RunAs Radio

Firewalls and MFA are awesome, but how's your physical security? Richard chats with Ned Pyle about a story surrounding a consultant able to walk into a data center, take a VM host server and walk out - and then was able to exploit it to pull all sorts of information out of the Active Directory service on it! Ned talks about taking both physical security and policies seriously, and then moves to the next phase: How do you protect a virtual machine even when its stolen? Enter Guarded Fabric and Shielded Virtual Machines, first introduced in Server 2016 and improved in Server 2019 - go beyond BitLocker protections and really digitally secure your VMs!

The next DevOps Report Survey is out, and Nicole Forsgren needs your help! Richard chats with Nicole about the changes at DORA (now part of Google) - but the work to understand how to make high performing teams continues! Nicole discusses her now expanded team of researchers getting to the heart of what it takes to make great software in your organization. Its never one simple thing, but many aspects that work together so that everyone involved in the creation and operation of software can be as effective as possible - take the survey today and contribute to the effort!

Office 365 is growing in popularity - but is it fast enough? Richard chats with Paul Keely about how IT needs to monitor Office 365 to understand performance problems and worse. Paul talks about all the various aspects of performance that can be impacted by working with Office 365, including needing more overall bandwidth. The discussion turns to the Azure Service Map tool that runs on workstations and in the cloud to understand what services are eating resources - and how that can turn up potential malware and security breaches! There are a lot of aspects to understanding exactly what's going on with Office 365 in your org, but it is a solvable problem - dig in!

Is Artificial Intelligence part of your data analytics strategy? Richard chats with Jen Stirrup about how data analytics and business intelligence continue to evolve to include different elements of artificial intelligence. Natural language interfaces are one aspect, but machine learning can play an even larger role - if you continue to do your diligence! Jen talks about needing quality data to feed to machine learning algorithms and the challenges of dealing with data bias and confirmation bias. We've had these battles all along in analytics, but the new AI tools can amplify your mistakes - there are no shortcuts to good data!

Whitelisting is a good idea - but not easy to make happen! Richard talks to Aaron Margosis about his work making it easier to use AppLocker to implement whitelisting on Windows, a set of scripts and tools named by Chris Jackson as AaronLocker. Aaron talks about implementing the whitelisting strategies outlined in the NSA whitepaper on the subject, making it easier to maintain the whitelist when apps need to be updated. Admins can choose how locked down to make a machine, providing flexibility around updates while still blocking the primary malware vectors - check it out!

How do you understand what's going on in your applications? Richard talks to Isaac Levin about Azure Application Insights - now part of the Azure Monitor Suite that can help with monitoring of PCs, virtual machines as well as a large variety of applications. As Isaac explains, Insights is really a reporting tool that feeds off of a standard SDK that can be installed in a variety of applications - but in the case of .NET applications, you don't have to install the SDK, AppInsights can still instrument it! But the most important aspect is all the complex reporting built-in that can show trends of behaviour as well as errors in your suite of applications.

Every organization has information hoarders; the question is, do you know where it is? Richard talks to Stephanie Donahue about the challenges around discovering information hoards and helping to unwind them - finding out why people hoard data and get them to share it to the larger organization that can benefit from it. Part of the challenge is tooling, and part of it is personal. Either way, it's worthwhile to get that hoarded data shared and help everyone be more productive!

It's 2019 - do you know where your IPv6 network is? Richard chats with Ed Horley about the current state of IPv6 and his new business, HexaBuild, that specifically provides services to companies implementing IPv6. Ed points out that the cell industry has pretty much moved entirely to IPv6 - if you're using a current generation smartphone, it's running across an IPv6 network. All the cloud providers offer IPv6 addressing, so the laggards at this point are the big, older corporations. The real question is, when do we move off of IPv4?

Machine Learning is all around us - are you getting ready for your company to use it? Richard chats with Ginger Grant about what you need to understand around machine learning to be successful. Not all data is created equal - often we think if we just store everything, it'll be useful for machine learning analysis in the future. Ginger talks about some of the mistakes she's seen in the space, and that analysis can't be an after thought. There are lots of great tools in the show notes to help you get started and be successful!

It's a container world - we're just living in it! Richard chats with Microsoft VP Corey Sanders about how containers have taken off in the cloud world. Starting the conversation with the previous show done with Corey in 2017, the discussion dives into how containers in general and Kubernetes specifically have dominated deployment and operations in the cloud. Corey runs down the gamut of advantages, including hybrid and cross-platform options, and how Microsoft is using containers under the hood - it's a container world!