The Cloud Architects Podcast

We've all heard the statement "Fast, Cheap or Good? Pick two" and it seems this continues to ring true. Does the current rate of innovation and change in technology come at the expense of quality? We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with our friends Martina Grom and Tony Redmond to discuss this and hear about what has been keeping them busy lately. Martina Grom is a Microsoft Most Valuabl...

We recently had a lot of fun catching up with our old friend and possibly our biggest fan - Stephen L Rose. We talked a little about his passion for really listening to customers and some of the new innovations in Microsoft Teams. Stephen also as passionate about community and sharing knowledge through various platforms, including his own podcast "Inside Microsoft Teams" Stephen Rose works in IT P...

Episode 52: Knowledge has a Price Tag by The Cloud Architects

After our recent 'reflections' episode, we felt it would be a great idea to catch up with our long-time sponsor KEMP to talk about how the load balancing world has changed in recent years. As we find ourselves moving away from the traditional fixed perimeter and rethinking 'castle and moat' principles an inevitable question arises, where does the humble load balancer fit into today's Zero Trust wo...

Episode 50! In this episode we reflect on our journey to 50 episodes - thinking about the fun we've had, everything we've learned and the guests we've had the privilege to speak to along the way. This is definitely a more personal episode, but don't worry - we also discuss the much talked about Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities and the recent Azure AD outage.

It's 2021! Well, technically it's been 2021 for three months and it looks like many of the trends established in 2020 are continuing - not only in our daily lives but also from a cyber threat perspective. In this episode we sit down with Donovan Stevens to talk about account takeovers (ATO) - what it is, why it is something you may want to pay attention to and what you can do to help safeguard aga...

2020 has been an interesting and very different year for most of us. We're doing more things online than ever before - Microsoft recently announced that Teams reached 115 million daily active users, but this new normal extends well beyond the business world. There are countless positive stories of how technology has helped teachers connect with students or doctors connect with patients, but there...

Zero Trust is a term that is thrown around a lot these days and seems to mean many different things to different folks. At its core, Zero Trust is a philosophy or security concept whereby no one is trusted by default on the network, and verification is always required from everyone attempting to access any resources. In this episode we sit down with Ashwin Pal to better understand Zero Trust, why...

Microsoft Teams has seen some incredible growth in recent months as many organizations worldwide adjust to a new normal that involves a remote, work from home workforce. In late April, Microsoft announced that it had seen a 70% increase in Teams usage, increasing to more than 75 million daily active users and seeing 200 million meeting participants in a single day for the first time. In this episo...

It's almost time for Microsoft Ignite 2020, but this year things are going to be a little different. In this special episode, Anna Chu (a.k.a The Community Khaleesi) gives us some inside info about what to expect this year and how you can get involved! If you're interested in being part of Ignite this year, the Microsoft Ignite Call for Moderators. (https://t.co/AQQQuTAOKl) is now open and closes...

There is no denying that the rate of change in the Microsoft Cloud in astounding. Microsoft continues to innovate and improve very rapidly with new features often being deployed weekly. Security and Compliance is understandably a huge area of focus and it can be a challenge to stay up to date with all the continuous change - this challenge requires an innovative solution. We're excited to talk to...

We're Back! Yes! it's been a little while since we last recorded an episode. Needless to say, the COVID-19 situation globally upset our planned travel and recording schedule just a little. We hope you and yours are keeping safe and well during these crazy times. In this episode we delve into Cybersecurity, something that has been very topical for many organizations as they have been forced to oper...

There is no denying the ever-increasing popularity of Microsoft Teams. Microsoft recently reported an unprecedented spike in Teams usage due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, with usage rising to more than 44 million daily users - showing an increase of 12 million users over the course of just seven days. When I sat down with fellow MVPs Paul Bloem and Andrew Morpeth in Auckland, New Zealand last...

Multi-cloud is a hot topic at the moment and in this episode we talk to Rick Claus and Joey Snow - a.k.a Patch And Switch from Microsoft about this new trend. Is Azure the cloud to rule them all or is a sound multi-cloud strategy essential in today cloud world? Rick Claus engages in person and online with the worldwide Ops community on behalf of Microsoft. As a Cloud Advocate on the Azure engineer...

Azure AD business-to-business (B2B) collaboration allows organizations to securely share applications and services with guest users from any other organization, while maintaining control over their data. In this episode we chat to returning guest Elisabeth Olson about some of the improvements in the B2B experience, the new bring your own identity functionality and she even helps Warren solve his v...

docs.microsoft.com is the new home for all Microsoft documentation and Microsoft Learn is a free, online training platform that provides interactive learning for Microsoft products - There has been significant investment in these platforms in recent years. We caught up with Erin Rifkin to talk about these platforms, the success of Microsoft Learn and how they've grown from 80 to over 700 modules i...

A move to the cloud is almost always accompanied by change. Sometimes these changes are pretty obvious and easy to grasp while other times they are more of paradigm shift - one such shift is in the way we monitor out deployments. Monitoring your tenant and supporting services won't prevent a service problem, but it will help you to respond proactively when one occurs and let your users know about...

Outlook for Mac has come a long way since it's humble beginnings as Microsoft Entourage. As avid Outlook for Mac users ourselves, Nic and I were excited to sit down with Alessio and Jessica to talk about the history, the much anticipated new version of the product and how important your feedback is to the team building it! Alessio Roic is a Group Program Manager and 23-year veteran at Microsoft wh...

Message transport in Office 365 "Just works" and is often considered to be the plumbing of the service. Despite the rise in popularity of social messaging apps, 62% of business professionals prefer email for business communications and the number of emails delivered daily worldwide is forecast to grow 18% by 2023. In this episode we chat to Kevin Shaughnessy about some of the message transport enh...

Ever heard of Microsoft FastTrack? FastTrack helps customers deploy Microsoft cloud solutions - customers with eligible subscriptions can use FastTrack at no additional cost for the life of their subscription. We sat down with Jennifer Burdett from the FastTrack Team to talk about what FastTrack is, how you can make the most of this benefit and how partners can compliment this offering. Jennifer B...

If you're like me, your Outlook Calendar is the first thing you look at every morning and the last thing you look at before heading off to bed - days seem to get more and more busy and we need some way to organize and schedule our daily lives. For many of us though, the calendar functionality built into Outlook is something we all take for granted. In this episode, we'll talk to Julia Foran who is...

With the explosive growth of cloud services, many organizations suddenly find themselves having to manage multiple cloud environments, either intentionally or by coincidence due to mergers, acquisitions or other such events. With Azure and AWS being two of the most popular choices, we talk to Azure MVP Mike Pfeiffer who is also AWS certified about the parallels between the two services, things to...

Data warehousing is a massive topic! We've all heard of data lakes, data swamps and big data in general, but what does it all mean? We sat down with Melissa Coates (a.k.a SQLChick) in an attempt to gain an understanding of this complex topic and definitely learned a thing or two in the process. Melissa Coates is a data architect with a focus on data warehousing, data lake, and business intelligenc...

Adoption is top of mind for many organizations at the moment - be it adoption of a particular workload (like Microsoft Teams) or cloud services in general. Warren and Nic sat down with the always entertaining Tracy van der Schyff to talk about the difference between adoption and consumption and the concept of user empowerment. Facilitating the evolution of human capabilities – Tracy's passion is t...

Nic and Chris catch up with Philip Griffiths about next-generation WAN being delivered over the internet, how perimeter security is not everything and the challenge of working in a global networking company.