How are you protecting your organization's data? Richard chats with Joanne Klein about her work with Microsoft Purview to help with data protection, management, and governance. Joanne talks about a spike in data protection concerns from Microsoft Copilot - if you have been securing data through obscurity, you're in for a nasty surprise! Copilot has a knack for finding every nook and cranny of data. Proper data protection also means effective archiving - getting rid of out-of-date or irrelevant data. And then there are the security concerns around data retention - how do you need to keep, and for how long? Microsoft Purview can help with all these problems, but you must work with leadership to get things right!

Links

• Microsoft Purview
• Adaptive Prevention in Purview

Recorded June 10, 2024

How has the cloud transformed the way we work with data? While at Build in Seattle, Richard sat down with Arun Ulag, Microsoft CVP of Azure Data, to discuss how the cloud has transformed how we work with data. The pre-cloud practice of extract-transform-and-load into OLAP cubes has given way to the data lake - you don't need to pre-process data if you have all the compute you need on demand. Arun goes further into empowering analysts using tools like PowerBI - but the key is access to data. With Microsoft Fabric, data lives in OneLake - or anywhere through links! Today, the data analytics landscape spans different product stacks and clouds - but all are available to learn more about your business!

Links:

• PowerBI
• Pivot Tables in Excel
• One Lake
• Apache Iceberg
• Snowflake
• Databricks

Recorded May 22, 2024

What hardware runs Azure today and into the future? While at Build in Seattle, Richard sat down with Rani Borkar to discuss the hardware that makes up Azure Compute, including examples of the new Cobalt and Maia processors! Rani talks about Cobalt first, Microsoft's ARM processor designed for workloads in the cloud. Then, a look at the Maia processor, which focuses on neural net workloads like large language models. As Rani explains, the scale of the work coming to the cloud today allows for specialized hardware - you would likely not want to buy a machine this specialized for yourself, but you can rent it by the minute in Azure!

Links:

• Azure Cobalt Processor
• Azure Maia

Recorded May 22, 2024

More application platform pieces make your life better! While at Build in Seattle, Richard sat down with Buu Lam of F5 to discuss F5's latest offering, NGINX as a Service in Azure. Buu discussed how F5's products have evolved to run in the cloud, not just on their hardware. While you could run them as virtual machines or containers, providing them as services in Azure is better. You purchase the service in the marketplace and as part of your Azure billing. The conversation digs into the advantages of the services model in terms of updating and instrumentation, as well as reducing the complexity of your infrastructure as code.

Links

• NGINX
• Kubernetes
• BIG-IP Next
• F5 Distributed Cloud
• NGINX as a Service on Azure
• DevCentral at F5

Recorded May 21, 2024

What are the hard parts of machine learning? Richard chats with Lynn Langit about her work helping the Mayo Clinic improve patient outcomes using machine learning to understand patient data better. Lynn talks about the challenges of multi-modal data analytics - taking all the different data collected from a patient, like an X-ray or video, along with treatment notes, to create an overall picture of treatment and outcome. Then multiply that by thousands of patients, making a complicated data problem with huge challenges in testing and validation. How do you know that the machine learning model is correct? The key to practical machine learning is in the fundamentals - working on each step before you jump to the more complex goals!

Links

• Lynn on GitHub
• BiomedCLIP
• Evaluation Metrics and Statistical Tests for Machine Learning
• GitHub Copilot Workspace
• Gemini in BigQuery
• Basic Bioinformatics for IT
• HistoGPT

Recorded May 17, 2024

Have you rolled out Microsoft Defender for Cloud? Richard chats with Yuri Diogenes about the bundle of tools under the Defender for Cloud moniker. Yuri describes Defender for Cloud as a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). This Gartner term covers the various elements that go into a cloud-native application, including APIs, servers, containers, storage, resource manager, and more! Defender for Cloud integrates with Microsoft Purview to understand data sensitivity, and Microsoft Sentinel helps detect breaches or data misuse. It also offers attack path analysis and remediation so you can get ahead of the attackers to close off potential breach risks before they happen! Check the links in the show notes for great resources, including an ebook on CNAPP strategy!

Links

• Defender for Cloud
• OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks
• Defender for APIs
• Microsoft Sentinel
• Data Security Dashboard
• Attack Paths
• Microsoft Purview
• Cloud Security Posture Management
• Microsoft Copilot for Security
• Security Remediation with Governance
• Defender for Cloud ServiceNow Integration
• CNAPP Strategy Ebook

Recorded May 13, 2024

How can Microsoft Copilot make your intranet better? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about her experiences adding Copilot into the intranet via the Copilot Studio and Viva Engage. Susan talks about the challenges of getting your intranet data in order - most notably, archiving old information so that it doesn't clutter up a Copilot with out-of-date and inaccurate data. The conversation explores making smaller Copilots focused on specific domains, like company policy. It's still the early days for copilots, so there are some challenges to getting things done right, but the potential is there!

Links

• Restricting SharePoint Search
• Copilot with Commercial Data Protection
• M365 Copilot
• Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Copilot for Viva Engage
• Viva Connections
• Viva Suite
• Answers in Viva

Recorded May 10, 2024

How are your company's Apple devices connected to the enterprise? Richard talks to Michael Epping about the recent additions in Entra that support the authentication of Apple MacOS and iPadOS devices. Michael discusses Apple's Secure Enclave as the equivalent of Trusted Platform Management in Windows. With Entra Platform SSO, you can now use that authentication to access Azure resources and, ultimately, on-premises Kerberos-secured resources! These features are still in public preview but fully supported, and more is coming!

Links

• Microsoft Intune
• Windows Autopilot
• Microsoft Entra Hybrid
• Microsoft Entra SSO Plug-in for Apple Devices
• Apple Secure Enclave
• Integrate Apple Devices with Microsoft Entra ID
• Apple Automated Device Enrollment
• Entra Conditional Access
• macOS Platform Single Sign-on
• Join a Mac device with Microsoft Entra ID

Recorded May 13, 2024