RunAs Radio

Teams in Office 365 is a hit - but should it be your intranet? Richard talks with Stephanie Donahue about the role that Teams can play in your organization. More than chat, teams is an effective collaboration tool, and a way to store and share institutional knowledge - how decisions are made, what roles people have in those decisions. Is it the first place you should look when you come into work in the morning? Probably. Is it the perfect place for everything in your organization? Stephanie says no - but it can be part of the solution!

What is Azure Sentinel, and how can it help protect your organization? Richard chats with Paul Keely about Azure Sentinel, a set of tools that provide Security Information Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration Automated Response (SOAR). Paul talks about going beyond the firewall, into the analysis of behavior within your systems, including Office 365, Azure and more - and using machine learning, being able to detect what unusual behavior looks like and automatically respond to it.

Power BI is a hit! Now what? Richard chats with Melissa Coates about the challenges of applying data governance to analytics tools like Power BI. Melissa describes various aspects of data governance, including security, organization/classification, documentation of data and education - you need training to understand the rules and responsibilities of data in an organization. If every company is a software company, then we're all data stewards as well!

What's an intelligent substrate? Richard chats with Microsoft Technical Fellow Jeffrey Snover about his new role in Office 365. About a year ago Jeff changed jobs and jumped into one of the biggest, oldest (and most profitable) teams at Microsoft: Office. Today Office is totally cloud-focused, and Jeff talks about the intelligent substrate, a NoSQL data store that contains everything related to Office 365, including documents, spreadsheets, SharePoint lists, email... everything. This allows artificial intelligence technology to find relationships within that data to provide more value to companies using Office 365 - lots of value!

How do you manage CosmosDB? Richard chats with Deborah Chen from the CosmosDB team about what it takes to care and feed the cloud-based NoSQL data storage solution. Deborah talks about the advantages of not having to manage the infrastructure of storage, with replication and fail-over solutions integrated into CosmosDB from the start - as well as at-rest and in-transmission encryption always on! The management tools are pretty straightforward too, with thorough logging and diagnostics tools integrated into Azure. CosmosDB can make your life simpler!

How can a deployment tool make your disaster recovery process easier? Richard chats with Michael Richardson of Octopus Deploy about Operations Runbooks. Octopus Deploy handles deployments very effectively, and with Runbooks, you can expand that functionality to include all sorts of other related processes, like backing up and restoring data, running failover scripts and more. Through deployment, Octopus already knows where all your resources live and the rights they need, making it easy to expand your automation over all sorts of disaster recovery needs!

It's 2020 - why are we still using passwords? Richard chats with Libby Brown about the on-going efforts to make passwordless authentication work great for everyone. The problems with passwords are well-known, but can we really get to a place where we don't have them at all? Libby talks about the challenges of using multi-factor authentication, including authenticator applications, FIDO keys, facial recognition and more. You need multiple methods of authentication and recovery strategies available before you can consider turning off passwords - but it is possible!

What does it take to get your team learning new skills? Richard chats with Don Jones about the entire learning process in the IT profession. Don discusses outcomes - why are we learning? What new skills will help the company? Answering these questions leads to budgets and times, but also commitment and deadlines. You can't just learn for fun (although you should), you have to provide value to the company. The good news is, we already learn all the time, we just have to remember that we do!

Links:SQL Server 2019Query Tuning AssistantLearn T-SQL QueryingAzure SQL DatabaseSQL Workshops

Azure Sphere continues to evolve - what's the latest? While at Ignite in Orlando, Richard sat down with James Scott to talk about how Azure Sphere has progressed. Azure Sphere is a highly secure IoT solution that follows the seven properties of highly secure devices (check show notes for the white paper). James also talks about how Azure Sphere will be in general availability in February 2020 - and it should be your IoT solution!