You. Hello and welcome to the let's Talk. Azure podcast with your host Sam Foot and Anne Armstrong.
If you're new here, we're a pair of Azure and Microsoft Three, six, five focused IT security professionals. It's episode 23 of season four. Alan and I had a recent discussion around Microsoft ignite 23. If you don't know Microsoft Ignite is an annual conference hosted by Microsoft centered around technology trends, product innovation and announcement concerning Microsoft cloud services, enterprise solutions and developer tools. Here's what we covered. The latest announcements at Ignite this year, both of our favorite announcements, what the in person Ignite experience is like and what MVP related activities has Alan been up to? We've noticed that a large number of you aren't subscribed. If you do enjoy our podcast, please do consider subscribing. It would mean a lot for us for you to show your support to the show. It's a really great episode, so let's dive in. Hey, Alan, how are you doing?
Hey Sam. Not doing too bad. How are you? Yeah, good, thank you. A bit different location this week, if I'm correct. A couple of thousand miles. Yeah. And time zone differences. Yeah. How is Seattle?
Yeah, it's really good. I haven't really had a chance to explore it like last time when I was over here, but from what I've sort of done here. Yeah, it seems really good. Travel was good. Getting from the airport and stuff like that is really good. And hotel's not too. Yeah, it's a little bit cold in the mornings and things like that, but it's about sort of the same location, same height in the world as the UK, I think. Something like that.
Whatever terminology you need for the current weather conditions are similar. I'll take that. Yes, I'll take that. Yeah. That'S cool. It is 10:00 at night here. Yeah, we need you back in the UK, Alan, for time zone related issues, that's for sure. I don't think I've ever really realized how different the time zone is, to be totally honest with you, because I'm actually messaging you and as I'm thinking about going to sleep, you're waking up.
Completely and like now you're waking up and I'm pretty much going to bed. Yeah, no, that's cool. So, yeah. How's your week been so far at egg night?
Yeah, it's been really good. The venue changed from last year. I think I maybe said that last week, but it's been great. It's been full on. Like I said, I haven't really had a chance to even check out Seattle. It's pretty much been fly in sleep, go to ignite because of some of the stuff I did for my MVP and then do the two days with like a little bit tomorrow or today. Yeah. And yeah, so yes, definitely a lot of walking, definitely a bit, definitely a lot bigger and stuff like that over here from the event from last year loads it's been lots of information come out. It's definitely a key topic for this year.
Well, should we talk about some announcements and talk through what are your sort of main themes and takeaways from this year's ignite, Alan?
Yeah, so it's definitely the era of AI for sure. And copilots, I know we knew about quite a few of them, but now we're getting more detail on how they can help engineers, SOC agents, members of the staff, increase their productivity, kind of do more for less, but in a different way. But yeah, so sort of my main sort of favorite things was coming out was security copilot. Again, we kind of knew about it, but we got a lot more detail about what it covers. So it's covering all of the security products, including intune and things like that. And we got some more insights about it being in line now as well within those products once it starts coming into, it's only in early access at the moment, but those glimpses seem very promising. And then a couple of other ones was defend for Cloud, got a couple of new features. So defend for APi got gaid, which is great. And we got some new SKUs there. The attack path that was only for like Azure now can span across AWS and GCP, so you can see attacks across from one cloud to the next as well, which I thought was pretty awesome. And yeah, the Defender for DevOps got rebranded to DevOps security and that's in effect gone into Ja because it's based on GitHub, GitHub security. I think it's, yeah, that's probably the main ones for me. I mean some of the stuff that came out that doesn't potentially touch us in a way, but Microsoft creating new chips for the data centers for AI and them actually creating their own fiber cables so they can get more throughput through their data centers, which I thought was quite interesting.
I think it's quite, we get these glimpses of scale, don't we? Right, with cloud platforms. Right. We sit here just like clicking on buttons in the portal, not really thinking about it. And then these cloud providers, they then turn around and go, oh, by the way, we have to make our own chips. Why? Well, because we buy so many of them and we need them so specialized. Right. It's crazy to think the scale you, you have to be at to warrant the investment in your own chips. Right. It's crazy.
Yeah. And I can't remember off top of my head what type of fiber cables they're creating. There's something like hollow air fibers or something like that. I can't remember it and I've probably butchered it completely there. Somebody spent millions with marketing or the. Product development, but Microsoft are creating their own and they've got the first dedicated factory just spewing fiber cables for them, which is insane. Yeah. That they need that many of them. Right?
Yeah. And it was really interesting to find out that because they said that they've already started deploying the cables. And I was like, okay, cool, it's going to be the US because it's the first place it would go and it wasn't, it was the UK. And that surprised me. Really. I thought it might have been like a new data center somewhere. Got it. Because they're putting it in, but they've updated the UK one first. Maybe it's because it's the smallest. I don't know.
Well, yeah, it could be a case of where the SMEs are, maybe where the technology is being developed as well. And also capacity Potentially as well. Right. Because we know that. Well, I always thought it was like resource capacity in UK south, but don't know, maybe there's a multitude of different restrictions. Well, maybe they're at capacity before they put those new AI chips in. They need it for a true, you.
Know, because I suppose every time you add more infrastructure, you need more throughput, bandwidth, connectivity, don't you? Right. Yeah. I don't know. I think I'm personally just detached from that. I said, I just click on the buttons, don't really think about it. And then there is actually, the cloud is just a bunch of oversimplifying. It is a bunch of boxes in a data center somewhere. Managed a lot more, a lot more sophistication, management of them. Right. In an orchestration.
That's why you go as PAas and stuff, don't you though? Because you don't have to worry about it. Yeah, exactly. And we're seeing like, oh no, we do have to worry about it. So, yeah, let's create chips and new technologies of fiber cable. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. So what about you then, Sam? What's been some of your sort of key or favorite announcements from the last couple of days.
I think for me there is a lot of, to me there's a lot of incremental announcements. Right. I don't want to undermine the messaging of ignite because I think the amount of innovation and new development that Microsoft puts out is insane. Right. I don't think we can fault them for the investment that they make into their platforms, right? No. And I think they said it was like 100 plus enhancements and new features and things like that in a year kind of thing. Maybe even like six months probably.
To be fair, what I kind of feel like is that a lot of the announcements are generally like GA or really, what's the best word of putting it well thought out and useful changes to a lot of things. Right? Yeah. Like pragmatic sort of operational changes. Right. One Azure Chaos Studio is now generally available. We did an episode on that in this season, actually episode eleven. Go and check it out. It was in preview when we spoke about it. So that's quite good timing actually for us to be totally honest with you. So yeah, KL Studio, go and check that out. That's definitely a great product. You can now start and stop Azure SQL Vcore instances to save money, which I thought was interesting. Apparently you couldn't do that before. It's been in preview for a year. So yeah, it's now generally available. Microsoft Fabric is now generally available. There's been a big push to sort of unify a lot of the data solutions within, in and around De Jor. Creating, I'm going to butcher it, but creating sort of a singular data plane is the way that I sort of see that.
Think they call it one lake, aren't they? Yeah. And there's a one lake like the next iteration of that I suppose is the way that I saw that. I haven't really delved into that announcement yet too much, but I don't know when Fabric was announced. Was it last ignite? I can remember talking about it. I haven't actually delved into it yet. Was it then or was it inspire? Might have been inspire, kind of might not. Yeah.
That does seem interesting with the whole mirroring data as well. So you can have it all in one place. Yeah. Really? We see that time and time again with organizations data. Right. It being siloed into different places. Now having it all in one place is a very utopian vision, I'd say. Right. Because the actual practicality of migrating this data to a single location for an organization is. I don't know if that's practical. Right. Especially if it's like terabytes of data and things.
Terabytes of data in proprietary databases. You might just be beholden to your application developers and your system. Guys, I don't want to focus on people, actually, no, it's more the technology than anything else. Right. But, yeah, being able to mirror data into different locations is, I think, really powerful. One other announcement that I thought was interesting is there is new sort of confidential computing SKUs on both AMD and, I believe, on the intel side as well. Now, when we did our episode on Confidential Computing, it was all intel driven. So I think what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to do a recap on new AMD capability. I'm going to have to look at that and see if there's actually any. The episode might still stand, it might still be valid, but we need to also see if there's any difference in that offering. Basically, there are new SKUs. There's always new SKUs. I believe the new AMD confidential SKUs are in line with a new AMD SKU being announced at this time. Genoa epics, I believe. So it's all sort of coming in one area. We're also getting a confidential VM with Nvidia H 100 GPUs. I didn't even know if you could get H 100 GPUs. I thought they were like, being scalped on eBay by enterprises. It might be the A 100 world. Can't remember.
I don't know if one of the bits that you seen was that they built their AI between Microsoft and Nvidia. They built their AI twin supercomputers. And they are full of, obviously a lot of Nvidia hardware. And apparently they put it against Forrester and it was something like, it wasn't even at full capacity and it was third in the world as a supercomputer. And they're like, we didn't even put it. It's full strength, it's third.
We plowed so many GPUs into the smallest space we could to train and run our AI models, we inadvertently had more computing than a small country. Right. It's just an arms race, isn't it? An AI. Absolute arms race. Right? Buy every single GPU you possibly can. Could you imagine being an account manager at Nvidia at the moment? I don't want to simplify people's jobs, but that must be a great gig to have at the moment, to be totally honest with you. Right?
100%, yeah. What else was there? I'm trying to think about Newbit's I'm trying to actively dodge copilot, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I'm just personally yet to. See the. True capability in action. I'm not saying it's not there whatsoever, but it's not an area that I'm a particular SME in, if that makes sense. Is there any sort of copilot, any of the copilot related news that you would like to cover? Alan?
Yeah, I mean, obviously Copilot went GA on the 1 November, the Microsoft 3651, and seeing so one announcement is probably the AI studio where you can, in effect, build your own copilots using chat, GPT, et cetera, and build your conversation flows and things like that so you can talk back to your fabric one lake to get your data, et cetera, and kind of train it. So it was definitely interesting in that sense, that as soon as that happened, I was thinking, because, in effect, you could build documents based on data and you just say, I need to talk about this, this and this, and if you've got something that's pre canned it basically write it out for you. That seemed pretty powerful in itself from that sort of thing. I mean, they were using it to sort of ask questions like, what's the delivery time with this supplier? And then it would go off and go and check all the orders and when they got delivered, so they could say all the mean 86% of the time they were on time kind of thing, just like within seconds, minutes kind of thing, which I thought was amazing.
Has it gone Ga? Because wasn't AI studio already there? AI studio has gone GA. Now it's a new one, I think. I think they upgraded it.
Right. Okay. Because I was a bit confused about the announcement. It was kind of like a. I felt like it was more of a reannouncement, but it wasn't pitched as like, it's now gone GA, I don't think, because I've used it well, I looked at it about, I don't know, two months ago, I think. But I wasn't looking at it in the way of generating my own copilot, so to speak, or my own models. It was more for storage of your own models and actually operationalizing them. So you would train your own model like you build a model yourself, and then you'd upload it to AI studio to then operationally plug it into your day to day services, basically, yeah.
So this wasn't necessarily building the learning models. It was more around. It's kind of building your generative AI conversation. If they ask this, then this is kind of the data you need to look at kind of thing. So you're saying if they're asking about HR data, then you go to this place where all our HR documentation is and be as generic as that, then the copilot will then understand that he needs to go there kind of thing. Okay.
So more new capability in that space, I'd probably say. Right. Like a generative AI layer on top of AI studio, I assume. Right. Do you think that's what Defender Microsoft Three six five copilot is doing? Yes. So Microsoft three six five copilot is in effect there, and it's reading your data, it's talking to graph, Microsoft graph, to see the data that you have access to. Okay.
And that's its grounding. I think that's how their terminology is the grounding of Microsoft three six five copilot non enterprise as the SKU is the Internet grounding. So it's basically you can generate your data, your response from the Internet kind of thing, and then when you go enterprise level, then it's in your context kind of thing. Defender for APIs is GA, yes. Which is cool. Yeah, that's interesting in itself.
Yeah, I know. It's got good integrations. Right. Considering it's quite a purview. Purview as well, built in, seeing what type of data is being sent to it. Yeah, exactly. The observability is just increasing day by day, isn't it? Right. I wonder if that's where a lot of the gaps have been. Oh, I've got X workload and I don't have visibility of it. So it's just a case of just connecting everything into your data security platform, aka Purview.
And quite a lot of developers do use, hopefully they use API manager, but they use APIs, don't they, to communicate between the different services. So with an API manager, they're in effect reading what's going through, then having something to feed into it to check.
And from my experience, like deploying APIs, is it like everybody gets really focused on the tech, right? And then you'll go to put it live, you'll talk to whoever's responsible for it or software plaTforms, they'll give you the technical green light, and then you'll have to pass through a gate of compliance, legal ops, something like that. And I'm not singling out those people. They are just the people that carry that risk in the organization. And then you have to go through that song and dance of what are you sharing how are you sharing it? How do you retain, there's party agreements there that need to be ironed out and understood. Processing requirements X, Y and Z. Right.
Tracking, auditing and all that.
Yeah. Right. Prove to me you don't send credit card information to a third party. I don't know. I can't do that now you can, right. Those conversations aren't that harsh. I've dramatized it. But the point still stands is I think for anybody deploying APIs, it's really important to understand the data that is flowing in and out of them, right. Because sometimes they can be forgotten about because they aren't like user facing, are they? People don't see it like day to day. No.
Yeah. What else have I got? Thoughts around AI. There's not a huge amount more on the actual Azure infrastructure side. There is a new IoT operations offering. It's supposed to be a management plane in and around IoT because the Iot stack in azure, I suppose, is quite siloed. Are they now point solutions? I don't know, but I added this to my must read more list, basically because I think, because IoT is an interesting one for end to end, right. Because a lot of IoT is not disconnected, but it is disconnected for good reason. Right. But with that comes challenge. Because if it is disconnected, how do you, I say disconnected? Like one step removed, right. Might not be air gaps, but one step removed. Yeah. Purdue, like down to segmented off. Right. And it's interesting because when I talk to some customers about IoT, some are okay with cloud connected visibility of them, right. What I haven't seen in the Enterprise is like an actual cloud managed IoT device, if that makes sense, where you're using IoT hub or something like that, connected directly into Azure. That's probably my naivety in my experience with IoT. Right. So it's interesting that they would add more sort of management capability into the IoT space. I get why they've done that. They've obviously done that in the server space with Arc. Right? Bringing a lot of that on Prem and IoT, you'll probably never be able to bring that to the cloud, right. Because your IoT devices are always local. Right. That's just the topology that is there. What I'm wondering is I do also see some organizations with very scrappy IoT sort of been distributed across like a manufacturing site or their organization because of sort of digital innovation and transformation in that space. Maybe it's not really been thought about. It's not that well connected. It so them offering a way to manage these devices or a holistic management plane could be good. I'll definitely check it out because I do have a bunch of, in my dev environment, I do have a bunch of devices. So what I've been sort of meaning to do is to turn my lab environment into more of a real IoT environment, if that makes sense, not just like a couple of, actually, maybe build a Purdue model and actually build that out properly locally to see how that's actually done in the real world. So yes, it'd be interesting to see what IoT operations sort of actually brings in, basically because they've talked a lot about cloud to edge. But I'm not skeptical. When we're talking about the edge, are we talking about Kubernetes, clusters and fast food shops or are we talking actual IoT and OT devices in a manufacturing facility? Like how far can we actually go? The thing I'm thinking about, I'm not saying it won't happen at all whatsoever, but I think I need to understand the risks and also the justification for doing so.
Yeah, definitely.
But yeah, that was pretty much me. As Alan said, there's over 100 announcements. There is the Ignite Book of News. So if you don't want to watch all of the, well, you should go and watch all the content. But if you don't want to do that and you want to skim through the updates in your specific area, the book of news is really good to do that because it's all broken down into sort of solution area, then it gives you the updates. Obviously the content is going to give you a lot more of a deep dive into those areas and give you.
Some practical example, the visualization of the demos and things like that. Exactly those scenarios. Yeah, but if you are only focused in certain areas and you want to look through them, then the Book of News will link it in the show notes as well. Anything else you think we've missed, Alan.
You'Ve got the rebrand of Microsoft Three, six, five Defender. We had a rebrand, so it's now called Microsoft Defender for XDR. And there's an announcement of a unified sock, sort of SoC operations, unified portal, in effect enhancing it. So I think that's early access, private preview at the moment, but in effect, from the conversations that I've had over here, in effect, most of the Defenders are going into there, as you could expect. But also you can hook up your Microsoft Sentinel workspace and then you can do cross querying against your logs that are in Sentinel from your third party tools against all the Defenders. So you can then do that cross referencing. So the way I see that is you don't have to ingest the Sentinel logs, the Defender logs. Sorry into Sentinel because you can just do that querying in Microsoft Defender, Defender for XDR.
So it's like one singular portal basically. Right. In effect copilot is going to go into their security. Copilot, yeah that makes sense. One thing I did miss, Devbox has got some changes. I don't know if you saw pretty basic one to start off with. You can limit the number of Dev boxes each developer can create. Yeah that's a good one.
And the specific wording is to. And I'm using air quotes people won't be able to see. That is help manage costs. So yeah that's cool. Yeah. New Microsoft hosted Networks. Alan, are they managed VNETs basically if what I saw on the announcement. Yeah, so that's like the Windows three six five. So it's basically they're just plain Internet in effect. Got it. And you specify the region you want the dev box to be in. It comes out of there. So it's just Microsoft like it says.
Yeah. And one other announcement that I've seen which is quite exciting for me personally is Devbox is going to have pre configured images for Docker as well. So you're going to have Docker desktop on your Devbox. Which to be honest with you that is like the killer feature for me really because a lot of local development that I've done is all around dockerizing that locally before you then migrate to your actual staging production environment. So yeah, that's a very welcome addition. Definitely cool.
Yeah. The only other ones I can think of as well is Windows three six five. Got a, it got some management tooling enhancements so you can do some more management with it. But also the Windows three six five app, the AVD, the remote app thing has now all gone into a single application now called Windows app. So they kind of split it out and now it's gone back into one again.
Nice. No, really good. And yeah there's a lot more updates and definitely do go in and check those out. So Alan can you tell us about the in person ignite experience? What's the event like this year? Lots of people there. It did sell out. So I assume it was busy.
Yes, it was definitely busy. I think it was around 6000 people plus staff and that. So definitely a lot more people than last year. Not quite as big as the 2019 ignites in Orlando because I think there were like 30,000. So still, I guess relatively small compared to those. But for the space that it was in, it was crammed. The hub up on the left, because there's five floors of the new summit convention center, and the fifth floor was the hub where all the booths were for all the partners and the Microsoft sort of stands, and it was constantly busy up there. Definitely. And all of the workshops were sold out and all the breakouts and things like that, they went pretty quickly as well. It's been really good, actually going for myself, especially, partly because I'm MVP, but I've been able to again now connect with the product groups, the engineers of the products especially defend for cloud, partly because I was on the booth for that, but just hanging out with those guys and having the conversations and things like that was really great. And I also got to speak to Chad, who from the enter ID external ID sort of team, product team, who asked us to do that episode. So I got to catch up with him as well. So that was really good. But yeah, there was loads of content. I was able to get into the keynote, the main one, because especially last year and definitely 2019, you had no chance of getting into that. I remember it was like by 07:00 I think it opened in 07:10 it was closed because everyone just went and got their bands and that was it. So you had no chance of even getting close to it.
What do you think? That's just because of the hall that the actual keynote was done in is relatively sized correctly for that to happen?
Yeah, I think they made sure they could get everyone in, in effect. I mean, it was massive. The hall was massive because there's loads of screens and everything. Yeah, it was sized correctly for the amount of people that they allowed to come, kind of thing. It was great to be in those. It's great to get to see the products. It was good to see some of the demos and things like that and ask the questions. It was actually good to get mingling, I guess, is the thing, socializing. And I got to talk to other attendees as well and make some connections there. So a couple of them from the UK, which is quite weird to find. Not weird to find UK people over here, but rarity, I guess, compared to the amount of people and things like that. Yeah, it was really good. And yeah, it's not quite the same still as ignite over in Orlando, but it's definitely a lot better and definitely felt more engaged. The pre day workshop seemed to go down really well with the attendees.
Do you think that's just because that's another sort of reason to. Because people are flying in a day or two before anyway, right. It gives them an extra reason to attend. Yeah.
And I think it's also because, well, at least the one that I was in, the attendees found it valuable. It was at the right sort of level. And they went out knowing more and understanding because it was a security one, understanding what they could potentially do and then sparks ideas and then they got to hub five and then go know challenge the Microsoft Teams and the MVPs up there with, I've just found out about this and I've just done it. But does that mean I can do know? It starts those questions starts building that want to actually investigate a bit more because you've had hands on of doing some of the, some of the attendees had some of the attendees do it day in, day out kind of thing. So they went through the labs pretty quickly and they found, you know, they announced all the new, some of the new stuff in those things as well, but some of them had never touched it and they were starting to do it. And they're like, actually, this is like, why aren't we doing this kind of thing?
I noticed that with a lot of people that I talk to, they're licensed for stuff, and then you show them it and how relatively simplistic it is with a bit of guidance, and they're like, that exact conversation, why aren't we using this.
With me being on the stand? And in fact, it was my last conversation today. And this gentleman came over to me and he's like, I don't really have a question for you, but what is defender for cloud kind of thing? And I said, okay, have you got stuff in Azure, AwS, GCP? And he's like, yes, we have. And I said, okay, do you know how much of it you've got, how secure it is? And he's like, we've got some sort of idea. I said, well, went through the CSPM story and said, by the way, you can start off for free and get that visibility. And he's like, sorry, what? He's like, it's a trap.
It's a trap. Yeah, it is a. He's like, and how easy is it to deploy to AwS? And I'm like, well, you kind of just like, do this. It's a cloud formation. I do cloud formations. Oh, is it just like that? Okay.
And it's like, light bulb. Why the hell haven't I got this turned on to get said, you know, you do need to probably go up to Defender CSPM because he wants to do regulatory compliance and do all the other kind of cool stuff with it. But he was like, yeah, if I get started, start seeing stuff and then I'll just upgrade and start consuming all the rest of it sort of thing. So he was conversation. You'Re right.
I had the same conversation with somebody about Sentinel on the Defender Cloud stand. He's like, we want to go for Sentinel. But, and I said, well, barrier to entry is you get a month of ten giga, I think it's ten gig a day ingestion. I said, you can ramp it up. I said then you can ramp it down and then you can make your decisions and then you go for it. And I said if you don't like it, you haven't cost a lot. You don't have to buy the, don't have to buy the hardware, you don't have to have the VM running just.
For it to be. And all the cloud stuff is like a click away, isn't it? Right, as in you don't need to pick your most complicated log sources to start off with, do you? Just get started with it, get your. Defenders in there and stuff and then. Start enhancing it, your entraid stuff. Right? Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. Again, people have that, I was having the conversation about the ingestion that's included with Defender for cloud and that was blowing people's minds that they could get some free ingestion Sentinel for it and stuff like that. And they're like, yeah.
But then I suppose it's a massive platform, isn't it? Right? We've seen 100 updates at one of my event this week at least. Yeah, right? Yeah. I think that just puts it into the perspective of the scale, right? Because I talked to some people about the podcast and they're like, are you ever going to run out of stuff to talk about? I was like, I don't think so. Why? Because every single announcement that's made is expanding the capability of Azure all the time, right? I think a lot of the challenge is actually just people even hearing or understanding about things, right. Because there's going to be loads of stuff that we've missed from this conversation, right? Like without a doubt it's all new. We're still thinking, but there's stuff that we don't even look at because it's not on our critical path every day, right. So we're not focused on it. But if you imagine an end organization where they've got to manage infrastructure in Azure their posture management, their on Prem, their data security threat protection. There's like multiple different buckets. And just inside of Microsoft there's a huge amount of tools that are there that they can use. Right. I suppose the benefit is that the conversation really isn't that the capability isn't there. Right. A lot of the time the conversation is that they didn't know that they could use it or benchmarking against the current solution they've got. That's a big part of the conversation. Right. Because a lot of the times it's like, well, why aren't we using this over X that we're currently paying? You know, that's a lot of the conversations we seem to have. But yeah, I just think the investment that, and we're know, security focused. Right. But the investment that Microsoft is making and continuing to make. Because I saw some people saying that it was pretty light on security updates thingy. But then I think if I look at what's in the preview community and the fact there's a security only conference now. Right. I think there's definitely enough. It doesn't need to be groundbreaking every single time, does it? It's got to be incremental I think is my main.
Yeah. And there might be some big changes coming that they need time to develop and get out. Because I don't think we heard a lot about Defender Friendpoint, only about Enterprise IoT being included in e five licensing now. Yes, kind of thing. But outside of that, we've not heard anything apart from being out the Unified Sock Operation center kind of stuff. But that's portal kind of related. But that's only really an efficiency if you're like an MSP, right?
No, it's more around your sock if you've got an internal sock. Well, that's true, I suppose. Yeah. If you're at that scale. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Got it. Because it's not multi customer, is it? I suppose it could be. The current preview I don't believe is going to start with it. I don't know. I have to double check that. But yeah, it's more designed for a customer on their tenant to be more efficient. Now a mouse service could dive into that portal and still be more efficient. Just whether.
And is that why the copilot you think is more customer aligned then? Because it's all going to feed into that one. Well, thing. The customer buys the optimization. It's the security sort of. Not the ethical side of things, but the security of copilot that your data is in your tenant. Yeah, exactly. Security copilot is in an MSSP, potentially. You're asking it to feed your data. I don't know. That's one for when we get a chance to have a look at Copilot, security copilot and its ins and outs.
Okay, now that makes a little bit more sense to me. Definitely. Yeah. Nice. And so what have you been up to as an MVP? What special access have you got, Alan? Now you're an MVP. Stopped. It hasn't stopped. That's what I mean. I haven't been out in Seattle or anything. Convention hotel room. Convention hotel room. Right. Well, that or, yeah, after party come back sort of thing. After party sounds.
So, for me, coming over, I proctored the pre day workshop with Rod, Trent and Morton, and Dean was a couple of the MVPs, and that was the security one. So that was really interesting. It was like a five hour workshop, one till six, I think it was. And that went really well. Helping out the attendees when they had technical problems, because there's a few technical problems occasionally, but also helping them go through what they were doing as well, explaining it, answering questions, things like that. So it was really good. Like I said, from the feedback that Rod was asking at the time, people were saying, yeah, this is great. This is a lot better. I really got value out of it. So. Sounds really good. And then, like I kind of mentioned earlier, I did a couple of shifts on the defend for Cloud booth and talked about defend for Cloud and occasionally other defenders when they came. Was that was that. And then someone, Thomas from Microsoft got in contact with us, didn't he, through the podcast. And then I got the honor of doing a interview with Yuri from the Microsoft Cloud Product group Live at Recorded at Ignite. So that was yesterday. So I think that's going on to his YouTube channel because it was video as well. Wasn't know, podcast YouTube, I think they said in sort of early December, I think it was. So watch that space. That was sort of a bit of a surprise kind of thing, but it was cool. And then, yeah, there was a security after party and, yeah, that was good to go to. And then tonight the celebration was on, the celebration for the Ignite. So I came on a little bit early, but that was at the Pacific Science Center. And, yeah, that was really good as, yeah, it's been really good to catch up with teams, other MVPs and that, and build some connections there, because this year has been, well, I haven't had a full year yet of being MVP, so just starting to build those connections and relationships across the world now and then to help do collaboration and things like that. So, yeah, it's been good.
Nice. Seems like an action packed week. What are you up to? I'm going to say today because my. Today is your tomorrow. Is that right? Yeah, it is for now. Yeah. So it'll just be probably packing up and heading home. I might not go to the center itself, but I'll probably catch the keynote. I think it's a keynote today, tomorrow. So I might catch that in the hotel just so I could pack ready and then head off to the airport and then an overnight flight and then back over on Saturday.
Nice. Yeah. Well, it sounds action paCked. I've seen a lot of. What's the best way of putting it? There's a lot of social media buzz, which is good. Do you know what I mean? It seems like people, more people being in one place at the same time just breeds that level of relationship building back to normal. Yeah, there was lots of swag, lots of stickers, backpack, T shirt and stuff like that. And because I was classed as a speaker being on the stands, I got a hoodie. As a hoodie? Yeah.
Oh, wow. Can't wait to see. That's it. Like conference Swag is like really what gets know. Yeah. And at the after party as well. If you went to it, you got a beanie with Microsoft Security on it and it's pretty cool actually.
Sorry. Pretty cool? Yeah, I love it. No, I'm jealous of your Microsoft security beanie. Not going to lie. Nice. Like it. Cool. Right. Let's let you go to sleep and I'm going to start my day. Alan, thanks for dialing in remote. It's worked quite well, actually, to be totally honest with you. I thought it was going to be a bit more chaotic, but no, it's been all right, I think.
Yeah, it seems all right. There's not much lag or anything. So I know we shouldn't see that in this sort of day and age, but you don't know, do you? No. Exactly. Next episode, sorry, is going to be Azure container apps. So episode 24. We were due to do that one this week, but we thought a recap around ignite was a better topic for this week. So. Yeah, we're just going to shift that into next week, basically. Yeah. Cool. Okay.
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