RunAs Radio

Happy holidays! Another year, another set of predictions around the life of IT Pros – now in 2022! The pandemic continues to evolve, with new variants appearing and vaccination levels getting high. Will the pandemic still be a significant factor next year? What about back-to-work plans? Or is working-from-home the new normal? The past year was tough on the security side of things with notable rans...

Does your organization need hybrid identities? Richard talks to Sonia Cuff about Hybrid Active Directory, connecting your on-premises Active Directory infrastructure to M365 and Azure. There's essentially no choice in larger organizations - too many identities and applications exist that replicating identities would be a huge problem. But what about a small organization? Sonia talks about folks li...

Basic authentication is going away in Exchange Online - how will it impact you? Richard talks to Greg Taylor about the long-planned end of basic authentication support in Exchange Online. Greg talks about the fundamental vulnerability of basic authentication systems like POP and IMAP - and how many systems still use them by default. Too many business email compromise and ransomware attacks happen...

What's your adaptability quotient? Richard chats with Sara Caldwell and Angela Dugan about the ideas behind the adaptability quotient - the ability to respond to change. The pandemic certainly forced a lot of change on a lot of folks - and different people coped with the changes in different ways. Sara talks about thinking about your ability to adapt and strengthening that ability, starting with a...

Christmas Gifts for IT Pros! Richard chats with Joey Snow and Rick Claus about their favorite gift ideas for your favorite IT Pros. Yeah, IT folks are hard to buy for, but here are some stocking stuffers and other gifts you will be excited to receive. Whether it's items that will help you work more effectively, home automation to make living a little easier, or maybe just something geeky and fun,...

Windows 11 Ships! So now what? Richard chats with Mary Jo Foley about her thoughts around the release of Windows 11. Mary Jo talks about how quiet the conversation has been around Windows 11, other than a few bits of outrage like the TPM requirements - which, as it turns out, aren't actually required. Is there a reason to move to Windows 11? Most IT folks seem happy to wait for further updates - t...

Is the cloud secure? Richard chats with Screaming in the Cloud's Corey Quinn about the latest spate of security issues in AWS and Azure - and the responses to those issues. Corey talks about the risks the cloud providers are creating, not being clear when an exploit is found, to let people know how much visibility they have into the problem. Mitigating an exploit is not enough - you have to be abl...

Should you inject a little chaos into your systems? Julie Gunderson says yes! Richard chats with Julie about how deliberate failing portions of your system teach you more about your dependency and resiliency. But it's not just about breaking things - you need to build a hypothesis around how you see the reliability of the system and then create tests to challenge that reliability - and how to reco...

Episode 800! Richard chats about making 800 episodes of RunAs with Microsoft Technical Fellow Jeffrey Snover. The conversation digs into the state of the IT business today, with the huge role of the cloud and digital transformation, and how it impacts the nature of work. Jeffrey talks about how the artificial intelligence in M365 is emerging as a tool to help people be more productive, by watching...

Is ransomware getting worse? Richard talks to Microsoft VP of Cybersecurity Ann Johnson about the state ransomware today. Ann quotes Sutton's law: "Why do criminals rob banks? Because that's where the money is." An increasing number of cybercriminals have successfully extorted money from companies using ransomware. So yes, ransomware is becoming more popular amongst criminals and will continue to...

What's the right way to have virtual desktops in the cloud? Richard talks to Aidan Finn about a virtualization project he was involved with that started with Citrix Cloud, which runs in Azure. Aidan talks about the number of virtual machines involved in a large-scale VDI implementation, many of which are infrastructure and plumbing. Why own the plumbing when you can get it as a service? The conver...

How do you add custom audio, video, and text communications into your organization? Richard chats with Mary Anne Noskowski about Azure Communications Services (ACS), a set of APIs and tooling that brings the features of Teams communications into custom applications and more. Mary Anne talks about Teams integration, providing a means to customize the guest access features into Teams via ACS. The co...

Are you stuck in the print nightmare? Richard talks to Jeremy Moskowitz about the ongoing battle over potential exploits through the point-and-print system in Windows. Jeremy talks about the discovery of the vulnerability in July 2021 and how it has led to a series of patches and registry key changes to resist a potential exploit. Meantime, people need to print! There are several workarounds with...

Making mistakes with reporting or analytics can lead to mistakes in business and a loss of trust - now what? Richard chats with Melissa Coates about building mechanisms in tools like PowerBI to make it easier to get correct results. Melissa talks about having a diligent core of analytics and a flexible edge - making sure the expert data stewards and building data flows and repositories for accurat...

How does your organization work with files in Microsoft 365? Richard chats with Jason Moore about the role of OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, and the many tools available for files, folders, and lists in the M365 world. Jason talks about how under the hood, every file ends up in some pretty standard spots, like Azure Blob Storage - so you know that compliance, governance, and policy are consist...

Does Windows need a package manager? Richard talks to Sarah Lean about Windows Package Manager, aka winget. Of course, there have been package managers for Windows before winget, and Sarah talks about her favorite, Chocolatey. But winget is destined to be a part of Windows itself and opens the door to some great deployment automation. The conversation also dives into exporting - making a copy of t...

It's a hybrid and multi-cloud world - how do you manage it? Richard talks to Microsoft VP Jeremy Winter about Azure Arc and its ability to work across on-premises and multiple clouds to give you a view of your whole infrastructure - and ways to govern, manage and secure it! Jeremy talks about the role that Kubernetes plays in the hybrid world to help manage applications and how Azure Arc helps you...

There's value in the data your organization has gathered - do you know how to use it to help your company succeed? Richard chats with Jen Stirrup about the new tools and techniques for data analytics. Jen talks about how cloud-based tools like PowerBI and Power Automate open the door to rapid interaction of analytics so that folks can get value in a short amount of time, and you can bring new capa...

How do you respond to a ransomware attack? Richard talks to Dana Epp about dealing with a ransomware attack. Dana discusses making a plan - if you don't have a plan already, dealing with an attack is very difficult. And make sure your plan exists outside of your regular network since one of the first things you're going to do during an attack is shut down the network. The conversation focuses on h...

How can Azure AD Conditional Access help to protect your organization? Richard chats with Nitika Gupta about the tooling available to detect and react to unusual sign-ins and access to data. Nitika talks about how Conditional Access lets you set policies in place to require additional authentication and even lockout an account when certain things happen - like a change in device, application, loca...

Paul is back! Richard chats with Paul about the recently released preview of Windows 11. Paul talks about being a bit surprised by the timing of Windows 11, and how it looks an awful lot like an update to Windows 10, with a UX refresh. The conversation digs into the current controversy around the Trusted Platform Module requirement in the hardware for Windows 11, while also discussing what should...

As the pandemic starts to wind down in some parts of the world, the conversation is turning to - do we go back to the office? Richard talks to Martina Grom about how some of her customers are responding to a need for hybrid workspaces, with some mixture of working from home and in the office. Martina also digs into the governance challenges of M365 with hybrid workers, and how folks who moved quic...

The SQL Server & AzureSQL Conference is BACK!   After more a year away, the SQL Server & AzureSQL conference happened in Orlando in June 2021. And that means a SQL Question and Answers session at the end of the show.   Bob Ward, Anna Hoffman, Buck Woody, David Pless, and many other great speakers answered questions from the attendees of the conference both in-person and online.   Topics ranged ove...

Can you have a private platform on the public cloud? Richard chats with Jennelle Crothers about her work with organizations setting up private Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure in Azure. Jennelle talks about using private DNS Zones, private container registries, and other services to provide a public-like platform experience for a company while not exposing it to the open internet at all.  Link...

Ned Pyle is back and he's got cool news! Richard chats with Ned about some of the features coming down the pipe for file storage in Windows Server 2022. First up is encryption - Server 2022 will have direct support for AES-256. Sure, it's overkill for many scenarios, but some organizations are demanding it, so here it is. Ned also talks about SMB Compression - while it has existed for xcopy et al...