RunAs Radio

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 fac...

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 y...

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...

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 move...

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 a...

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...

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 involve...

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 coul...

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 dea...

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 V...

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 cha...

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,...

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...

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 i...

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 machin...

Power BI is a hit! Now what? Richard chats with Melissa Coates about the challenges of applying data governance to analytics tools like Power BI. Melissa describes various aspects of data governance, including security, organization/classification, documentation of data and education - you need training to understand the rules and responsibilities of data in an organization. If every company is a...

What's an intelligent substrate? Richard chats with Microsoft Technical Fellow Jeffrey Snover about his new role in Office 365. About a year ago Jeff changed jobs and jumped into one of the biggest, oldest (and most profitable) teams at Microsoft: Office. Today Office is totally cloud-focused, and Jeff talks about the intelligent substrate, a NoSQL data store that contains everything related to Of...

How do you manage CosmosDB? Richard chats with Deborah Chen from the CosmosDB team about what it takes to care and feed the cloud-based NoSQL data storage solution. Deborah talks about the advantages of not having to manage the infrastructure of storage, with replication and fail-over solutions integrated into CosmosDB from the start - as well as at-rest and in-transmission encryption always on! T...

How can a deployment tool make your disaster recovery process easier? Richard chats with Michael Richardson of Octopus Deploy about Operations Runbooks. Octopus Deploy handles deployments very effectively, and with Runbooks, you can expand that functionality to include all sorts of other related processes, like backing up and restoring data, running failover scripts and more. Through deployment, O...

It's 2020 - why are we still using passwords? Richard chats with Libby Brown about the on-going efforts to make passwordless authentication work great for everyone. The problems with passwords are well-known, but can we really get to a place where we don't have them at all? Libby talks about the challenges of using multi-factor authentication, including authenticator applications, FIDO keys, facia...

What does it take to get your team learning new skills? Richard chats with Don Jones about the entire learning process in the IT profession. Don discusses outcomes - why are we learning? What new skills will help the company? Answering these questions leads to budgets and times, but also commitment and deadlines. You can't just learn for fun (although you should), you have to provide value to the...

Links: SQL Server 2019 Query Tuning Assistant Learn T-SQL Querying Azure SQL Database SQL Workshops

Azure Sphere continues to evolve - what's the latest? While at Ignite in Orlando, Richard sat down with James Scott to talk about how Azure Sphere has progressed. Azure Sphere is a highly secure IoT solution that follows the seven properties of highly secure devices (check show notes for the white paper). James also talks about how Azure Sphere will be in general availability in February 2020 - an...

SharePoint custom solutions are powerful - but how do you get them into the cloud? Richard talks with Christina Wheeler about her work moving complex on-premises SharePoint applications into the Power Platform that includes Office 365, Power BI, Power Apps and more. Christina talks about the cultural shift that happens both to her and her customers as the cloud becomes a compelling option for busi...

What are SQL people concerned about at the end of 2019? While in Las Vegas at SQL Intersection, Richard hosts the semi-annual question and answer session for SQL at the end of the conference. Panelists include Bob Ward, Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Brent Ozar, Glenn Berry, Kevin Farlee, Pam Lahoud, Pedro Lopes, Ben Miller and Tim Radney. Questions around SQL Server 2019, SQL in the cloud, new clusterin...