RunAs Radio

What can Azure Synapse do for you? Richard chats with Jen Stirrup about Microsoft's Azure Synapse Analytics. Jen talks about how most companies have structured and unstructured data, typically stored in different locations. If you're all in on Azure, you have an Azure Data Warehouse for structured data ready for analytics as well as an Azure Data Lake that holds your unstructured data. Azure Synapse brings those two data sources together, along with other SQL data sources, to help you do comprehensive analytics. The conversation turns to the idea of answering business questions as opposed to exploring business mysteries - both are valuable, but need different tools and techniques!

Are you ready to have employees back in the office? As part of the Pandemic Series, Richard talks to Cynthia Milota about what preparations need to be made for using office space during the pandemic. In some places in the world, the initial wave of the pandemic has passed and the number of cases stabilized. Where authorized, folks can go back to the office - but with certain restrictions. What makes sense for your office? Can you maintain physical distance? How much cleaning is required? How do you give the staff the confidence that working from the office is safe?

Two old guys bicker about Windows! Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about the current state of Windows Desktop, and the cycles that keep recurring - put more things into Windows, then take them out. Update more frequently, then less frequently. Client software deployment problems - use the web instead. Web doesn't have enough features, build more client apps. There are lots of cycles around Windows, which ones affect you?

How do you stop the company email from being compromised? Richard talks to Niall Merrigan about the sophisticated level of hacks going on in business email. Niall describes how business email systems get compromised, typically through a weak password, then monitored to understand the business well enough to inject email in to steal money or compromise the business. In these challenging times, no one can afford this - and multifactor authentication and strong confirmation policies can help!

Windows Terminal 1.0 is shipped! Richard talks to Kayla Cinnamon about the open-source project that is Windows Terminal. The conversation starts with a bit of a history lesson on updating the Windows Command Prompt - and why it turned out to be a bad idea. Folks depended on the exact behavior of the command prompt so heavily that any changes broke things and spread sadness. But what if you could start over? Windows Terminal brings together all the things you never knew you wanted in a terminal client, as well as a bunch of features you definitely knew you wanted. Check it out!

Could Windows Virtual Desktop be your organization's Work-From-Home solution? Another episode in the Pandemic Series, Richard talks to Grant Becker about the latest version of Microsoft's virtual desktop tools. Grant talks about Windows Virtual Desktop as Remote Desktop Services in Azure - you have a minimal installation on the workstation, all of the security policies live in the Azure-hosted virtual machines that run your templates. And it works on mobile devices as well! While certainly a useful solution during the pandemic, WVD could be a common way to work going forward!

How robust is the data governance in your organization? Richard talks to Susan Hanley about the various elements that go into data governance, starting with having a plan! Depending on what your organization does, there can be a huge array of rules on how to collect, retain, and delete data. Then comes the challenge step of actually following those rules! Susan talks about the latest generation of tools available to make sure you're consolidating and deleting data when you should. Good data governance keeps a company safe and relevant!

It's Show 700! Richard brings his friend Jeremy Moskowitz on to celebrate making 700 episodes of RunAs. The conversation spans the history of the show, the evolution of Windows, the challenges of the pandemic and how Group Policy can fix everything - check out the webinar that Richard and Jeremy did together at https://www.policypak.com/runas - and thanks for listening!

How do you get value from the unstructured data in your organization? Richard chats with Seth Juarez about the array of AI-related services that Microsoft makes today to help understand all kinds of data in your organization. Seth talks about machine learning in general, and how Microsoft has built various cognitive services that can be applied to Azure Cognitive Search to help dig deeper into any kind of document, images, PDFs, and more - and understand them! The conversation digs into what can be extracted, how you can utilize the data, and even how to plug that revealed information into standard analytics tools like PowerBI!

Databases are important during a crisis - how are yours? Richard talks to Brent Ozar about how the pandemic has effected workloads for databases and DBAs. While some businesses have wound-down during the crisis, many are busier than ever. How do you scale on short notice? What if bigger hardware isn't readily available? Even large cloud database instances are somewhat limited today, so clever techniques have to be found to keep things running. Brent also digs into the maintenance side of things - it's a great time to do the preventative work you always meant to do!