RunAs Radio

Do you Kusto? Richard talks to Mark Morowczynski about his new book, The Definitive Guide to KQL, and the power of Kusto to look across your Azure tenant and understand operational and security issues. Mark talks about being able to query across all log sets, telemetry, the M365 graph, and more - to help understand issues. The book provides example queries you could run today, including knowing th...

What about SQL Server in Microsoft Fabric? Richard chats with Anna Hoffman about the preview release of SQL 2025 in Microsoft Fabric and the power of having your data store where you are doing your analytics and machine learning! Anna talks about new applications being developed using AI technologies like large language models and that often those applications need a data store - so why not keep i...

Are your docs part of your DevOps cycle? Richard chats with Mattias Karlsson about automating documentation for APIs, cloud resources, and more! Mattias talks about using tools to build text files that contain every Azure resource being utilized, hopefully per application, along with API info, NuGet packages, and more. He also digs into the different audiences for that documentation - business wan...

How is least privilege different in 2025? Richard talks to Bailey Bercik about the ongoing efforts to minimize users, administrators, and applications' privileges in 2025. Bailey talks about the power of Entra Permissions Management to help you see what permissions are going unused on various accounts so that you can tailor rights to individual accounts without things becoming unmanageable. Artifi...

For the first show of 2025, let's talk about being a sysadmin in the coming year. This is the sixth year of Richard going solo on the show to talk about the things he's seen in the past year and speculate a bit on the next year, at least for sysadmins. Economic uncertainty is still a thing, as is employment. The security situation continues to be tough - and getting worse. But remarkable new tools...

What does Windows want for Christmas? Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about the crazy year that Windows has had and what 2025 holds. Paul starts with the Ignite keynote that focused on Windows being an open platform - which sounds funny on the surface, but has some logic to it! Security is a key part of that story, which brings up the issues around Crowdstrike and the Secure Future Initiative. An...

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 bring...

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...

Need some gift ideas for your favorite sysadmin? We're here for you! Richard brings back Rick Claus and Joey Snow for another round of great gadgets that sysadmins love. There are some inexpensive options, some expensive options, some silly things, and some awesome toys! Share this show with your loved ones to help them get something great for you! Links LinkTree The Help Desk Girl Stickers 50th a...

How does your organization respond to incidents? While at NDC Porto, Richard chatted with Mandi Walls about her experiences with different incidents, from corrupted files to data center failures. Mandi talks about detecting and determining the scope of an incident, whether it is specific to a customer (or group of customers), or possibly system wide. The conversation ranges over external attacks,...

How do you test your database? While at NDC Porto, Richard chatted with Dan Mallott about building unit tests for transactional databases like SQL Server. Dan talks about using testing frameworks constructed for the purpose, like TSQL-T, to make it easier to test individual database elements, from stored procedures to column constraints. The conversation digs into the challenges around testing, to...

What's happening with SQL Server Management Studio? Richard chats with Erin Stellato, now at Microsoft, about the big jump coming for SSMS. Erin talks about how folks felt SSMS was a bit neglected when the reality is that there was a push to catch up with its parent codebase in Visual Studio. However, the next version of SSMS makes that jump, which opens the door to some excellent extension models...

How does Software-Defined Networking in Azure work? Richard chats with Aidan Finn about his experiences working with the suite of Azure networking products, including Firewall and Route Server. Aidan talks about the training available on Microsoft Learn to get up to speed with the power of Azure Firewall, including building policy rule sets. The conversation also explores the power of defining how...

ARM for Windows is here in the form of the Snapdragon Copilot+ PCs - how do you update them? Richard talks with Aria Hanson about how Windows Updates treat ARM like just another Windows device - all the updates! Aria talks about the transition time with Windows 24H2 update, which has some specific Copilot+ PC features. But when looking at ARM-based Windows devices, don't just focus on the Copilot...

How can you secure your company information with Azure Virtual Desktop? Richard talks to Jim Duffy about his work helping companies comply with NIST SP 800-171 security standards. These are the new standards required for Department of Defense contracting - including all subcontractors and suppliers. The security standard is thorough, with over 100 requirements. And you have to be audited to show t...

Can you pen test yourself? Paula Januszkiewicz says yes! Richard talks to Paula about taking an active role in understanding your organization's security vulnerabilities. Paula talks about the low-hanging fruit she often finds as a professional penetration tester - typically on poorly maintained infrastructure like PKI servers. The conversation digs into tooling you can use to find vulnerabilities...

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...

Microsoft 365 Data Governance has always been critical - but it's only getting more important! Richard talks to Nikki Chapple about her experiences working with companies trying to get their "data estate in order." That phrase is what Microsoft recommends before turning on tools like Copilot for M365. Nikki talks about how hard the goal of data security is - that it is just as tricky as any other...

What does Windows Server 2025 bring to Active Directory? Richard chats with Orin Thomas about the new version of Windows Server coming and what to expect around Active Directory. Orin talks about how mature the Windows Server space is, so only incremental improvements are warranted, but they are important ones - like retiring NTLM once and for all. And when it comes to Active Directory, there are...

Do you know how asymmetric encryption works? While at the Kansas City Developers Conference, Richard sat down with Eli Holderness to discuss many of the encryption technologies being used today—and the new options coming in the future! Eli talks about how symmetrical encryption and public key encryption have been the focus of modern encryption, especially on the web. But the ongoing security arms...

What can you do to Microsoft 365 with PowerShell? Turns out - almost anything! Richard talks to Tony Redmond about his ongoing efforts to educate sysadmins about the vast array of capabilities in M365, including all the PowerShell cmdlets that can let you retrieve and control everything in M365. There's now so much information that Tony and his team have created a separate book explicitly focused...

How is generative AI evolving, and what can we do about it? While at NDC in Oslo, Richard chatted with Alison Cossette about her work as a data scientist before the ChatGPT explosion in November 2022 and what life has been like since the LLM came to town. Alison talks about the rigor of building AI models using generative AI before ChatGPT and how many of those efforts have diminished when confron...

Leadership wants to get on the AI bandwagon - what are the security risks? While at the Kansas City Developers Conference, Richard sat down with Steve Poole to talk about his experiences helping companies manage the risk of bringing AI into the company. Steve talks about the impact of introducing a new development stack, especially open-source stacks where you aren't sure of the providence of the...

What are the threats your cloud application and infrastructure are facing? While at NDC Oslo, Richard chatted with Daniela Cruzes and Romina Druta about their work building threat models for cloud-based applications. Daniela discusses how modeling helps to understand security concerns before applications are deployed and attacked - often, security retrofits are time-consuming and expensive, so thi...

Are you ready for passkeys? Richard talks to Tarek Dawoud from Microsoft about the evolution of passwordless access with passkeys. Tarek talks about the FIDO alliance and the ongoing effort to create authentication strategies that are mathematically impossible to phish - no password stuffing under the covers that might get exploited by a man-in-the-middle attack. The conversation also dives into t...