We all have a hybrid cloud solution - how do you manage it? Richard chats with Thomas Maurer about Azure Arc, a tool in the Azure suite for managing virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and data services in Azure, your on-premises servers, even other cloud providers! Thomas talks about how IT folks end up with an array of tools for managing servers depending on the location and how Azure Arc ends that. Arc provides location-independent access to all your resources, and it's in preview now, so ...
Jul 22, 2020•40 min•Ep. 709
You've got everyone working from home - how is their WiFi holding up? After the initial rush to get folks working from home, there's the need to work effectively from home. Having bandwidth and connectivity problems seriously impacts productivity. Richard talks to Ryan Woodings, the CEO of MetaGeek about getting WiFi working well. MetaGeek has made products for tuning enterprise WiFi for years, but the need for getting better performance out of home WiFi has had them refocusing on different tool...
Jul 17, 2020•36 min•Ep. 708
What can Azure Synapse do for you? Richard chats with Jen Stirrup about Microsoft's Azure Synapse Analytics. Jen talks about how most companies have structured and unstructured data, typically stored in different locations. If you're all in on Azure, you have an Azure Data Warehouse for structured data ready for analytics as well as an Azure Data Lake that holds your unstructured data. Azure Synapse brings those two data sources together, along with other SQL data sources, to help you do compreh...
Jul 15, 2020•43 min•Ep. 707
Are you ready to have employees back in the office? As part of the Pandemic Series, Richard talks to Cynthia Milota about what preparations need to be made for using office space during the pandemic. In some places in the world, the initial wave of the pandemic has passed and the number of cases stabilized. Where authorized, folks can go back to the office - but with certain restrictions. What makes sense for your office? Can you maintain physical distance? How much cleaning is required? How do ...
Jul 10, 2020•36 min•Ep. 706
Two old guys bicker about Windows! Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about the current state of Windows Desktop, and the cycles that keep recurring - put more things into Windows, then take them out. Update more frequently, then less frequently. Client software deployment problems - use the web instead. Web doesn't have enough features, build more client apps. There are lots of cycles around Windows, which ones affect you?
Jul 08, 2020•46 min•Ep. 705
How do you stop the company email from being compromised? Richard talks to Niall Merrigan about the sophisticated level of hacks going on in business email. Niall describes how business email systems get compromised, typically through a weak password, then monitored to understand the business well enough to inject email in to steal money or compromise the business. In these challenging times, no one can afford this - and multifactor authentication and strong confirmation policies can help!...
Jul 03, 2020•42 min•Ep. 704
Windows Terminal 1.0 is shipped! Richard talks to Kayla Cinnamon about the open-source project that is Windows Terminal. The conversation starts with a bit of a history lesson on updating the Windows Command Prompt - and why it turned out to be a bad idea. Folks depended on the exact behavior of the command prompt so heavily that any changes broke things and spread sadness. But what if you could start over? Windows Terminal brings together all the things you never knew you wanted in a terminal c...
Jul 01, 2020•38 min•Ep. 703
Could Windows Virtual Desktop be your organization's Work-From-Home solution? Another episode in the Pandemic Series, Richard talks to Grant Becker about the latest version of Microsoft's virtual desktop tools. Grant talks about Windows Virtual Desktop as Remote Desktop Services in Azure - you have a minimal installation on the workstation, all of the security policies live in the Azure-hosted virtual machines that run your templates. And it works on mobile devices as well! While certainly a use...
Jun 26, 2020•36 min•Ep. 702
How robust is the data governance in your organization? Richard talks to Susan Hanley about the various elements that go into data governance, starting with having a plan! Depending on what your organization does, there can be a huge array of rules on how to collect, retain, and delete data. Then comes the challenge step of actually following those rules! Susan talks about the latest generation of tools available to make sure you're consolidating and deleting data when you should. Good data gove...
Jun 24, 2020•36 min•Ep. 701
It's Show 700! Richard brings his friend Jeremy Moskowitz on to celebrate making 700 episodes of RunAs. The conversation spans the history of the show, the evolution of Windows, the challenges of the pandemic and how Group Policy can fix everything - check out the webinar that Richard and Jeremy did together at https://www.policypak.com/runas - and thanks for listening!
Jun 19, 2020•34 min•Ep. 700
How do you get value from the unstructured data in your organization? Richard chats with Seth Juarez about the array of AI-related services that Microsoft makes today to help understand all kinds of data in your organization. Seth talks about machine learning in general, and how Microsoft has built various cognitive services that can be applied to Azure Cognitive Search to help dig deeper into any kind of document, images, PDFs, and more - and understand them! The conversation digs into what can...
Jun 17, 2020•44 min•Ep. 699
Databases are important during a crisis - how are yours? Richard talks to Brent Ozar about how the pandemic has effected workloads for databases and DBAs. While some businesses have wound-down during the crisis, many are busier than ever. How do you scale on short notice? What if bigger hardware isn't readily available? Even large cloud database instances are somewhat limited today, so clever techniques have to be found to keep things running. Brent also digs into the maintenance side of things ...
Jun 12, 2020•35 min•Ep. 698
WireShark has evolved - are you using the latest? Richard talks to Laura Chappell about her on-going efforts to teach IT folks more about what is happening in their network and how you can understand and improve it! Since the last time Laura was on the show (ten years ago!) the role of WireShark has changed. Today there are great capture tools for understanding the vast amount of network traffic produced in your organization, and WireShark helps to dissect the interesting bits, both from a secur...
Jun 10, 2020•34 min•Ep. 697
Even during a pandemic, the bad actors are out there. Richard talks to Ann Johnson, Corporate VP for Cybersecurity at Microsoft about the security activity going on during this unusual time. Ann points out that there isn't necessarily an increase in attacks, but that the attacks are targeting the pandemic, using phishing strategies around COVID-19 and preying on people's fears. The conversation turns to all the things we meant to push out for security, like multi-factor authentication and passwo...
Jun 05, 2020•34 min•Ep. 696
What's your WiFi network solution? Richard chats with Daniel Piessens about the Ubiquiti UniFi WiFi devices available today. What started as a straight WiFi provider has evolved into a more sophisticated networking set up with switches, gateways, security devices, and more. But its the software around the UniFi products that really makes things interesting. Daniel talks about the frustrating parts of UniFi as well as the fun stuff. Looking for a WiFi set up for home or small business, have a lis...
Jun 03, 2020•34 min•Ep. 695
How's your business continuity? As part of the Pandemic Series, Richard talks to Sonia Cuff about the role of IT in business continuity. As Sonia says, the first word there is BUSINESS. And we're all part of making a business work, so you need to engage with business leadership around what continuity looks like for your organization. Backups are not enough! The conversation also dives into the fact that business continuity is not just about outages - productivity plays a part as well. Helping st...
May 29, 2020•35 min•Ep. 694
Are your PC deployments on Autopilot? Richard talks to Michael Niehaus about Windows Autopilot, which offers a centralized way to deploy to PCs, both remotely and on-premises. Michael talks about getting away from the double-shipping approach of provisioning new PCs, where you as an IT person have to receive a machine, load it up, then ship it out to the employee that is using it. With Autopilot you identify new PCs to your hardware provider using your Azure Tenant ID. Then you specify your conf...
May 27, 2020•38 min•Ep. 693
Next up in the Pandemic Series - how is your VPN? Richard talks to Richard Hicks about the vast increase in demand for VPN services as employees work from home en masse. For many businesses, VPNs were an exception case, with relatively few users. When everyone needs to use it, can the infrastructure hold up? Richard talks about configuration issues that can limit the scalability of your VPN, what workloads can be offloaded from the VPN entirely, and how sometimes its easier to build out a new in...
May 22, 2020•36 min•Ep. 692
Are you ready to move to the cloud? Richard talks to Evelyn Padrino about the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework. Evelyn describes how Microsoft has been collecting knowledge from all the past cloud migrations to build out a framework to make it easier to do the right thing moving workloads to the cloud. The conversation digs into all the preparations that need to be made before anything gets moved, and how to move the right things the right way. And it's not just about Lift-and-Shift, but also ...
May 20, 2020•34 min•Ep. 691
How are you managing everyone working from home? Second in the Pandemic Series, Richard talks to Martina Grom about the challenges around maintaining security and productivity with entire workforces doing their jobs from home. Office 365 does offer some powerful options for security, including the Azure Information Protection services that can restrict the copying of files and limit lifetimes on access. Modernizing security using password managers and authentication helps also - this is not the ...
May 15, 2020•33 min•Ep. 690
How do you keep the configuration of your Microsoft 365 resources consistent? Richard talks to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Nik Charlebois about the evolution of Desired State Configuration. Nik talks about how his old open source project called ReverseDSC has become a part of the new Microsoft365DSC - giving you the ability to extract all the configuration and policy details from the various elements of your Microsoft 365 tenant. And once you have that file, you can compare it against other...
May 13, 2020•37 min•Ep. 689
The first of the Pandemic series - how's your bandwidth? Richard talks to Cameron Fuller about some of the issues IT folks are dealing with during the pandemic. With most employees working from home, the bandwidth available to those employees is essential. And most likely, there's more than one person at home that needs that bandwidth - do they have enough? Does it make sense for IT to get involved in configuring networks in employee homes to provide bandwidth shaping with QoS? What about other ...
May 08, 2020•30 min•Ep. 688
What is Terraform, and why should you use it? Richard chats with Jennelle Crothers about HashiCorp's open source project called Terraform, providing configuration-as-code solutions for building out Azure infrastructure. As Jennelle describes it, this is code for racking-and-stacking Azure resources: Defining your virtual machines (or containers), wiring them up with networking, and so on. You could do it with Azure ARM, but do you want that much JSON in your life? Jennelle talks about the Azure ...
May 06, 2020•34 min•Ep. 687
DevOps involves a whole organization - but what can Ops do to facilitate DevOps? Richard chats with Michael Levan about the role of Ops in the DevOps evolution of an organization. Michael talks about the need for culture change to make your DevOps practices successful, but at the same time, tools have gotten dramatically better. The conversation turns to Azure DevOps as an overarching tool for dealing with the continuous integration and continuous deployment of software for your organization. Th...
Apr 29, 2020•33 min•Ep. 686
Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 went out of support as of January 14, 2020. Now what? Richard talks to Sonia Cuff about what your options are to deal with your Windows 2008 Servers. The conversation dives into all the great things that have been added to Server in the past twelve years, and the various options to have to upgrade. Starting with - should you upgrade? Sonia talks about building new VMs for roles like DHCP, DNS and Active Directory - and shifting workloads gradually. There are lots ...
Apr 22, 2020•35 min•Ep. 685
If you care about mail, there are important things coming in 2020! Richard chats with Gareth Gudger about recent announcements from Microsoft that will have an impact on email both on-premises and in the cloud. First up is the end of Basic Authentication to Exchange Online this fall - old mail clients are going to break, time to upgrade! Next is the end of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 support - more client challenges! Gareth talks about upgrading, contracting out and other solutions for the on-going efforts ...
Apr 15, 2020•33 min•Ep. 684
What does it take to become a data scientist? Richard chats with Ginger Grant about her experience talking to DBAs about getting into data analysis and data science. The conversation starts out describing the difference between analysis and science - Ginger describes analysts as using querying to generate dynamic reports in tools like PowerBI. Data science is all about algorithms. But either way, your knowledge of data and domain are key skills. You have an advantage as a working DBA, add some a...
Apr 08, 2020•30 min•Ep. 683
How does IT Pros do their jobs during a pandemic? It may sound like an April Fools Day joke, but it's not. The Covid-19 pandemic is having a significant impact on how we work and play. Richard flies solo again to talk through various aspects of IT during the pandemic, including various efforts needed to help employees work from home, communicate effectively and maintain important operations. This is a time all about business continuity - how can you keep people productive and safe? We can get th...
Apr 01, 2020•17 min•Ep. 682
Teams in Office 365 is a hit - but should it be your intranet? Richard talks with Stephanie Donahue about the role that Teams can play in your organization. More than chat, teams is an effective collaboration tool, and a way to store and share institutional knowledge - how decisions are made, what roles people have in those decisions. Is it the first place you should look when you come into work in the morning? Probably. Is it the perfect place for everything in your organization? Stephanie says...
Mar 25, 2020•34 min•Ep. 681
What is Azure Sentinel, and how can it help protect your organization? Richard chats with Paul Keely about Azure Sentinel, a set of tools that provide Security Information Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration Automated Response (SOAR). Paul talks about going beyond the firewall, into the analysis of behavior within your systems, including Office 365, Azure and more - and using machine learning, being able to detect what unusual behavior looks like and automatically respond to it....
Mar 18, 2020•43 min•Ep. 680
