Should you use Windows Server Update Services or Windows Update for Business? Richard talks to Aria Carley about the different update mechanisms available today - and some new ones that are coming! Aria talks about how Windows is evolving to routine, incremental feature updates - but that can be challenging for managed workstations. The conversation explores the roles of Configuration Manager, WSUS, WSUB, Group Policy, Intune, and the new Azure Update Management tools. Plus, a hint of what is to...
Jun 21, 2023•38 min•Ep 885•Transcript available on Metacast What does high availability look like in 2023? Richard chats with Allan Hirt about his work with high-availability solutions today - not just on-premises but also in the cloud. Allan talks about the frustration folks had with moving workloads in the cloud during the pandemic panic, lift-and-shifting workloads focusing on getting things working quickly rather than cost-effectively. The results can be costly, to the point where some folks considering moving back off the cloud again - but does that...
Jun 14, 2023•37 min•Ep 884•Transcript available on Metacast Are you using Microsoft Sentinel? Richard talks to Cloud Security Advocate Sarah Young about Sentinel, Microsoft's Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. Sarah talks about the role of the SIEM in creating a common place for all security-related data to arrive. She mentions some of the many tools in the Microsoft suite to feed into Sentinel - Defender for Endpoints, Identity, and Cloud as examples. Specialized analysis tools send summaries to Sentinel, but Sentinel can also pr...
Jun 07, 2023•49 min•Ep 883•Transcript available on Metacast Are your finance people suffering from Azure sticker shock? Richard talks to Aidan Finn about his experiences with organizations discovering they spend far more on Azure than expected. Aidan talks about designing systems based on on-premises requirements where hardware is over-provisioned, and new features in Azure are added without a thought to cost. Getting finance involved in an Azure migration from the beginning can help mitigate the shock and balance features and costs. Plus, there are grea...
May 31, 2023•43 min•Ep 882•Transcript available on Metacast Is your organization ready to respond to a security incident? Richard talks to Paula Januszkiewicz about her experience helping organizations respond effectively when a security incident occurs. Paula talks about detection - attackers often have breached your infrastructure months before their attacks become visible. Once you've detected a potential breach, the next steps are to determine where the breach comes from, or as Paula says, who is patient zero? And what are the indicators of compromis...
May 24, 2023•39 min•Ep 881•Transcript available on Metacast Is your Exchange server one of the vulnerable ones? Richard talks to Gareth Gudger about the ongoing security concerns around on-premises Exchange servers. The conversation addresses a blog post by the Exchange server team about restricting access of potentially vulnerable Exchange servers to Exchange Online. But, as Gareth explains, this has to do with hybrid Exchange, where your on-premises server can access Exchange Online in a privileged state. What is the right thing to do to limit exploits...
May 17, 2023•38 min•Ep 880•Transcript available on Metacast Moving to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) has never been easier! Richard talks to Jen Sheerin about her work with the Azure Virtual Desktop Accelerator tools. Jen describes how moving workloads to AVD is part of the Cloud Adoption Framework that helps you integrate virtual desktop workloads with standard security and licensing practices. The conversation explores the different folks who use the accelerator - even for greenfield implementations of new virtual desktops! There are more great tools to h...
May 10, 2023•33 min•Ep 879•Transcript available on Metacast Large Language Models like ChatGPT are all the rage, but how will they impact work going forward? Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about the role of LLMs in the Windows ecosystem. Paul digs into the history of ChatGPT and how this whole wave of technology started more or less by accident until Microsoft grabbed on and created BingAI. Now with announcements for Copilot for security and M365, where else can the technology go? The conversation digs into the power of having a tool that can help you ...
May 03, 2023•38 min•Ep 878•Transcript available on Metacast The demand for effective data analytics within organizations continues to grow – how do you build your analytics team? While at SQLBits in Wales, panelists Maria Zakourdaev, Falek Miah, and Anupama Natarajan discussed their experiences with building teams - from recruiting to training, up-skilling, and retention. The discussion spans the different roles, including architects and data modelers, that help to provide the data sets analysts need. Do you train from within, hire into the role, or use ...
Apr 26, 2023•49 min•Ep 877•Transcript available on Metacast Ready to get some zero trust security inspiration? Richard chats with George Finney, author of Project Zero Trust, a fictional narrative about a company dealing with a security breach and the efforts to make the company more secure. George talks about the challenges of being a security professional and learning to speak to leadership in terms they can appreciate in their efforts to improve security overall. The conversation digs into the reality that security is about people, most of all, not so...
Apr 19, 2023•39 min•Ep 876•Transcript available on Metacast How do you measure the productivity of your team? Richard talks to Angela Dugan about her work at 3Cloud, supporting groups that are primarily work-from-home and working with remote clients. What do you measure when you can't be face-to-face? Angela talks about using objective and subjective measures - time spent on a project- and how people feel about the work they are doing and the people they are doing it with. The conversation also turns to skill growth as part of measuring a team - making n...
Apr 12, 2023•34 min•Ep 875•Transcript available on Metacast Are you ready for more IPv6 in your life? Richard talks to Pierre Roman about recent support added to Azure Active Directory for IPv6 - specifically around Conditional Access. Pierre talks about how in the past, IPv6 addresses weren't a part of Conditional Access - but now they are. This could cause problems for folks connecting to an Azure tenant via IPv6 if those IPv6 ranges aren't included as named locations. Even if this update hasn't impacted you yet, it can - changes to your ISP or when co...
Apr 05, 2023•40 min•Ep 874•Transcript available on Metacast Does multi-cloud make sense? Richard chats with Phoummala Schmitt about her explorations into building workloads that can survive a cloud outage. Phoummala begins the conversation with some definitions because most organizations are multi-cloud already, using more than one cloud provider. Referencing Gartner and Thoughtworks, the term "polycloud" covers that idea. Then the hard part - a workload that needs perfect uptime, even in the face of a cloud provider outage. That is a more complex and ex...
Mar 29, 2023•33 min•Ep 873•Transcript available on Metacast Secure remote file access without OneDrive or VPNs? Richard chats with Ned Pyle about the power of SMB over QUIC. Ned talks about the ongoing battle to put older versions of SMB to bed and how QUIC is becoming the de facto standard for moving files around, both within the network and across the internet. While a lot of business files can be served effectively from OneDrive for Business, often, you have applications and infrastructure that depend on UNCs and other file mapping approaches. SMB for...
Mar 22, 2023•38 min•Ep 872•Transcript available on Metacast What is your approach to incident management? While at NDC London, Richard talks to Hila Fish about her work in incident management. Hila talks about understanding when you have an incident and trying to grasp the scope before acting - is it impacting customer value? The goal is to learn from an incident to stop them from happening, and often immediate mitigations, like rebooting, destroy information needed for later analysis. Making the dashboard lights turn green is not enough - you want to ge...
Mar 15, 2023•34 min•Ep 871•Transcript available on Metacast Ready to go passwordless? While at NDC in London, Richard chatted with Kyle Kotowick about the FIDO2 specification and how it is being implemented to provide more passwordless options for authentication. Kyle talks about how FIDO2 does not necessarily mean physical keys like the Yubikey - there are more options! The TPM chip in your PC or smartphone can act as the token generator when combined with a second authenticator, like fingerprint or facial recognition in Windows Hello. Ideally, this sup...
Mar 08, 2023•30 min•Ep 870•Transcript available on Metacast Managing reliability means being available when things go wrong. But how do you make the on-call time productive? While at NDC in London, Richard talked to Lesley Cordero about her work with the New York Times on reliability management teams. Lesley talks about how putting regular sprint work into on-call time causes more problems than it solves - the quality of work suffers, and people get frustrated. Better to focus on preventative work, which is more contemplative. Even better to have an arra...
Mar 01, 2023•35 min•Ep 869•Transcript available on Metacast Are you ready to move your organization to Windows 11? Richard talks to Michael Niehaus about the upcoming end of support for Windows 10 in 2025 and the pressure to get to Windows 11. Michael talks about how slow Windows 11 adoption has been, mainly because there hasn't been a significant reason to do so. But as of October 14, 2025, organizations will have to pay for long-term support - and it's cheaper to move to Windows 11. The conversation digs into how Microsoft seems to be updating Windows ...
Feb 22, 2023•38 min•Ep 868•Transcript available on Metacast How do you improve the security of your organization? Richard talks to Jess Dodson about the current security environment we're living in and what you can do to improve your security posture. Jess talks about how breaches happen and what you can do to detect them early before things get worse. The conversation dives into getting more resources - in most cases, improving security means having the time to work on preventative measures, like implementing multi-factor authentication, security inform...
Feb 15, 2023•42 min•Ep 867•Transcript available on Metacast How about a free suite of over 500 tools for SQL Server best practices, administration, development, and migration? Richard talks to Rob Sewell about the ever-growing dbatools PowerShell module. While its origins are in migrating SQL Server databases from one environment (and version) to another, the range of capabilities is extensive. Rob talks about the power of repeatability when attempting to do these potentially complex tasks - which is best served by scripting. But why write the scripts wh...
Feb 08, 2023•35 min•Ep 866•Transcript available on Metacast Are you ready to move your intranet into the cloud? Richard talks to Susan Hanley about her work helping organizations migrate intranets into Microsoft 365 Sharepoint Online. Susan talks about avoiding lift-and-shift implementations for intranets - or anything going to the cloud. Better to take what you have learned about your intranet and build a governance plan in M365 to migrate content piece by piece. The good news is most of your old SharePoint customizations are now built-in capabilities i...
Feb 01, 2023•35 min•Ep 865•Transcript available on Metacast Do your applications need identities? Richard talks to Martin Ehrnst about how all Azure resources, including your applications, need an identity to function well in the Azure ecosystem. Martin talks about registering an application with Azure AD, a process that includes a manifest showing how it should be authenticated and what resources it needs. Then to the more confusing part - the service principals that show up as enterprise applications to provide access to the application within your ten...
Jan 25, 2023•39 min•Ep 864•Transcript available on Metacast 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 D...
Jan 18, 2023•39 min•Ep 863•Transcript available on Metacast 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 wo...
Jan 11, 2023•37 min•Ep 862•Transcript available on Metacast 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 l...
Jan 04, 2023•33 min•Ep 861•Transcript available on Metacast 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 c...
Dec 28, 2022•31 min•Ep 860•Transcript available on Metacast 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,...
Dec 21, 2022•39 min•Ep 859•Transcript available on Metacast 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 exis...
Dec 14, 2022•37 min•Ep 858•Transcript available on Metacast 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'...
Dec 07, 2022•41 min•Ep 857•Transcript available on Metacast What do SysAdmins want for Christmas? Richard chats with Rick Claus and Joey Snow about their favorite gadgets for SysAdmins. From the gadgets that help us at work to the toys that make us happy at home, it's a shopping spree of goodies! Share this episode with your loved ones to give them ideas on what to get you for Christmas, you impossible-to-shop-for SysAdmin! Links: DalStrong Call of Duty Knives PhotoStick Omni Permatrack Dr Zzs LED Shop Bluetooth Beanie Hat Rosewood Block Star Wars Ice Cu...
Nov 30, 2022•41 min•Ep 856•Transcript available on Metacast 
