure AD
• Microsoft Zero Trust
• Azure AD Privileged Identity Management
• Azure AD Identity Protection

Recorded July 9, 2021

Paul is back! Richard chats with Paul about the recently released preview of Windows 11. Paul talks about being a bit surprised by the timing of Windows 11, and how it looks an awful lot like an update to Windows 10, with a UX refresh. The conversation digs into the current controversy around the Trusted Platform Module requirement in the hardware for Windows 11, while also discussing what should be controversial - requiring a Microsoft account to log into Windows 11. The controversy is helping to shape the product, you should be a part of the discussion!

Links:

• Windows 11 Preview 1

Recorded July 19, 2021

As the pandemic starts to wind down in some parts of the world, the conversation is turning to - do we go back to the office? Richard talks to Martina Grom about how some of her customers are responding to a need for hybrid workspaces, with some mixture of working from home and in the office. Martina also digs into the governance challenges of M365 with hybrid workers, and how folks who moved quickly to the cloud during the pandemic are still struggling to use their tools in a sustainable way. There's lots to learn still!

Links:

• Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365
• Guest Access to Azure Active Directory
• Governance Toolkit 365

Recorded June 30, 2021

The SQL Server & AzureSQL Conference is BACK!  

After more a year away, the SQL Server & AzureSQL conference happened in Orlando in June 2021. And that means a SQL Question and Answers session at the end of the show.  

Bob Ward, Anna Hoffman, Buck Woody, David Pless, and many other great speakers answered questions from the attendees of the conference both in-person and online.  

Topics ranged over migrating to AzureSQL, securing data effectively, failover strategies, keeping up with the endless stream of new technologies coming, and much more! 

Recorded June 10, 2021

Can you have a private platform on the public cloud? Richard chats with Jennelle Crothers about her work with organizations setting up private Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure in Azure. Jennelle talks about using private DNS Zones, private container registries, and other services to provide a public-like platform experience for a company while not exposing it to the open internet at all. 

Links:

• Azure ExpressRoute
• Azure Container Registry
• Azure Kubernetes Service
• Azure Private Link
• Azure Private DNS
• Azure ARM Templates

Ned Pyle is back and he's got cool news! Richard chats with Ned about some of the features coming down the pipe for file storage in Windows Server 2022. First up is encryption - Server 2022 will have direct support for AES-256. Sure, it's overkill for many scenarios, but some organizations are demanding it, so here it is. Ned also talks about SMB Compression - while it has existed for xcopy et al for a while, now you'll be able to enable compression across any mapped drive. Finally, there is SMB over QUIC - file sharing over the internet that is secure by default, and much more efficient than VPNs. File sharing is never going away - how can you do it better!

Links:

• Windows Server 2022 Preview
• SMB Compression
• Server 2019 Hot Patching
• Azure Files

What's it like to build a tool for SQL DBAs? Richard chats with Kendra Little about her role at Red Gate being a product manager for the SQL DevOps tools. Kendra talks about moving to the UK to be closer to the main offices of Red Gate - just in time for pandemic lockdowns to start. The conversation digs into the various strategies around including databases in a DevOps approach, and how tooling can help. Kendra also explores the challenges of making the right thing, working with the team effectively through the pandemic, and software development teams have evolved in this strange time in history. 

Links:

• SQL Compare
• SQL Server Data Tools

What happened to Windows 10X? Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about the ongoing saga at Microsoft to create a lighter version of Windows that can compete with iOS and ChromeOS. Paul talks about various incarnations along the way, including Windows ARM and Windows 10S - Windows 10X is just the latest victim of an extremely challenging problem. Windows has always been about maintaining backward compatibility - but does that still make sense today? What are we willing to do to increase security and reduce complexity?

Links:

• Windows Virtual Desktop
• Windows Server 2022
• Project Reunion

What happens when you bring Teams into an organization that already uses SharePoint? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about the intimate relationship between Teams and SharePoint, especially when it comes to files. Susan talks about aligning SharePoint folders and Teams groups to be able to connect existing SharePoint information into Teams - and how Teams can become the interface to everything, especially with Viva!

Links:

• Information Governance in Microsoft 365

What is Microsoft Viva? Richard chats with Hilton Giesenow about the recently announced Microsoft Viva as part of Microsoft 365. Hilton discusses how Viva is a group of products focused on Employee Experience (EXP). Employee Experience being the things that employees need to do at the company outside of the actual work, such as submitting timesheets, requesting vacation, getting training, and understanding company procedures. The conversation turns to the different components of Viva: Learning focuses on employee education with LinkedIn Learning. Connections provide an interface to SharePoint pages for employees that the organization may already have. Topics is a discovery tool, identifying key terminology in the organization from within chats on Teams and elsewhere to bring information together. Finally, there are Insights, which looks at employee wellness. The interface to Viva is Teams - so that employees have everything they need in one place!

Links:

• Microsoft Viva
• Project Cortex
• Microsoft Delve

How do you protect your PowerApps? Richard chats with April Dunnam about backing up and maintaining versions of PowerApps over time. April talks about how many PowerApps are developed by people that are more domain experts than developers. That lack of experience in development means that issues like source control and disaster recovery are not on their minds. There is excellent tooling available to help manage PowerApps: You just need to set it up!

Links:

• Power Platform
• Backup and Restore Environments
• PowerApps Dataverse
• Application Lifecycle Management with Power Platform
• Power Platform Extension for Visual Studio Code
• Azure DevOps
• Debugging Canvas Apps with Monitor
• Fusion Development

What does cybersecurity look like today? Richard talks with Troy Hunt about the recent news around the Hafnium exploits. The FBI utilized the vulnerability created in Exchange servers to patch the servers and remove the exploit. Is this a good idea? Is it legal? The actions of the FBI lead to a broader conversation about modern cybersecurity - when time is of the essence, should the so-called white hats be able to get legal authority to act to protect people, companies, and property? What's the alternative?

Links:

• The HAFNIUM Exploits
• FBI BotNet Testimony
• Vastaamo Ransomware Podcast
• The Hafnium Podcast Episode
• Apollo Breach on HIBP

How do you get started with the Power Platform? Richard chats with Sandy Ussia about the familiar places that Power Platform first appears - domain users trying to automate work like approvals, improve or replace forms-over-data tooling, and more! Sometimes it relates to existing custom applications in the organization, and sometimes it is a set of connectors between SaaS services - or is so far down the to-do list, who knows when someone will get to it! Sandy talks about how culture impacts the evolution of Power Platform in an organization - will the people using the tool reach out when they hit an access restriction, or work around it? This is where IT can help - and maybe find some opportunities to use Power Platform as well!

Links:

• Lightning Tools Chat
• Power Platform
• Power Automate
• Microsoft Power Apps Community
• Power Apps
• PowerBI
• PowerBI Gateway
• Shane Young on YouTube
• Explore Power Platform

So many ways to store data in the cloud, so little time! Richard talks to Karl Rautenstrauch about the array of offerings for your files in Azure Storage. Karl talks about how the rush to move to the cloud last year created some regrets - in the form of large bills for certain services! Planning migrations help because there are several storage choices based on your needs. The conversation digs into the role of Azure Disk, Azure Files, and Azure Blobs - including their relationship to OneDrive for Business, and even a quick chat about NAS products like NetApp!

Links:

• OneDrive for Business
• Azure Storage Services
• Azure Migrate
• Azure NetApp Files

You moved your data into the cloud - but have you moved your thinking? Richard chats with Jes Schultz about going beyond the lift-and-shift of databases into the cloud to thinking more broadly about what you can do with data once it's there. Jes talks about how the cloud changes your approach to disaster recovery and database storage, opening the door to experimenting with different database capabilities, even different databases entirely! With core operations more automated, you have time to do more tuning - improving performance and saving money!

Links:

• Azure SQL
• Azure PostgreSQL
• Azure Databricks
• Azure Data Warehouse

Windows Server 2022 is in preview - have you checked it out? Richard chats with Robert Smit about the early stage preview of Server 2022 released to Windows Insiders. Anyone can be an insider if you want to check it out! Robert mentions a minor problem with the early build that broke sysprep. Check out his blog post in the links below for the workaround. The focus of Server 2022 seems to be on security, although not all the features are in place for the preview. But this is the version of Windows Server that will be in long-term support - and worth checking out!

Links:

• Windows Server 2022 Insider Preview
• Robert's Blog Post on Installing Server 2022 Preview
• Azure Active Directory

Ready to have your Azure virtual machines auto-managed? Richard chats with Phoummala Schmitt about Azure Automanage, recently released into public preview. Phoummala talks about how Automanage sits atop Azure Update, Azure Backup, Azure Security Center, and more. The combination of tools gives you an overview of all of the virtual machines in your tenant and the ability to managing patches, governance: All the things you'd typically do by hand or in ARM templates. Virtual machine management is getting easier!

Links:

• Azure Automanage
• Azure Backup
• Azure Update Management
• Azure Security Center

How can Azure Security Center help you? Richard talks to Yuri Diogenes about the array of security tools in Azure, starting with Azure Security Center (ASC). ASC is free, and you enable it as soon as you set up your Azure tenant. Yuri talks about how ASC analyzes your Azure tenant and points out potential vulnerabilities, culminating in a security score. Your score goes up as existing resources in Azure are secured, or when you add already-secured resources - and your score goes down when the opposite happens! Talk of security leads to a conversation around Azure Defender for threat detection, Azure Sentinel for security event management, and ultimately to Azure Arc providing security access beyond Azure, into AWS, GCP, and even on-premises servers!

Links:

• Azure Security Center
• Microsoft Defender
• Azure Defender
• Azure Defender for DNS
• Azure Defender for AppService
• Securing Privileged Access
• Azure Sentinel
• Azure Arc
• Azure Security Center in the Field
• Azure Security Center Ninja Training

What did the pandemic do to your infrastructure? Richard chats with Stephanie Donahue about the array of digital transformations that have taken place in the past year. Stephanie talks about moving workloads to the cloud - and how it is not just an IT problem. Work-from-home and other remote aspects of work have helped drive cloud adoption, but the opportunities are much larger than that! The conversation dives into new ways to collaborate, understanding how people work together on projects, and the potential for the latest tools available today!

A severe set of exploits have hit the on-premises Exchange server world. Richard talks to Tony Redmond about the so-called Hafnium exploits, a collection of four zero-day exploits that can allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on Exchange servers visible to the internet. Exchange Online is not affected, and it appears that on-premises Exchange servers only accessible by VPN are also safe. The patches are available for Exchange 2010 on upward, but it is likely too late for tens of thousands of Exchange servers. What happens now?

Links:

• Office 365 IT Pros
• John Hammond Hafnium Analysis
• Tony's Blog Post on Hafnium
• Microsoft Post on Hafnium Exploit

What is Azure Purview, and how can it help you with data governance? Richard chats with Laurie Litwack about the preview version of Azure Purview. Laurie discusses how Purview focuses on an overall view of data in an organization - collecting metadata about data wherever it is stored. That means collecting information about data in databases, file shares, on-premises, in the cloud, even on the various SaaS platforms like Salesforce. The result is a data catalog that can help your organization utilize data more effectively, as well as understand where sensitive data exists and is being created!

Links:

• Azure Purview
• Try Azure Purview

Are your teams secure? Richard chats with Tobias Zimmergren about securing Office 365 Teams - both internally and externally! The challenge of Teams collaboration is the risk of sharing too much - and as Tobias says, by default, everyone can see everything. Certain teams in your organization, like HR, legal, and RnD, have to limit who can see their collaborations: Teams has information barriers to protect sensitive collaborations. Tobias also dives into eDiscovery and Data Loss Prevention, two huge topics on their own, and typically connected with Exchange: But also important with Teams. Get secure!

Links:

• Managing Teams Security
• Managing External Access in Teams
• Security and Compliance in Teams
• Information Barriers in Microsoft Teams
• eDiscovery Solution in Microsoft 365
• Office 365 Data Loss Prevention
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365
• Microsoft Cloud App Security

What's the right way to migrate SQL workloads to the cloud? Richard chats with Anna Hoffman about the expanding array of choices we have today for moving your SQL Server to Azure. Anna talks about the great support for running SQL Server in an Azure Virtual Machine - and why that sometimes makes the most sense for folks! Then there's moving into Azure SQL, which has some differences to regular SQL Server, but you will find it familiar. The conversation also turns to migrating other databases as well - and the migration tools that provide guidance and tooling to make it easier than ever!

Links:

• Data Exposed
• SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machine
• Azure Data Migration Guidance

How does your IT career evolve? Richard chats with Michael Levan about his career journey and some ideas of how your career can evolve as well! The conversation starts out at the help desk, where many IT folks get started, interacting with the various applications in the organization as well as the staff. Michael talks about thinking more broadly about your career, whether self-employment makes sense, how you learn, how you teach, and how you grow!

Links:

• Deep Work
• CloudSkills

Everyone needs source control! Richard chats with Nicole Stevens about what IT Pros need to know around source control. Normally the purview of developers, source control is useful anywhere you have text that needs to be stored, versioned, and protected. Nicole talks about how you can use GitHub in a private repository to manage your own scripts - keep track of the changes you make over time, be able to go back to old versions, and so on. And when the whole team gets involved, it gets even more interesting!

Links:

• GitHub
• GitHub Workflow

What happens when our most private thoughts are ransomed? Richard talks to Sami Laiho about the Vastaamo Ransomware hack. Sami talks about how the hacker succeeded over months to steal private healthcare records, including transcripts of therapy sessions, and then attempted to ransom the company to get the data back. When the company refused to pay, the hacker contacted the individual patients with ransom demands and released several hundred private records in the process. Ransomware attacks are no joke - and Sami was both a victim and one of the folks fighting against the hack. In the end, spending time, energy, and money on protecting data your organization's data is important - you can't wait until after an attack to fix it. Not all genies will go back into the bottle.

Links:

• Wired Story of the Vastamo Hack

Secrets Management ships for PowerShell! Richard chats with Sydney Smith who is the product manager for Secrets Management about how this PowerShell extension helps you access and manage multiple key stores in your organization and provides secrets for your PowerShell scripts. Sydney talks about how the development process of Secrets Management was done out in the open, on GitHub, with lots of feedback from the community. It works with multiple key stores, including its own, and leaves room for you to provide very granular security to your secrets - take a look!

Links:

• PowerShell Gallery
• Azure Key Vault
• KeePass
• AWS Key Management Service
• Windows CredMan
• PowerShell SecretStore on GitHub
• PowerShell SecretManagement on GitHub

Does M365 work for small business? Richard chats with Ian Williamson about his work as a sole IT person in a small business trying to move into Microsoft 365. Ian talks about how many of the features (and documentation) for Microsoft 365 is aimed at organizations much bigger than what he is working in - and often digging into features his tenant doesn't have! The conversation also focuses on the challenges of identity: Making sure your personal Microsoft identities don't collide with your M365 identities, how to untangle that mess, and perhaps, at some point, actually get some real benefits from M365!

Links:

• Perform an Internal Admin Takeover
• Determining Tenant Type
• Microsoft Hibernates SMB Support
• M365 Security Defaults

Do your tools help you work the way you want to? Richard chats with Heather Newman about the concepts of work-life balance and how your tools can make it harder to do the right thing for you and your organization. Heather also dives into the new etiquette around communication, the value of attention, using time and energy wisely. Can our tools help? It's all in how you use them!

Links:

• Debbie Ireland Work Life Balance
• Office Delve
• The Power of Full Engagement
• Driving Adoption Blog
• Jason Stephenson Music
• Modern Workplace Change

It's 2021 - does PowerShell really need any new features? Jason Helmick says yes! Richard and Jason talk about Jason's move to Microsoft into the PowerShell team and the cool new things coming down the pipeline. First up is Secrets Management, providing a great means to avoid putting passwords in scripts and to be able to utilize secure accounts without ever knowing the secrets in the first place. Jason also explores IntelliSense and IntelliCode with PowerShell and how new AI technologies can make your PowerShell coding experience even better. Finally, Crescendo - tooling to make it easier to wrap native command line tools with PowerShell. 2021 looks to be a great year for PowerShell!

Links:

• Secrets Management Module
• IntelliCode
• Visual Studio Code
• PowerShell Crescendo
• Crescendo on GitHub

What else can Teams do? Richard chats with Christina Wheeler about going beyond the default features of Teams, turning it into the hub of work that it can be. Christina talks about the various plugins available for Teams available from third-party companies, as well as the kinds of add-ins you can build yourself. The conversation focuses on app templates as useful tools unto themselves, like the request-a-team template that lets you control the creation of Teams. But since it is an open-source project, you can customize it, or use it as a starting point for something more extensive. With excellent security and governance features, you can extend Teams to help your users have one place to look for all their work!

Links:

• App Templates for Microsoft Teams
• Teams Integration with Salesforce
• Teams Admin Center
• MS-600: Building Applications and Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services
• Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio
• QnA Maker

Ransomware attacks are a disaster! Can your disaster recovery strategy cope? Richard talks to Dave Kawula about his experiences battling ransomware attacks - and how failed backup strategies facilitate the bad guys getting paid. Dave talks about securing your backups with separate credentials - the ransomware folks count on getting all-powerful administrator accounts! When you granularize your security (call it Just Enough Admin) you make it harder for ransomware to succeed. Get smarter about protecting your backups!

Links:

• Azure Storage Blobs
• Azure Key Vault
• Azure Backup and Disaster Recovery
• Azure Site Recovery
• Cybersecurity Insurance

What's your Productivity Score? Richard talks to Ulrika Hedlund about productivity in 2021 - the impact of the pandemic on work, and how IT can help. Ulrika discusses the rush to work remotely and the move into the cloud, including Microsoft 365. But the move is not enough - you have to train and learn how to use the new tools available. The conversation focuses on the etiquette of chat, email, video, and audio meetings - and the difference in formality between work and home uses! Ulrika also talks about the Productivity Score that M365 can provide to help IT understand how folks are using the technology so that they can provide support where needed.

Links:

• Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Surface Hub
• Microsoft Productivity Score
• Storyals

Happy New Year! A year ago Richard flew solo to talk about what IT looked like in the new decade. And then the pandemic hit and changed everything. With vaccines beginning to roll out, it's a good time to look at what 2021 is going to look like. What changes have been made in your organization, and how many of them will stay as the pandemic ends? Richard also dives into the predictions he made at the beginning of 2020, and how they look a year later. This is also the end of the Pandemic Series - thanks so much for listening!

What can GitHub tell us about DevOps? Richard talks to Nicole Forsgren about her new role at GitHub, studying the behavior of developers (and many others) using the massive set of aggregate data that exists within GitHub. Nicole talks about expanding the annual State of the Octoverse report to dig deeply into development productivity, security, and the community of source code contributors. This opens the door to some great ideas on how operations and development can work together - and isn't that what DevOps is all about?

Links:

• Accelerate
• DevOps Research & Assessment
• State of the Octoverse
• GitHub Security

Christmas time with COVID! Richard invites Mary Jo Foley on the show to celebrate a bit of Christmas and reflect on what a crazy year 2020 has been. Mary Jo talks about the early days of the pandemic when the tech companies sent everyone home and the challenge of keeping the internet and cloud providers working while the loads went up... it may have been a near thing! The conversation ultimately turns to gratitude for friends, family, and a great career in this industry. All the best to you and yours!

Links:

• All About Microsoft

What role does PowerShell play in DevOps? Richard talks to Rick Taylor about his experiences building deployment pipelines for development and operations using a variety of tools, including PowerShell. Rick talks about how each tool, including PowerShell, can be the easiest solution to a given task. The conversation also turns to cross-platform deployments, where the implementations of tooling vary from platform-to-platform. PowerShell can help there too, but you do have to learn the platform you're working from! In the end, even PowerShell is just a tool, and DevOps is more about culture and process - and the conversation goes there too!

Links:

• Terraform
• Ansible
• PowerShell for macOS
• PowerShell for Linux
• Azure DevOps
• Pester
• ServiceNow

A year into the pandemic - how have things changed for IT? Richard talks with Stephen Rose about his experiences working with organizations during the pandemic, from the rapid move to the cloud, facilitating work-from-home, sending all work online, and more. Stephen talks about the social changes happening at work that aren't likely to go away when the virus does. The relationship with IT has evolved also - how are we going to be different in the years to come?

Links:

• Office 365 MFA
• Azure Power Platform

How can Query Store help you participate in the DevOps cycle? Richard chats with Erin Stellato about the power of SQL Query Store - born out of Azure SQL, Query Store keeps a record of every unique query that is run, along with its query plan and stats. How does this help with DevOps? By providing data for DBAs to talk to developers about how to make improvements to applications that will have a real impact on customer value in the long run!

Links:

• Erin's Blog
• Docs on SQL Server Query Store