RunAs Radio

What does it cost to recover from a disaster? While at NDC Oslo, Richard chatted with Natalie Serebryakova about her work helping companies understand their disaster recovery costs and what that process can teach you about your infrastructure. Natalie talks about different types of disasters, from the deletion of a production server to a major outage caused by a fire at a data center - and the pow...

Ready to move your device certificate authority to the cloud? Richard chats with Richard Hicks about Microsoft Cloud PKI - certificate management for devices and people as part of the Intune Suite. Richard talks about it being early days for Cloud PKI, so not everything you want is there yet. The only way to get a certificate onto a device is through Intune, so some devices, like servers, don't ha...

How are you protecting your organization's data? Richard chats with Joanne Klein about her work with Microsoft Purview to help with data protection, management, and governance. Joanne talks about a spike in data protection concerns from Microsoft Copilot - if you have been securing data through obscurity, you're in for a nasty surprise! Copilot has a knack for finding every nook and cranny of data...

How has the cloud transformed the way we work with data? While at Build in Seattle, Richard sat down with Arun Ulag, Microsoft CVP of Azure Data, to discuss how the cloud has transformed how we work with data. The pre-cloud practice of extract-transform-and-load into OLAP cubes has given way to the data lake - you don't need to pre-process data if you have all the compute you need on demand. Arun...

What hardware runs Azure today and into the future? While at Build in Seattle, Richard sat down with Rani Borkar to discuss the hardware that makes up Azure Compute, including examples of the new Cobalt and Maia processors! Rani talks about Cobalt first, Microsoft's ARM processor designed for workloads in the cloud. Then, a look at the Maia processor, which focuses on neural net workloads like lar...

More application platform pieces make your life better! While at Build in Seattle, Richard sat down with Buu Lam of F5 to discuss F5's latest offering, NGINX as a Service in Azure. Buu discussed how F5's products have evolved to run in the cloud, not just on their hardware. While you could run them as virtual machines or containers, providing them as services in Azure is better. You purchase the s...

What are the hard parts of machine learning? Richard chats with Lynn Langit about her work helping the Mayo Clinic improve patient outcomes using machine learning to understand patient data better. Lynn talks about the challenges of multi-modal data analytics - taking all the different data collected from a patient, like an X-ray or video, along with treatment notes, to create an overall picture o...

Have you rolled out Microsoft Defender for Cloud? Richard chats with Yuri Diogenes about the bundle of tools under the Defender for Cloud moniker. Yuri describes Defender for Cloud as a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). This Gartner term covers the various elements that go into a cloud-native application, including APIs, servers, containers, storage, resource manager, and more!...

How can Microsoft Copilot make your intranet better? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about her experiences adding Copilot into the intranet via the Copilot Studio and Viva Engage. Susan talks about the challenges of getting your intranet data in order - most notably, archiving old information so that it doesn't clutter up a Copilot with out-of-date and inaccurate data. The conversation explores ma...

How are your company's Apple devices connected to the enterprise? Richard talks to Michael Epping about the recent additions in Entra that support the authentication of Apple MacOS and iPadOS devices. Michael discusses Apple's Secure Enclave as the equivalent of Trusted Platform Management in Windows. With Entra Platform SSO, you can now use that authentication to access Azure resources and, ultim...

How can you use PowerApps to extend the functionality of other apps? Richard talks to Christina Wheeler about her efforts to teach folks to use PowerApps to add the functionality they need to Dynamics 365 and elsewhere! Christina talks about her move to Microsoft, shifting from SharePoint to PowerApps, but still essentially doing the same thing - finding customer solutions. The conversation ranges...

Two old guys talk about Windows AGAIN? Richard brings back Paul Thurrott for the tenth time to discuss Windows more. This time, the discussion focuses on the end of life for Windows 10 - currently October 2025. Paul discusses how it used to be April 2025, but that's not enough time. Is it enough time now? The conversation spans other Windows-related topics, including alternative versions like Wind...

Machine learning models need updating - what's the reliable way to do it? While in Romania, Richard sat down with Annie Talvasto to talk about her work helping to build DevOps practices around machine learning: Building repeatable processes for data ingestions, cleaning, organization, model building, and deployment. The challenges are the arrays of skilled people needed to operate and evaluate the...

How's your identity governance? Richard talks to Jef Kazimer from Microsoft about Entra's capabilities to help you have robust governance around identity. Jef talks about the lifecycle of identity - when someone joins the organization and a new identity gets created, privileges changing as roles evolve, to the eventual offboarding when that person departs. The same sort of cycle exists for devices...

How does artificial intelligence fit in with SQL Server? At the Microsoft Fabric Conference in Las Vegas, Richard sat down with Muazma Fahid and Bob Ward to discuss the AI developments in SQL Server. Muazma talks about SQL Server as a crucial source of data for building machine learning models and the new features added to make SQL Server a key store for vector data and other elements of machine l...

Have you downloaded the latest version of PowerShell? While at the MVP Summit in Redmond, Washington, Richard sat down with Sydney Smith to discuss some of the features in PowerShell 7.4. Sydney talks about the successful delivery of PSResourceGet and PSReadline, two long-in-development features that have reached their so-called "1.0" state. The conversation also digs into the ongoing challenge of...

How can GitHub Copilot help you? Richard chats with Damian Brady at NDC Sydney about the power of GitHub Copilot to help you understand and write the bits of code you need - whether you're using PowerShell, understanding a RegEx expression, or trying to get a Bash prompt right. GitHub Copilot and help to explain the code you've got, even across workspaces - so you can find all the scripts that cha...

As Artificial Intelligence enters our organizations, how do we secure them? While at NDC in Sydney, Richard sat down with Sarah Young to discuss the challenges of securing these new technologies. Sarah talks a bit about the fundamentals - in the end, AI technology is just more software and needs all the same authentication and authorization that other apps need. However, there are some unique aspe...

How can Microsoft Copilot for Security help you? While at NDC in Sydney, Richard chatted with George Coldham about Microsoft Copilot for Security - combining GPT-4 with information about Microsoft security products and your organization's resources in Azure to provide guidance and insight into making your company more secure. George talks about how it's early days for this copilot - and it's only...

What can GitHub do for you? While at NDC London, Richard chatted with April Edwards about how GitHub can help sysadmins - and everyone in your organization! In the end, GitHub is an engine for managing work, with GitHub Actions kicking off workflows that can send messages, run all sorts of code, activate scripts, and more. Ultimately, you get a good report of what happened - or didn't happen. And...

Aren't we all platform engineers? Steve Buchanan says yes! But there's more to it - and Steve talks about the mindset of looking beyond individual products that we might have skills with and owning the entire problem of providing platforms for your organization to get work done. The conversation dives into the many products that can help our applications function better and the challenge of making...

What do you know about large language models? While at NDC in London, Richard sat down with Dr. Jodie Burchell to discuss how machine learning has reached this new technological milestone. Jodie talks about different types of machine learning and how large language models fit into the landscape. The conversation explores where LLMs come from, what they are good at, and what they should not be used...

Have you upgraded to TLS 1.3? While at NDC in London, Richard chatted with Scott Helme about his work moving companies onto the latest version of TLS. But do you need to? Scott talks about how SSL 2 and 3 were used until they were broken by the black hats, leading to a panic to update quickly. While there is no evidence that TLS 1 and 1.1 are breached, they are already deprecated - and are slower...

How are we going to manage the use of M365 Copilot? Richard chats with Martina Grom about her experiences helping organizations prepare for M365 Copilot. Martina talks about getting your data estate in shape - and the challenge that represents in terms of identifying what data should be available within an organization. The conversation also digs into the larger picture of the Microsoft Graph - al...

What's coming next for Windows Server? Richard chats with Jeff Woolsey about the latest information around Windows Server vNext! Jeff discusses how customer feedback influences Windows Server and the challenges of moving folks to the latest versions. Server vNext is designed to live in a cloud hybrid world and includes improvements for interacting with Azure, but it also has plenty of on-premises...