RunAs Radio – Details, episodes & analysis

Ready for some real-time intelligence? Richard chats with Yitzhak Kesselman about Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric. Yitzhak talks about what it means to be real-time - that your company has a data analytics need with an ROI affected by a short amount of time. Perhaps it's a factory making products incorrectly or even issues with response times in a call center. The process involves bringing streaming data sources into the real-time hub and then attaching dashboards to them to see data as it changes. Fabric simplifies this tooling so domain experts can do much of the exploration. Once you have valuable and actionable information coming in, you have the activator options, including messaging via email or Teams, all the way to Power Automate to affect almost anything!

Links

• Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric
• Fabric Real-Time Hub
• Real-Time Dashboard
• Real-Time Activator
• Power Automate

Recorded October 29, 2024

Can government agencies use M365 Copilot? Soon! Richard chats with Angela Dugan about how government entities: federal, state, counties, and cities, are exploring the power of M365 Copilot. Angela talks about the US Government GCC process for making M365 Copilot available in the next few months. The conversation turns to the usual challenges of data governance and security - all the same problems any other organization would have with tools that explore every element of data. Getting your data estate in order isn't easy - but the potential benefits in government are tremendous - providing more services to constituents for less cost!

Links

• Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC
• SharePoint
• OneDrive for US Government
• Microsoft Purview

Recorded October 29, 2024

How can OpenAI help you with PowerShell? Richard talks to Doug Finke about his experiences with ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to help him write PowerShell and how he incorporated the OpenAI API into a PowerShell library to create a conversational interface in his PowerShell scripts! Doug talks about his productivity gains using OpenAI to write better quality PowerShell faster - helping him understand the code, automate test writing, and explore aspects of PowerShell he had never dug into. But beyond writing code for him, adding the conversational interface to a PowerShell script opens a whole new interactive opportunity to make it easier for folks to use scripts and do more with them!

Links

• GitHub Copilot
• PSAI
• GPT-4o
• Doug's Blog
• Doug's YouTube Channel

Recorded August 7, 2024

How is the DevOps movement evolving, and why should sysadmins care? Richard talks with April Edwards about how DevOps continues to grow with better tools and results! April talks about how often developers lead DevOps initiatives but that so much value comes from operations. The conversation digs into the tools that can facilitate deploying more frequently, measuring more accurately, and understanding how customers work. Everyone writes code these days, even if they aren't developers - and the DevOps cycle also applies there!

Links:

• Azure DevOps
• Policy as Code
• Repeatable Infrastructure
• DevContainers
• Virtual Machine Scale Sets
• Azure Load Testing
• Phoenix Project
• The DevOps Lab

Recorded December 14, 2022

Have you used LAPS? Richard chats with Jeremy Moskowitz about the Windows Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS). Jeremy talks about how the Premier Field Engineers originally developed LAPS at Microsoft to deal with having different local administrator passwords on every workstation in an organization. The passwords change automatically regularly, and sysadmins can retrieve the password for a given machine using PowerShell and other tools. Today there is an updated version of LAPS that works with Azure Active Directory and provides more control over password changes and restrictions - you need this tool!

Links:

• Netwrix Endpoint Management
• Windows Local Administrator Password Solution

Recording December 13, 2022

What are the new governance challenges in M365? Richard chats with Martina Grom about her ongoing work helping organizations provide governance over the growing surface area of Microsoft 365. Martina talks about the challenges around identity and multi-factor authentication and the improvements that Microsoft is making to MFA to make it easier for users to do the right thing. The conversation also turns to data loss prevention and the approaches to minimizing a company's legal exposure to data loss - starting with not storing data if you can avoid it! Martina also talks about the new challenges in governance with Power Apps, including the tools available to help sysadmins see what apps exist, how they touch data, and what privacy and security controls are in place. Governance is an ongoing effort!

Links:

• Microsoft Entra
• Privileged Identity Management
• Privileged Access Management
• Azure Purview
• Data Loss Prevention
• California Consumer Privacy Act
• Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit
• Power Platform Usage Insights
• Changes to Microsoft Authenticator
• Microsoft Purview Insider Risk
• Collaboration Governance
• Cloud Hub for Evergreening
• AtWork Blog

Recorded December 13, 2022

It's the end of 2022, and time to reflect on the work coming up in the next year – what will it be like for SysAdmins in 2023? Richard flies solo for his annual year-in-review show, looking back on last year's predictions (including what he got wrong!) and projecting forward into 2023. Security continues to be a top priority, but the situation has evolved. Current economic conditions likely will impact your business – how does it affect your work? How will the cloud continue to evolve, and how can you take advantage of it? 2022 was another unusual year, and 2023 looks even more so – thanks for sticking with us!

Links:

• CycloneDX

Mary Jo Foley moves on! No, not entirely from Microsoft - away from writing several times a week about the latest enterprise topics. MJ is going to Directions on Microsoft, where she will spend more time on analysis but still communicate it to the world. The conversation digs into current subjects like the state of the cloud and Microsoft's focus on building industry-specific cloud implementations, and precisely what is happening with Windows these days? Lots of great thinking from MJ, as usual, and a hint of what's to come!

Links:

• Mary Jo Foley Leaves ZDNet
• Directions on Microsoft
• Microsoft Industry Cloud
• Windows 10 22H2
• Windows Server 2022
• Azure Arc
• Google Anthos

Recorded November 11, 2022

You're moving to the cloud; how does your application security look? Richard talks with Carroll Moon of CloudFit about moving applications into the cloud with better security and governance using the Azure Landing Zone approach. Carroll talks about the various patterns that allow existing applications to work in the zero-trust environment, with containerization, platform-as-a-service changes, and even desktop virtualization! The blackhats are improving, and the cloud is less vulnerable than existing on-premises solutions, but only if you embrace the cloud security models. New standards for cybersecurity are emerging - are you up to speed?

Links:

• Azure Landing Zone
• Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification
• Microsoft Power Platform
• Microsoft Purview
• Microsoft Defender for the Cloud
• Azure Virtual Desktop

Recorded October 31, 2022

Is Excel damaging your company? Richard talks with Jen Stirrup about how Excel gets used far too much in businesses and for too many things. Jen talks about the lack of data integrity in Excel and how it's easy to make small mistakes that can damage data - and give you little to no methods to detect the damage! While Excel can often be a starting point for a new business opportunity, as soon as it becomes essential, it's time to pivot to tools that can protect data quality more effectively! Don't let your company be the next news story about a flawed spreadsheet!

Links:

• Jen's Blog Post on Excel
• TransAlta Excel Mistakes
• Excel Inquire Add-In
• Snowflake

Recorded October 28, 2022