RunAs Radio

What can Graph do for you? Richard chats with Jeremy Thake about his return to Microsoft, joining the engineering team at Microsoft Graph. Jeremy is focused on the developer experience, which leads to a detailed discussion of what Graph is all about and how it can help an organization manage rights between users, devices, and applications. This leads to a conversation about increasing the sophistication of security models within an organization by incorporating granular privilege controls provided by Graph. Get away from the nothing/everything security dichotomy!

And the battle is on - CloudOps vs DevOps! Richard debates with Dana Epp about what modern operations looks like. Dana points out that all too often, DevOps is purely a developer-driven initiative for automated continuous delivery pipelines - but there's more to DevOps than that! Meantime there's a group using the CloudOps term as an approach to not bothering with operations at all - let the cloud take care of it! What does the real value of operations looks like today? Do we have to decide between on-premises and cloud? How do we get to be a better team?

What's an IT Community and why should you be a part of it? Richard chats with Michael Bender about being a part of a larger IT community. Michael talks about how often IT folks are so head-down in the day-to-day crises of operations that they don't have the cycles or interest to connect with others in their profession. But it's a trap! Engaging with the community is a source of support, information and opportunities to make your work better, help your career growth and to open doors to the new things you might want to do. Go to a conference or attend a local meetup - you'd be amazed at what happens next!

What does a data analytics solution look like today? Richard chats with Trey Johnson of Zap about how data warehousing and OLAP have evolved into the modern data analytics solution. The cloud is the biggest shift for data analytics, changing what it means to Extract, Transform and Load. Trey talks about the focus being far more on extracting and loading across different SaaS products, and transformation being a rarer option. Whether you're starting a new greenfield analytics solution or looking to modernize an existing implementation, the tooling just keeps getting better!

Spectre and Meltdown are still out there - are you protected? Richard chats with Susan Bradley and Wayne Small about Spectre and Meltdown, a set of vulnerabilities found in Intel, AMD, ARM and other CPUs. Since the public announcements in early January, there have been an on-going stream of patches to mitigate the vulnerability - but at the expense of performance and in some cases, stability. The presumption that all patches are good is significantly challenged by Spectre and Meltdown. What are the right answers here?

What's new in Configuration Manager world? Richard chats with Johan Arwidmark about the latest for Configuration Manager - but starts out with a discussion around Windows Update. Of course, anyone immersed in configuration cares about the problems with Windows Update, and Johan talks about the testing they're doing that often results in needing to wait for fixed to updates before they get deployed. Report your problems - they will get fixed faster! Then into a discussion about the Cloud, and the new cloud management tools for Config Man - making it easier to manage configuration no matter where you are. Check it out!

Control what gets onto your PCs! Richard chats with Sami Laiho about the latest thinking around application whitelisting. For years we've worked from the blacklist model of allowing anything onto PCs and running anti-malware software to remove the bad stuff. But there's so much bad stuff today, it's impossible to keep up. Whitelisting has gotten simpler with better versions of AppLocker and approaches that allow you to more easily control what applications live on PCs. And it defeats the vast majority of malware right out of the gate!

Hey, it's episode 600! Let's celebrate! While down in Redmond at the residence of Kim Tripp and Paul Randal, Richard turned on the recorder and this bit of silliness emerged. Technical content? Not so much. Cursing? Yeah, a bit of that. But it's been 600 episodes - thanks for listening!

Ready for a chuckle? Richard chats with Mike O'Neill about a number of stories from his work as a Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft. While it's best to always be kind, some of these mistakes, especially the security ones, are shocking... Mike talks about offices where everyone was a domain administrator (including every ex-employee too!), keeping passwords secure in paper envelopes, and many more. You can't know everything, but if these stories are any indication, it's still worthwhile to ask and know more!

Ready to migrate some storage? Richard chats with Ned Pyle about his work on the Storage Migration Service, which is part of Server 2019. You can get an insider preview of Server 2019 today, and with a couple of extra clicks, start experimenting with this cool tool to help you migrate file server content, that is files, rights, metadata and all the details onto Server 2019. Ned talks about the pain of manual file server migrations - what if you could make it like a Physical-to-Virtual migration in Hyper-V with no downtime!