RunAs Radio

How do criminal hackers make money hacking? Richard chats with Paula Januszkiewicz about the methods used by criminals to steal money through various exploits. Whether its ransomware or taking control of your Facebook account long enough to ask for money in your name, there are a lot of possibilities. As long as there is money to be made, the hacks will continue. Increasing your security doesn't m...

You sent machines home during the pandemic - are the drives encrypted? Richard talks to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Julie Andreacola about BitLocker and the various management tools needed to make BitLocker work for you and your organization. Julie talks about the need for PCs that have modern TPM chips - BitLocker will work without them, but life is much better with, especially in recovery....

ARM Templates are awesome - but what happens when they get big? Richard chats with Pierre Roman on the Cloud Advocates team at Microsoft about how ARM Templates are evolving to help you manage them when they get more sophisticated. Pierre talks about all the challenging bits of scaling ARM Templates, including modularizing, testing, and using source control. Your infrastructure-as-code is code, an...

How is your productivity during the pandemic? And the folks you work with? Richard talks to Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick, authors of Agile Conversations, about how to improve productivity during the pandemic. The conversation turns to how we measure productivity in the first place, and why we were happy with our productivity before the pandemic. Squirrel and Jeffrey talk about being comfo...

How secure is your office Wi-Fi? Richard chats with Dr. Avril Salter about using enterprise security features in Wi-Fi. The conversation starts out focused on WPA2-Enterprise, using RADIUS servers and protocols like CHAP and PEAP. It may be more complicated to set up, but once running, you have far more control over who can be on your Wi-Fi. Avril talks about creating separate SSIDs for secure cor...

There is big data, and then there is genomic-scale. Richard talks to Lynn Langit about her work in large scale data analytics around the pandemic. Lynn talks about the terabytes of data involved in doing genetic analysis and the pipeline needed to move and organize that data. It takes a cloud - you need a huge amount of compute in relatively small bursts, as well as massive amounts of storage. And...

There are performance issues in the cloud? Lori Mac Vittie says yes! Richard chats with Lori about how just buying more cloud might increase capacity - but not performance. This leads to a conversation about performance even is - and what it means to the users of your apps. Ultimately, the same diagnostic challenges we had before the cloud come into play - bottlenecks exist within software and nee...

You've moved to the cloud - you're secure, right? Richard chats with Dana Epp about what you should be doing to secure your cloud services in Azure. Dana talks about how the default settings for Azure services tend toward making them easy to use and inexpensive. But it also leaves you potentially vulnerable - logging is turned off, for example. The conversation turns to tools like Azure Advisor he...

Ready to automate? Richard chats with Sandy Ussia about Power Automate, formerly known as Flow (although the term flow is never far away). But Power Automate is exactly what you think it is - a no-code/low-code solution to providing automation in Azure between Office 365 and a whole host of other platforms including Google, Salesforce, and so on. Sandy talks about the array of templates that alrea...

The Black Hats are targeting your users' fears - are you prepared? Richard talks with Susan Bradley about the focus of attackers on COVID-19 topics. Susan talks about how many security exploits depend on convincing users to click on something they shouldn't. You can train to resist those clicks, but nothing is ever perfect. The question is, what happens next? The conversation digs into multifactor...

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 end...

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, bu...

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 Synap...

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 mak...

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 Window...

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 o...

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 s...

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 vir...

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...

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!

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...

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 tech...

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 p...

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 tu...

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...