Can you have a private platform on the public cloud? Richard chats with Jennelle Crothers about her work with organizations setting up private Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure in Azure. Jennelle talks about using private DNS Zones, private container registries, and other services to provide a public-like platform experience for a company while not exposing it to the open internet at all.

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Your Private Cloud Platform with Jennelle Crothers

Ned Pyle is back and he's got cool news! Richard chats with Ned about some of the features coming down the pipe for file storage in Windows Server 2022. First up is encryption - Server 2022 will have direct support for AES-256. Sure, it's overkill for many scenarios, but some organizations are demanding it, so here it is. Ned also talks about SMB Compression - while it has existed for xcopy et al for a while, now you'll be able to enable compression across any mapped drive. Finally, there is SMB over QUIC - file sharing over the internet that is secure by default, and much more efficient than VPNs. File sharing is never going away - how can you do it better!

Encryption, Compression, and Sharing in Server 2022 with Ned Pyle

What's it like to build a tool for SQL DBAs? Richard chats with Kendra Little about her role at Red Gate being a product manager for the SQL DevOps tools. Kendra talks about moving to the UK to be closer to the main offices of Red Gate - just in time for pandemic lockdowns to start. The conversation digs into the various strategies around including databases in a DevOps approach, and how tooling can help. Kendra also explores the challenges of making the right thing, working with the team effectively through the pandemic, and software development teams have evolved in this strange time in history.

Building SQL DevOps Tools with Kendra Little

What happened to Windows 10X? Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about the ongoing saga at Microsoft to create a lighter version of Windows that can compete with iOS and ChromeOS. Paul talks about various incarnations along the way, including Windows ARM and Windows 10S - Windows 10X is just the latest victim of an extremely challenging problem. Windows has always been about maintaining backward compatibility - but does that still make sense today? What are we willing to do to increase security and reduce complexity?

What Happened to Windows 10X with Paul Thurrott

What happens when you bring Teams into an organization that already uses SharePoint? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about the intimate relationship between Teams and SharePoint, especially when it comes to files. Susan talks about aligning SharePoint folders and Teams groups to be able to connect existing SharePoint information into Teams - and how Teams can become the interface to everything, especially with Viva!

How Teams works with SharePoint with Susan Hanley

What is Microsoft Viva? Richard chats with Hilton Giesenow about the recently announced Microsoft Viva as part of Microsoft 365. Hilton discusses how Viva is a group of products focused on Employee Experience (EXP). Employee Experience being the things that employees need to do at the company outside of the actual work, such as submitting timesheets, requesting vacation, getting training, and understanding company procedures. The conversation turns to the different components of Viva: Learning focuses on employee education with LinkedIn Learning. Connections provide an interface to SharePoint pages for employees that the organization may already have. Topics is a discovery tool, identifying key terminology in the organization from within chats on Teams and elsewhere to bring information together. Finally, there are Insights, which looks at employee wellness. The interface to Viva is Teams - so that employees have everything they need in one place!

Microsoft Viva with Hilton Giesenow

How do you protect your PowerApps? Richard chats with April Dunnam about backing up and maintaining versions of PowerApps over time. April talks about how many PowerApps are developed by people that are more domain experts than developers. That lack of experience in development means that issues like source control and disaster recovery are not on their minds. There is excellent tooling available to help manage PowerApps: You just need to set it up!

Backing up PowerApps with April Dunnam

What does cybersecurity look like today? Richard talks with Troy Hunt about the recent news around the Hafnium exploits. The FBI utilized the vulnerability created in Exchange servers to patch the servers and remove the exploit. Is this a good idea? Is it legal? The actions of the FBI lead to a broader conversation about modern cybersecurity - when time is of the essence, should the so-called white hats be able to get legal authority to act to protect people, companies, and property? What's the alternative?

The New Cybersecurity with Troy Hunt

How do you get started with the Power Platform? Richard chats with Sandy Ussia about the familiar places that Power Platform first appears - domain users trying to automate work like approvals, improve or replace forms-over-data tooling, and more! Sometimes it relates to existing custom applications in the organization, and sometimes it is a set of connectors between SaaS services - or is so far down the to-do list, who knows when someone will get to it! Sandy talks about how culture impacts the evolution of Power Platform in an organization - will the people using the tool reach out when they hit an access restriction, or work around it? This is where IT can help - and maybe find some opportunities to use Power Platform as well!

Getting Started using Power Platform with Sandy Ussia

So many ways to store data in the cloud, so little time! Richard talks to Karl Rautenstrauch about the array of offerings for your files in Azure Storage. Karl talks about how the rush to move to the cloud last year created some regrets - in the form of large bills for certain services! Planning migrations help because there are several storage choices based on your needs. The conversation digs into the role of Azure Disk, Azure Files, and Azure Blobs - including their relationship to OneDrive for Business, and even a quick chat about NAS products like NetApp!

The Azure Storage Landscape with Karl Rautenstrauch

You moved your data into the cloud - but have you moved your thinking? Richard chats with Jes Schultz about going beyond the lift-and-shift of databases into the cloud to thinking more broadly about what you can do with data once it's there. Jes talks about how the cloud changes your approach to disaster recovery and database storage, opening the door to experimenting with different database capabilities, even different databases entirely! With core operations more automated, you have time to do more tuning - improving performance and saving money!

Getting the most from your Cloud Database with Jes Schultz

Windows Server 2022 is in preview - have you checked it out? Richard chats with Robert Smit about the early stage preview of Server 2022 released to Windows Insiders. Anyone can be an insider if you want to check it out! Robert mentions a minor problem with the early build that broke sysprep. Check out his blogpost in the links below for the workaround. The focus of Server 2022 seems to be on security, although not all the features are in place for the preview. But this is the version of Windows Server that will be in long-term support - and worth checking out!

Looking at the Windows Server 2022 Preview with Robert Smit

Ready to have your Azure virtual machines auto-managed? Richard chats with Phoummala Schmitt about Azure Automanage, recently released into public preview. Phoummala talks about how Automanage sits atop Azure Update, Azure Backup, Azure Security Center, and more. The combination of tools gives you an overview of all of the virtual machines in your tenant and the ability to managing patches, governance: All the things you'd typically do by hand or in ARM templates. Virtual machine management is getting easier!

Governing your Cloud VMs using Azure Automanage with Phoummala Schmitt

How can Azure Security Center help you? Richard talks to Yuri Diogenes about the array of security tools in Azure, starting with Azure Security Center (ASC). ASC is free, and you enable it as soon as you set up your Azure tenant. Yuri talks about how ASC analyzes your Azure tenant and points out potential vulnerabilities, culminating in a security score. Your score goes up as existing resources in Azure are secured, or when you add already-secured resources - and your score goes down when the opposite happens! Talk of security leads to a conversation around Azure Defender for threat detection, Azure Sentinel for security event management, and ultimately to Azure Arc providing security access beyond Azure, into AWS, GCP, and even on-premises servers!

Azure Security Center with Yuri Diogenes

What did the pandemic do to your infrastructure? Richard chats with Stephanie Donahue about the array of digital transformations that have taken place in the past year. Stephanie talks about moving workloads to the cloud - and how it is not just an IT problem. Work-from-home and other remote aspects of work have helped drive cloud adoption, but the opportunities are much larger than that! The conversation dives into new ways to collaborate, understanding how people work together on projects, and the potential for the latest tools available today!

Managing Digital Transformation with Stephanie Donahue

RunAs Radio is a weekly Internet Audio Talk Show for IT Professionals working with Microsoft products.

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