The Cloud Architects Podcast

In this episode we have the honor of being joined by Richard Campbell - an industry veteran and podcast legend who has recorded more than 3,000 episodes. Richard is a professional storyteller and we really enjoyed talking about a variety of things, including .NET, AI and even Windows on ARM. Richard Campbell started playing with microcomputers in 1977 at the age of 10. He's really never done anything else since. He is a Microsoft Regional Director and is recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the area of ASP.NET development. You can connect with Richard on Twitter (https://x.com/richcampbell) Be sure to check out Richard's other projects: * .NET Rocks (https://www.dotnetrocks.com) * RunAs Radio (https://www.runasradio.com) * DevIntersection group of conferences (https://www.devintersection.com)

Another in-person episode! We recorded this one at the MVP Summit in Redmond earlier this year and had a great time talking to Katie and Pablo about community as they introduced us to The Microsoft Security Customer Connection Program (CCP). Katie and Pablo help us understand the value the program provides to both Microsoft and its customers, how they gather feedback and what the requirements are to join the program. Here are the links mentioned during the episode: * Security Connection Program (CCP) (https://aka.ms/joinccp) * Microsoft Security Community (https://aka.ms/securitycommunity) Katie Ryckman is the Director of US Small Business Partner Strategy, including partner programs and The Microsoft Security Customer Connection Program (CCP). The goal of the CPP program is to drive quality customer feedback into our prioritization, design, and development process to build the best possible security solutions. You can connect with Katie on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/katieryckman/) Pablo Chacón is an experienced Senior Engineering Program Manager, most recently helping engineering groups in Azure gather feedback shared by the Security Engineering Advisory Council, a community of selected customers who give candid and expert engineering advice for the betterment of Azure security services. He is also the MVP Product Group Lead for Azure Security, leading the security community of Microsoft's MVP Award program. You can connect with Pablo on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pjchacon/)

In this episode we're once again joined by Philip Miller to continue our AI discussion, and this time we also invited Todd Wright from Progress to discuss data and the importance of data accessibility and connectivity within AI. Generic large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are fun and all, but being able to leverage your own organizational data in a secure way to train models is where the real magic happens. AI is a long-term program and not just a short term 'one and done' project. We discuss some practical guidance on how to make the most of your data and why data quality and governance are so important. Philip Miller is a Senior Customer Success Manager at Progress, a leading software company that enables enterprises to accelerate the creation and delivery of strategic business applications. He has over six years of experience helping customers and partners maximise their investment in MarkLogic by Progress, the only enterprise-grade data platform that integrates data from any source and any format. You can connect with Philip on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipdavidmiller/) Todd Wright is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Progress, helping enterprises thrive by providing the best products to develop high-impact business applications securely and reliably, while automating how you configure, deploy, manage and scale those apps on premise or in the cloud. You can connect with Todd on LinkedIn(https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-wright-dm/) and find out more about Progress DataDirect here (https://www.progress.com/datadirect-connectors)

AI is everywhere at the moment - it seems like every product or service now includes AI. What does that mean exactly? Can technology really think for itself? What is the difference between Copilot and an LLM and how do these relate to Generative AI? In this episode, we chat to Philip Miller from Progress in an attempt to break down these concepts and discuss how they relate to each other. Is this all hype or are there real-world business benefits? We discuss some interesting AI use cases and Philip recommends an agile approach to AI implementation. Here are the links to content mentioned in the episode: * Semantic Knowledge for Artificial Intelligence (https://www.progress.com/semaphore/solutions/ai) * Unleash the Power of Generative AI Systems in Your Enterprise - eBook (https://www.progress.com/resources/papers/unleash-the-power-of-generative-ai-systems-in-your-enterprise) Philip Miller is a Senior Customer Success Manager at Progress, a leading software company that enables enterprises to accelerate the creation and delivery of strategic business applications. He has over six years of experience helping customers and partners maximise their investment in MarkLogic by Progress, the only enterprise-grade data platform that integrates data from any source and any format. You can connect with Philip on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipdavidmiller/)

We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Camila Martins from Microsoft to talk about Microsoft's new Security Service Edge (SSE) solution. SSE includes Microsoft Entra Internet Access and Microsoft Entra Private Access. In this episode, we dive deep into these new capabilities that Microsoft is making available to customers and discuss how these can work with technologies like Conditional Access to help secure those 'crusty' critical applications that so many organizations have. Here are the links to content mentioned in the episode: * Microsoft's Security Service Edge Solution Deployment Guide (https://aka.ms/ssedeploy) * Data Security and Privacy Customer Connection Program (CCP) (https://aka.ms/joinCCP) Camila Martins is a Senior Product Manager for Identity & Network Access at Microsoft where she is working on the launch of the new Microsoft's Security Service Edge solution. You can connect with Camila on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/camilacmartins/)

In today’s episode we talk to Twan, Neil and Conrad who are the founders of PowerSyncPro, a software vendor solving complex migration problems for customers in a unique way and, in the shadow of some giant competitors. We delve into their interesting story, their technology and the problems they are working to solve. After more than 5 years heavily investing into developing PowerSyncPro, PSP is now a world class robust identity sync and Windows workstation migration tool that facilitates cross company collaboration with ease. Written and designed by migration experts. PSP is solving directory consolidation, unified GAL and Windows workstation migration issues under a single pane of glass. It is a product that Twan, Neil and Conrad are immensely proud of. Twan van Beers is a Senior Infrastructure Architect with commercial experience in a variety of development and Infrastructure technologies spanning over 30+ years. Having been a consultant for most of this time, Twan has become accustomed to fitting in with diverse teams, with everyone working towards a common goal. Neil Langston comes from an IBM Domino background and has worked on some of the world's largest Domino to Exchange migrations. Neil specialises in large migration projects, tenant to tenant and Google to Microsoft. Neil has a wealth of experience migrating workloads including Identity, Exchange Online, Teams, OneDrive for Business and others for a variety of customers. Neil’s passion for all things migration related is reflected in the enhancements of PowerSyncPro. Conrad Murray has over 25 years’ experience in the IT industry. As a messaging specialist experienced with Microsoft 365 and Azure, Conrad has expertise in all things messaging, Microsoft Exchange, IBM Domino, messaging hygiene as well as enterprise migration tools. Conrad is now using his wealth of experience to improve and innovate PowerSyncPro, to remove end user frustration with mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and consolidations! This episode is sponsored by PowerSyncPro. PowerSyncPro ultimately makes mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and tenant consolidation a breeze. The product is constantly evolving to incorporate more scope to create a seamless migration process. Twan, Conrad and Neil had, and have been, working on migration projects for over a decade. They kept running into the same problems each time with Active Directory synchronisation. Issues for user identities across multiple AD’s or companies with multiple email systems. At the end of 2018 the team ran into some hard technical and commercial limitations with a well-known competitor’s toolset they were using and needed another way. Enter Twan van Beers... During the 2018 Christmas break, with the support of his family, Twan invested his personal time to develop a comprehensive PowerShell module-based solution that could be used by internal consultants. This was the genesis of PowerSyncPro. A directory synchronisation tool that would simplify the process of syncing multiple directories or tenants to help streamline migration projects – an issue that had come up time and time again - Read more on our blog at https://thearchitects.cloud/ or check out the links below. Links: Home page (https://powersyncpro.com) The Business Benefits of PowerSyncPro (https://powersyncpro.com/the-business-benefits-of-powersyncpro/) The Business benefits of PowerSyncPro Migration Agent (https://powersyncpro.com/powersyncpro-migration-agent/the-business-benefits-of-powersyncpro-migration-agent/)

Microsoft Identity CXP team members, Tarek Dawoud and Mark Morowczynski, discuss topics like Conditional Access, phish-resistant MFA, evolving threats in cybersecurity, and the importance of learning KQL. They delve into passwordless authentication, Azure access management, and the significance of continuous security improvements.

If you follow the latest developments in the Entra space, you have no doubt come across Merill Fernando. In this episode Merill joins us for a great discussion as we geek out about Entra and authentication in general. Why is it called Entra (RIP AAD!)? Merill sheds some light on the name change, we talk about AD FS and its relevance today, discuss the deprecation of AzureAD and MSOnline PowerShell modules and introduce some of the great tools and resources he's developed for the community. Merill Fernando is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and Senior member of the "Customer Success Team" engaging with Microsoft Entra customers and guiding them through deployments, planning, debugging and driving feedback into the feature teams. Merill has a weekly newsletter on all things Microsoft Entra and is the creator of cmd.ms & idPowerToys.com. You can connect with Merill on Twitter (https://twitter.com/merill) or on YouTube (https://youtube.com/@merillx) Here are some links to Merill's work: * Entra Newsletter - https://entra.news * Merill's site - https://merill.net Here are the links the Identity Architecture Series discussed in the episode: * Azure Active Directory Core Store: Data centers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8ZPjSxNte0 * Azure Active Directory Core Store: Scale units - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcKO44GtHh8 * Azure Active Directory Core Store: Read and write replicas - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeLDtcpKc-U Are you interested in learning from others in the community? Give these folks a follow: * Nathan McNulty - https://twitter.com/NathanMcNulty * Eric Mannon - https://www.linkedin.com/in/emannon * Dr. Nestori Syynimaa - https://twitter.com/DrAzureAD * Rod Trent - https://twitter.com/rodtrent

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Nic and I had the great pleasure of talking to John Kindervag. I once read about John that he has "forgotten more about technology than most people learn in their careers" and I'm sure after listening to this episode you'll understand why he is referred to as the Godfather of Zero Trust. In this episode we discuss the origins of Zero Trust and some of the history behind it. John also talks about why trying to control the attack surface is a fool's errand and introduces the concept of a protect surface. With over 25 years of experience as a practitioner and industry analyst, John Kindervag is one of the world’s foremost cybersecurity experts and is known for creating the transformational Zero Trust Model of cybersecurity. At Illumio, John is responsible for driving the adoption of Zero Trust Segmentation through high-touch advocacy and forward-thinking thought leadership. You can connect with John on LinkedIn

We recently had a great conversation with Joe Flynn about modern endpoint management and how the way we manage our devices has changed over the years - we reminisce about the old ways and talk the future of Active Directory. We also discuss management friction, current hybrid work trends and scenarios where technologies like Windows 365 just make sense. Joe Flynn is a Director and Distinguished Engineer at Insight. With more than 25+ years in the IT industry, Joe loves that technology is constantly changing and providing new challenges — pushing him to learn and absorb more each day. Joe is passionate about technology and the business outcomes that it can provide. You can connect with Joe on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeflynn2/)