RunAs Radio

Ready to put your PBX in the cloud? Richard chats with Tom Arbuthnot about the Cloud PBX offering as part of Office 365 Skype for Business. Skype for Business has been around for awhile, as part of an overall cloud-based unified communication strategy - so what makes the Cloud PBX offering unique? Tom talks about how Microsoft is talking on the PSTN services as well - in the United States (at least for now), they've become a full-fledged carrier and can sell you PSTN numbers that bridge into Office 365. Elsewhere in the world you can work with your local carrier to provide SIP and TDM access up to Office 365 and get pretty much the same result. If you're looking to update your PBX, you need to check this out!

Have you looked at Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS)? Richard chats with Cameron Fuller about OMS and its relationship with System Center Operations Manager - other than caring about operations, they aren't the same thing at all. Cameron discusses the cloud-centric nature of OMS, but not necessarily an Azure-centric view: OMS can help with instrumentation and management of Amazon's cloud as well as other platforms as a whole. While OMS will integrate with Operations Manager, it will also take data from Nagios, which is a great instrumentation system from the open source world. The conversation also digs into different approaches to automation and backup - OMS covers a ton of important functionality!

Patching is hard, but patching clusters is worse! Richard chats with Luke Sword about the challenges of getting patches done right when systems are mission critical and complex. Luke runs down the range of options for managing patch, including Windows Update Services, the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and System Center Configuration Manager (which depends on the previous two). But that only works when the patches are all independent - what happens if you have to patch one server before another? The conversation digs into System Center Orchestrator in the role of coordination and all the PowerShell scripts you need to write and manage to make it all work. Check it out!

Are you using Chef for your configuration management? Richard chats with Steven Murawski about the on-going open source project that is Chef. Steven talks about how the community leads and builds the project as much as the folks from Chef themselves do - and its free to use, but Chef offers pay services above and beyond the core product to make your life easier. The conversation also digs into the relationship between Chef, PowerShell and Desired State Configuration - they all work together to keep your servers on the straight-and-narrow of delivering reliable software services. Whether you're on-premise or in the cloud, this is configuration-as-code at it's best!

When should move your storage to the cloud? Richard chats with Kevin Evans about migrating off of an on-premise SAN onto Azure's StorSimple hybrid cloud storage solution. Kevin discusses the data requirements of a graphics packaging company, making multi-gigabyte files for printing. When the on-premise storage solution was due for replacement, looking at the massive increase in storage available in the cloud was hard to resist. When combined in a hybrid configuration so that you have the performance of local storage as well, it was an unbeatable combination. Disaster recovery, continuous online storage and archiving... is the cloud the perfect storage solution?

How is Windows 10 working out for you? To finish 2015, Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the on-going changes to Windows that should result in this idea of Windows-as-a-Service. Mark talks about the almost continuous building process going on with Windows, and how various rings of folks get access to those builds. Most of those builds are only visible to Microsoft employees, but you can see them at BuildFeed - and you can get further into the new builds with the Windows Insider Program. The challenge of this new model will be the demand to keep up to date. How often and you and your organization stand new versions of Windows? Every year? Every few months?

With last names like Claus and Snow, what else could we talk about but Christmas gifts? Richard chats with Patch and Switch, aka Joey Snow and Rick Claus, about all the gifts you wish you'd thought of for your IT loved ones. Oh wait, that's the listeners, isn't it? Right, offer this show up to your loved ones and let them know this is the kind of stuff you want - geeky and cool! Whatever you celebrate this time of year, all the best to you and yours!

Ready for SharePoint 2016? Richard chats with Todd Klindt about what's coming in SharePoint 2016, comparing the differences in on-premise and Office 365 versions. Todd talks about the dark times a couple of years ago where it seemed like SharePoint on-premise was over - it was cloud or nothing. But that has changed, today the hybrid option of some SharePoint elements in the cloud and some on-premise is possible. Want to keep your files on-premise but search in the cloud? No problem! How about just externally accessible files in the cloud? Todd talks through all these scenarios - you can do SharePoint the way you want!

Can you use the cloud as backup? Richard chats with Aidan Finn about Microsoft Azure Backup and Site Recovery services. The conversation starts out talking about the challenges of earlier versions of Azure backup, which could really only handle files. If you wanted more comprehensive backup, you needed System Center Data Protection Manager, which was more complex (and expensive) than most SMB businesses wanted. But the latest incarnation of Azure Backup Services covers everything at a much more incremental price. And then there's Site Recovery, which can snap entire VMs from on-premise and keep them in the cloud - lots of options to protect your data and systems!

Data breaches are a fact of life - how can you resist them, and when that fails, deal with them effectively? Richard talks to Troy Hunt about his experience studying a huge variety of data breaches over the past few years. Having a plan for dealing with breaches is key, but so is actually being able to detect a breach, and knowing what to do when someone tells you that you have been breached - ignoring it won't make it go away! As far as resisting breaches, have you tried hacking your own site? There are lots of free (and paid) tools out there to show you your vulnerabilities. If you don't run them, someone else WILL!