RunAs Radio

Is the deployment of IPv6 impacted by the pandemic? Richard talks to Ed Horley about how IPv6 deployment has continued through the crisis - and also how enterprises continue to lag behind home services when it comes to IPv6! Ed discusses the latest data around IPv6 usages showing that work-from-home has actually increased the amount of IPv6 traffic because the majority of consumer ISPs now provide IPv6 services. This leads to an interesting discussion on the instrumentation of IPv6 traffic for business. If you're not using IPv6 in your work network, you likely aren't watching what traffic moves across it!Links:National Suicide Prevention LifelineCrisis Services CanadaPractical IPv6 for Windows AdministratorsIPv6 Fundamentals 2nd EditionIPv6 BuzzIPv6 Deployment Stats

What does it take to get started with data science? Richard talks with Ayodele Odubela about her new book on learning data science. Ayodele talks about how often data science starts out just defining a good question to ask - and how that question evolves as you learn more. The example explored is getting new customers - which starts with understanding what customers you already have. Often we are unconsciously filtering potential customers, so knowing what bias you have in data is key - as is improving the quality of the data you collect! Visit Ayodele's web site (links below) and use the code RunAs to get a 50% discount on her book!Links:Getting Started in Data ScienceJulia Computing

Ever had a conversation take a twist you didn't expect? Richard talks to Lauren Malhoit about the state of networking during the pandemic. The conversation evolves into a broader view on IT in the pandemic, thinking longer term, and that the changes we're making today are not going to magically disappear with the virus. While it may not be the conversation planned, it is two experienced IT folks sharing their tales of coping in these challenging times!

Windows can protect itself from exploits – but you need to turn it on! Richard talks to Chris Jackson about his recently published document about exploit protection. Chris talks about the long list of mitigation strategies that exist inside of Windows to stop arbitrary code (read: malware) from executing. Each strategy comes with the risk of breaking your application. You need to apply the mitigations on an application-by-application basis, and with some testing around it. But if you want to make your Windows desktops more secure, these exploit protections are enormous!Links:Enable Exploit ProtectionMicrosoft Security BaselinesImage File Execution OptionsEnable Code IntegrityMicrosoft Defender Advanced Threat ProtectionAppCompat ShimsExploit Protection Reference

Enterprise Mobility is no longer optional! Richard talks to Richard Hicks about his work during the pandemic around remote connectivity. The early days of the pandemic were a scramble to get folks working from home, often needing to scale up VPN services. Now that a few months have gone by, other problems have appeared: Are the remote workstations getting patched? How do you know? What about self-service password changes with remote machines? Richard digs into the details of not being on the local network and how you can tune up your remote connectivity to bring back all the goodness!Links:Defender Advanced Threat ProtectionAlways On VPNNetMotionWindows AutopilotDirectAccessRichard's Blog on Forced Tunneling

Can you go serverless with databases? Monica Rathbun says yes! Richard chats with Monica about Microsoft's serverless mode for SQL Azure. Same SQL database, but now it is billed by the second and will automatically suspend itself after a set amount of time - incurring no costs to you while suspended! It doesn't work for every database scenario, but Monica talks through some options that have great potential. You need to understand the limitations as well as the benefits, but serverless SQL is a great new tool!Links:Azure SQL Database ServerlessSQLEspresso Blog

How can Windows Virtual Desktop improve productivity? Richard chats with Jen Sheerin about the kinds of applications better served by virtualization. Jen talks about her work with Citrix XenDesktop and Windows Virtual Desktop, and how the pandemic has accelerated adoption. The challenge is especially acute for thick client applications - you can deploy them to a home machine, but that is a security risk and has VPN performance challenges. Windows Virtual Desktop gives you more control, more security, and more ability to keep your users working efficiently. Get the power of "any any" - any location on any device with desktop virtualization!Links:Windows Virtual DesktopAzure Active DirectoryAzure ExpressRouteWindows 10 Enterprise Multi-SessionWindows Virtual Desktop for Windows 7FSLogix

Perimeter security is one thing - what about beyond the edge? Richard chats with Ned Pyle about a series of blog posts (links in the show notes) to help you harden security on every machine in your network. Ned talks about various settings available on Windows clients and servers that can help protect your systems from bad actors - and there's nothing to install, just adjusting policy and settings! In the end, you can make your security much deeper and difficult to exploit.Links:SMB1 Product ClearinghouseIT Ops Talk BlogBeyond the EdgeSMB over QUICInterception Attack ProtectionsUNC Hardening Group PolicyWindows Hello for BusinessKerberos ArmoringADSecurityPasswordless Strategy

How can compassion help during the pandemic? Richard talks to April Wensel about the importance of compassion at this difficult time. April talks about how compassion has always been important and powerful for work and the rest of life, but today it's essential. Everyone has been affected by the pandemic to some degree, and everyone is grieving, whether they know or not. We all need more compassion in our lives, for ourselves, family, neighbors, co-workers, and the world.Links:Practicing Compassion During a PandemicJane Goodall on the Pandemic

SCCM or Intune? Do you need to choose? Should you choose? Richard chats with Greg Shields about device management using SCCM and/or Intune. Greg admits that it is his own journey coming from SCCM but developing an Intune class that led him to admire what Intune is good at. The two products definitely overlap, and understand each other - you can run both very successfully. It comes down to your organization's needs!Links:Configuration ManagerService ManagerIntuneGreg's Pluralsight CoursesInternet-Based Client ManagementAzure VPNWindows Autopilot

What does incident response look like during the pandemic? Richard talks to Julie Gunderson of PagerDuty about what it takes to respond to an incident effectively when you can't necessarily be in the same room together. The conversation starts out with the fundamentals of incident response - how to report an incident, how an incident unfolds, what it looks like to resolve an incident and then, most importantly, the post mortem. The pandemic just makes it harder - communication is remote, documentation is essential, trusting your people is critical. We'll get through this!Links:PagerDutyJ Paul Reed

What is your preferred SQL Server tool? Richard chats with Vicky Harp, who oversees the development of many of the tools you count on to manage all sorts of databases in the Microsoft world. From SSMS to Azure Data Studio to SQL CLI - there's a lot of ways to manage and maintain databases on-premises and in-the-cloud. What tool is right for you? Don't worry, you can use more than one!Links:SQL Server Management StudioAzure Data StudioJupyter NotebooksMicrosoft Azure NotebooksMS SQL CLISQL CMDSQL PowerShellAzure Data Studio on Twitter

Ready for some cloud snark? Richard chats with Corey Quinn, the cloud economist and snarky commenter on all things cloud. The conversation digs into how the use of the cloud has evolved rapidly during the pandemic, and the reality that people may want to spend less on the cloud, but more importantly, they want consistency in their spend. Getting off virtual machines and into "real" cloud services can help, but understanding how you are using cloud technology is critical. Lift and shift is not enough!

Are you ready to become Ansible? Richard chats with Josh Duffney about his book on Ansible - using a play on the term "become," which is the privilege elevation command in Ansible. The conversation turns to how you evolve as an infrastructure-as-code person, doing basic automation tasks first, but ultimately turning into a source-code-controlled library-building-team that makes deployment of applications and resources easy, reliable, and powerful. If you're coming from the Windows world and trying to learn Ansible, this is the book for you!

The pandemic has sent everyone home to work - how do you support them? Richard chats with Jessica Deen about her work doing remote support both before and now during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jessica starts out talking more philosophically about support work in this challenging time, with lots of patience and empathy. But that also takes effective remote communication - being able to see the person you're supporting is incredibly valuable! Ultimately effective remote support comes down to understanding the person battling the issue and working with them - like working locally, only harder!

With folks working remotely more than ever, how do you keep your team together? Richard chats with Tracy van der Schyff about her work building tools in organizations that become the focal point of work. Whether with SharePoint in the old days, or Teams today, you can make a place that is great for work and connecting the team - and the power of transparency!

The Hybrid Workforce is here to stay - how do you update Windows? Richard chats with Dave Backman about what it means to manage a hybrid workforce, where most of your staff work both from home, and occasionally in the office. The pandemic made this happen, and it's likely to continue indefinitely. So how do you keep Windows up-to-date? Dave talks about the modern update strategies beyond Windows Update Server, into InTune and Windows Update for Business.

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 make you immune, it just makes things more expensive for the black hats. Perhaps expensive enough that they stop?

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. The conversation then turns to management, including Azure AD, InTune, and MBAM. Any combination of those tools can help you provide keys when BitLocker goes into Recovery mode. Keep your drives safe, even when they are remote!

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, and it needs care and feeding to be as good as it can be, especially as things get more complex!

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 comfortable with how things were - and now that no one is all that comfortable, how do we rethink work, trust, confidence and productivity!

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 corporate devices, BYOD devices, a guest network, and a legacy network. Yeah, four SSIDs! Next up - WPA3, with even better default security features!

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 in the end, you get probabilistic results - nothing is ever absolutely certain! But the experiences happening today in genomic-scale research point to amazing data analytics capabilities for everyone in the future.

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 need to be improved. Might be code, might be data architecture - it takes a group effort to understand and improve!

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 helping you lock down your services better and having a clear view of who is using your services, as well as who is attacking you. Microsoft secures the cloud, you secure your cloud services!

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 already exist for Automate, so that rarely do you need to start from scratch - there's always a template for your idea that can at least get you started. And the Starter Kit helps you get started right, with good governance!

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 authentication, resisting lateral security breaks, and more. You can keep your remote workers secure!

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 ends that. Arc provides location-independent access to all your resources, and it's in preview now, so free to use (although you may have to pay for additional Log Analytics data)... check it out!

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, but the need for getting better performance out of home WiFi has had them refocusing on different tools - including the free inSSIDer WiFi analysis tool!

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 Synapse brings those two data sources together, along with other SQL data sources, to help you do comprehensive analytics. The conversation turns to the idea of answering business questions as opposed to exploring business mysteries - both are valuable, but need different tools and techniques!

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 makes sense for your office? Can you maintain physical distance? How much cleaning is required? How do you give the staff the confidence that working from the office is safe?

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 Windows, which ones affect you?

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 one can afford this - and multifactor authentication and strong confirmation policies can help!

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 start over? Windows Terminal brings together all the things you never knew you wanted in a terminal client, as well as a bunch of features you definitely knew you wanted. Check it out!

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 virtual machines that run your templates. And it works on mobile devices as well! While certainly a useful solution during the pandemic, WVD could be a common way to work going forward!

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 tools available to make sure you're consolidating and deleting data when you should. Good data governance keeps a company safe and relevant!

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 kind of document, images, PDFs, and more - and understand them! The conversation digs into what can be extracted, how you can utilize the data, and even how to plug that revealed information into standard analytics tools like PowerBI!

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 techniques have to be found to keep things running. Brent also digs into the maintenance side of things - it's a great time to do the preventative work you always meant to do!

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 produced in your organization, and WireShark helps to dissect the interesting bits, both from a security perspective and performance!

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 turns to all the things we meant to push out for security, like multi-factor authentication and password manager, as even more important today.

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 of UniFi as well as the fun stuff. Looking for a WiFi set up for home or small business, have a listen!

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 fact that business continuity is not just about outages - productivity plays a part as well. Helping staff that are new to working from home get more productivity, providing mechanisms for making work and progress visible; all these things are about business continuity. And any improvements here benefit the business today and in the world beyond the pandemic!

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 you identify new PCs to your hardware provider using your Azure Tenant ID. Then you specify your configuration information so that when the machine powers up and connects to the Internet, it knows how to provision itself. There are also services for resetting machines and de-provisioning them at end-of-life!

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 workloads can be offloaded from the VPN entirely, and how sometimes its easier to build out a new infrastructure for connectivity than to revise the existing one.

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 moved, and how to move the right things the right way. And it's not just about Lift-and-Shift, but also how you modernization, monitor, and make your infrastructure better!

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 access. Modernizing security using password managers and authentication helps also - this is not the time for information breaches!

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 elements of your Microsoft 365 tenant. And once you have that file, you can compare it against other templates of Microsoft 365 tenants and apply it if you need to. Nik talks about the power of knowing exactly when your configuration gets changed for any reason, and the options available to react to that change!

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 involved in configuring networks in employee homes to provide bandwidth shaping with QoS? What about other bandwidth options like MiFi access points? Cameron explores several options and ideas you can add to your list of things to do to keep employees productive in this challenging time!

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 could do it with Azure ARM, but do you want that much JSON in your life? Jennelle talks about the Azure Provider for Terraform and how it transforms the easy-to-read code of Terraform into Azure objects. But that code is still unique to Azure, don't expect to use your same Terraform scripts with other cloud providers.