RunAs Radio

WireShark has evolved - are you using the latest? Richard talks to Laura Chappell about her on-going efforts to teach IT folks more about what is happening in their network and how you can understand and improve it! Since the last time Laura was on the show (ten years ago!) the role of WireShark has changed. Today there are great capture tools for understanding the vast amount of network traffic produced in your organization, and WireShark helps to dissect the interesting bits, both from a security perspective and performance!

Even during a pandemic, the bad actors are out there. Richard talks to Ann Johnson, Corporate VP for Cybersecurity at Microsoft about the security activity going on during this unusual time. Ann points out that there isn't necessarily an increase in attacks, but that the attacks are targeting the pandemic, using phishing strategies around COVID-19 and preying on people's fears. The conversation turns to all the things we meant to push out for security, like multi-factor authentication and password manager, as even more important today.

What's your WiFi network solution? Richard chats with Daniel Piessens about the Ubiquiti UniFi WiFi devices available today. What started as a straight WiFi provider has evolved into a more sophisticated networking set up with switches, gateways, security devices, and more. But its the software around the UniFi products that really makes things interesting. Daniel talks about the frustrating parts of UniFi as well as the fun stuff. Looking for a WiFi set up for home or small business, have a listen!

How's your business continuity? As part of the Pandemic Series, Richard talks to Sonia Cuff about the role of IT in business continuity. As Sonia says, the first word there is BUSINESS. And we're all part of making a business work, so you need to engage with business leadership around what continuity looks like for your organization. Backups are not enough! The conversation also dives into the fact that business continuity is not just about outages - productivity plays a part as well. Helping staff that are new to working from home get more productivity, providing mechanisms for making work and progress visible; all these things are about business continuity. And any improvements here benefit the business today and in the world beyond the pandemic!

Are your PC deployments on Autopilot? Richard talks to Michael Niehaus about Windows Autopilot, which offers a centralized way to deploy to PCs, both remotely and on-premises. Michael talks about getting away from the double-shipping approach of provisioning new PCs, where you as an IT person have to receive a machine, load it up, then ship it out to the employee that is using it. With Autopilot you identify new PCs to your hardware provider using your Azure Tenant ID. Then you specify your configuration information so that when the machine powers up and connects to the Internet, it knows how to provision itself. There are also services for resetting machines and de-provisioning them at end-of-life!

Next up in the Pandemic Series - how is your VPN? Richard talks to Richard Hicks about the vast increase in demand for VPN services as employees work from home en masse. For many businesses, VPNs were an exception case, with relatively few users. When everyone needs to use it, can the infrastructure hold up? Richard talks about configuration issues that can limit the scalability of your VPN, what workloads can be offloaded from the VPN entirely, and how sometimes its easier to build out a new infrastructure for connectivity than to revise the existing one.

Are you ready to move to the cloud? Richard talks to Evelyn Padrino about the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework. Evelyn describes how Microsoft has been collecting knowledge from all the past cloud migrations to build out a framework to make it easier to do the right thing moving workloads to the cloud. The conversation digs into all the preparations that need to be made before anything gets moved, and how to move the right things the right way. And it's not just about Lift-and-Shift, but also how you modernization, monitor, and make your infrastructure better!

How are you managing everyone working from home? Second in the Pandemic Series, Richard talks to Martina Grom about the challenges around maintaining security and productivity with entire workforces doing their jobs from home. Office 365 does offer some powerful options for security, including the Azure Information Protection services that can restrict the copying of files and limit lifetimes on access. Modernizing security using password managers and authentication helps also - this is not the time for information breaches!

How do you keep the configuration of your Microsoft 365 resources consistent? Richard talks to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Nik Charlebois about the evolution of Desired State Configuration. Nik talks about how his old open source project called ReverseDSC has become a part of the new Microsoft365DSC - giving you the ability to extract all the configuration and policy details from the various elements of your Microsoft 365 tenant. And once you have that file, you can compare it against other templates of Microsoft 365 tenants and apply it if you need to. Nik talks about the power of knowing exactly when your configuration gets changed for any reason, and the options available to react to that change!

The first of the Pandemic series - how's your bandwidth? Richard talks to Cameron Fuller about some of the issues IT folks are dealing with during the pandemic. With most employees working from home, the bandwidth available to those employees is essential. And most likely, there's more than one person at home that needs that bandwidth - do they have enough? Does it make sense for IT to get involved in configuring networks in employee homes to provide bandwidth shaping with QoS? What about other bandwidth options like MiFi access points? Cameron explores several options and ideas you can add to your list of things to do to keep employees productive in this challenging time!