RunAs Radio

Public Folders are a plague! Richard chats with Tony Redmond about the challenges of decades of public folders in Exchange accumulating the data cruft of a company. The need to store information independent of any given individual and discoverable by others has always been a challenge. Public Folders never got a lot of love, but today there are some interesting solutions found in Office 365. Tony talks about Office 365 Groups and how they are becoming what Public Folders ought to have been. These are the new emerging features of Office 365 and are worth a look!

Is Group Policy dead? Jeremy Moskowitz says no! And he's not alone. Richard chats with Jeremy about the confusion in the marketplace these days around Active Directory, Group Policy, Intune, mobile device management tools and so on. Group Policy continues to represent the best way to manage Windows PCs, which is still a large part of most organizations. And Windows 10 implements even more Group Policy related features. If you manage a domain, you should be using Group Policy. MDM, well, that's another show!

Is it time to jump into machine learning? Richard talks to Buck Woody about how he has focused his multi-decade career at the leading edge of using data for business advantage. Buck talks about the differences between business intelligence, data mining, predictive analytics and machine learning. The landscape called Data Science these days is large, but there is lots of opportunities. When you get it right, Data Science represents a huge opportunity for your organization. But it is a young technology now that benefits generalists, and you do need to learn some things. Check the show notes for great places to get started!

Hyperconverged storage is coming to Windows Server 2016! Richard chats with Ned Pyle about his work building parts of the Storage Services in Server 2016, including Storage Replica. The term "hyperconvergence" is a bit abused, but Ned talks about how software-defined compute, networking and storage have come together to allow the scaling and reconfiguration of server resources easier, more dynamic and maintainable. The latest incarnation of Storage Services takes using bunches of storage devices (hard drives, SSDs, NVME and so on) and making them allocate out based on your needs for performance, reliability and scalability. There's a ton to talk about, so this is a long show - and worth it!

Time for another SQL Q and A! Richard moderates an hour long discussion at SQLintersection in Orlando with panelists Paul Randal, Kim Tripp and Brent Ozar as they tackle the questions and concerns of the attendees. A number of other SQL luminaries (including Microsoft SQL team members) chime in about topics ranging from data types to data recovery, noSQL vs RDBMS, query performance strategies, and more! Why should you upgrade to SQL 2016? How long does CheckDB take to run on SQL 2005? What is the longest answer to a question that Kim Tripp can give? All this and more in this show full of great answers and debates!

So what happens when a country gets hacked? Richard talks to Troy Hunt about the significance of the attacks on Turkey and the Philippines, where entire voter registries have been exposed, including email addresses, passport information, even fingerprint data! Troy digs into the ideas around biometric data, the tepid reactions of the governments in question and a larger conversation about where this will ultimately lead. If you are concerned about data privacy, there are steps you can take, but only to a limited degree - anywhere that you share your data is vulnerable, even your government. Protect yourself!

Instrumentation and Automation across clouds and on-premise? Yes! Richard chats with Jeremy Winter about his work bringing Microsoft Operations Management Suite to life in the cloud. Think of it as Monitoring and Management as a Service, although it works just fine with your on-premise systems as well. OMS comes from the System Center world, but it isn't dependent on it - you can use OMS with and without System Center. Jeremy also talks about how other existing instrumentation and automation tools integrate with OMS so that you don't have to do any rip-and-replace, just add OMS on the top for a broader view of your systems. Lots of great links, check them out!

How much administration do you need? Richard chats with Tech Fellow and Father-of-PowerShell Jeffrey Snover about Just Enough Administration (JEA). The goal of JEA is to get administrators to stop living in admin accounts, to operate day-to-day with regular domain accounts and only escalate up to admin for a specific task, typically written in PowerShell. Jeffrey talks about creating a "break glass in emergency" account that is the superadmin, only to be used when there's no other way to do something. This account should be heavily logged and scrutinized, so that root cause analysis can extract the needs for the event and create more automation and security granularity around it. JEA works on Server 2008R2 and above, and will be built into Server 2016!

How do you know your systems are compliant with security and industry standards like CIS, SOX, HIIPA, PCI and so on? Chef evangelist Jessica DeVita talks to Richard about the free Chef compliance tools that can help you understand where your systems are exposed and help get you into a compliant state - and stay there. If your only check of compliance is an audit, things are going to be rough. Audits are just spotchecks, not comprehensive evaluations, and it takes time to get things into order. Having a system that can continuously check compliance state, even as code is being written, makes life much, much simpler. Check it out!

How do you manage your infrastructure like its code? Enter the release pipeline! Richard chats with Steven Murawski and Michael Greene about their recent white paper on the Release Pipeline Model. The conversation digs into the stages of developing and management configuration-as-code, including source code management, building, testing and deploying. There's a ton of tooling around each of these aspects, what you choose is very personal - and it makes sense to use what you already have onsite. Michael and Steven also dig into crisis management - taking advantage of the pipeline to respond more effectively when there are problems, and to help make sure those problems never happen again!