Let's Talk Azure!: Recent Episodes
Alan Armstrong & Sam Foot
Listen with Alan Armstrong and Sam Foot as we talk about all things Microsoft Azure!
We are both technical consultants working with Azure day in, day out. Alan focuses on Identity and Security automation while Sam is a .NET developer deploying PaaS and SaaS solutions on Azure.
Each episode we have a topic we cover and we highlight some key news that we are interested in. No fluff, sales or products here, just two technical people having a light hearted chat.
This week Alan and Sam discuss Azure AI Search. It is a robust, cloud-based search service provided by Microsoft that leverages artificial intelligence to enhance search functionalities within applications. It allows developers to create rich, full-text search experiences with features like natural language processing, semantic search, and cognitive search capabilities, which can extract insights from various data sources. The service is scalable, ensuring efficient handling of large volumes of data and queries, and integrates seamlessly with other Azure services, providing a comprehensive solution for building intelligent and responsive search-driven applications.
- What problems is Azure AI search aiming to solve?
- What does it integrate with?
- What are some of the use cases for the solution?
- How much does it cost?
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Alan and Sam discuss the management of macOS and how it is a little different to other operating systems. Alan guides through what can be configured and the reasons why. Here are a few things we covered:
- How is macOS different to other operating systems to manage?
- What Microsoft tooling can you use to manage them
- What licences do you need
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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This week Alan and Sam discuss Azure Data Box. It is a ruggedised appliance designed to simplify the process of transferring large volumes of data to Azure cloud storage, offering high-speed data transfer and secure encryption. It enables organisations to overcome bandwidth limitations and easily migrate large datasets, ensuring efficient and reliable data transfer.
- What is Azure Data Box?
- What can you back up with it?
- How does the process work?
- How much does it cost?
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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This week, Alan and Sam talk about new features and services that have gone into Public Preview or General Available status in the last month. We dive into a couple of these updates that peaked our interest.
Some of the Microsoft product features and update we covered:
- FIDO2 authentication & Keypass
- Security group provisioning to Active Directory using cloud sync
- Unified security operations platform
- New API Manager v2
- App Service v1 and v2 environments retirement
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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Alan and Sam discuss Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access. A identity-centric Security Service Edge (SSE) solution that helps secure user's internet and on-premises access. Here are a few things we covered:
- What is a Security Service Edge ?
- What is Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access?
- How does Entra Internet access for Microsoft 365 help secure and prevent data leakage?
- What is Entra Internet Access and Private Access?
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This week Alan and Sam discuss Azure Backup. It is a comprehensive solution offered by Microsoft Azure for safeguarding data across cloud and on-premises environments, providing seamless backup and recovery capabilities. It enables users to protect critical workloads, applications, and files with automated backups and flexible retention policies.
- What is Azure backup?
- What can you back up with it?
- How can you secure your backups?
- How much does it cost?
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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Alan and Sam discuss Microsoft's new Cloud PKI service, which enables the management and deployment of device and user certificates through Intune.Below are some key points we addressed:
- What are user and device certificates and how are they used
- How would you normally manage PKI services
- What is Microsoft’s Cloud PKI
- How much does it cost?
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This week, Alan and Sam talk about new features and services that have gone into Public Preview or General Available status in the last month. We dive into a couple of these updates that peaked our interest.
Some of the Microsoft product features and update we covered:
- Copilot for Security and M365
- Syslog and CEF AMA connector for Microsoft Sentinel
- Lots of Azure changes, new features and retirements!
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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Alan and Sam discuss Azure Key Vault, it is a centralized cloud service designed for securely storing and managing cryptographic keys, certificates, and secrets used by cloud applications and services. It offers robust access control, encryption, and auditing capabilities to safeguard sensitive information and streamline key management processes.
- What is Azure Key Vault?
- What are the common use cases for Azure Key Vault?
- What does it integrate with?
- How much does it cost?
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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Alan and Sam talk about the Microsoft Connection Program (CCP). A Community of Technical professional from Customers, to Partners and MVPs that interacts with Microsoft Product groups around new features.. Here are a few things we covered:
- What is the Customer Connection Program?
- What are the benefits of being in the CCP?
- What is my experience being in the various CCPs?
- How do you get involved?
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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This week, Alan and Sam talk about new features and services that have gone into Public Preview or General Available status in the last month. We dive into a couple of these updates that peaked our interest.
Some of the Microsoft product features and update we covered:
- Dark Mode in Defender XDR
- Cloud PKI
- Improvements in Azure Key Vault
- Configuration-as-code customizations in Microsoft Dev Box
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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Alan and Sam discuss Azure Event Grid. It simplifies event-driven architectures by providing a fully managed service for routing events from various sources to multiple destinations in near real-time, enhancing agility and scalability in cloud-based applications. It enables seamless communication between Azure services, custom applications, and external sources while offering features like event filtering, routing, and dead-lettering for reliable event handling at scale.
- What is Azure Event Grid?
- What are the common use cases for Azure Event Grid?
- How can you get started?
- What are the licensing options?
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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Alan and Sam discuss what vulnerability management is, and why it is important to an organisation. Alan dives into how Microsoft security solutions help identify weaknesses and monitor their remediation. Here are a few areas we covered:
- What are vulnerabilities?
- why should you monitoring, priorities and resolve them?
- How can Microsoft Solutions help manage your vulnerabilities?
- What Microsoft licenses do you need to get started?
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Azure AI Studio is an all-in-one AI platform that simplifies the development, evaluation, and deployment of generative AI solutions and custom copilots1. It provides a unified hub for building, managing, and fine-tuning AI models, making it easier for developers of all skill levels to create and deploy intelligent applications. Whether you’re working on natural language processing, computer vision, or other AI tasks, Azure AI Studio streamlines the process and offers a comprehensive suite of tools and services to support your AI projects.
Sam takes the lead covering:
- What is AI and what do organizations use large language models for?
- What is Azure AI studio, and what problems is it solving?
- Sam's initial impressions of using Azure AI studio for the first time
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
This week, Alan and Sam talk about new features and services that have gone into Public Preview or General Available status in the last month. We dive into a couple of these updates that peaked our interest.
Some of the Microsoft product features and update we covered:
- Microsoft Defender XDR
- MDA / MDI / Defender for Cloud
- Azure API Center
- Azure Containers Apps Multiple Ports
- Azure API Management
- Azure Gen1 to Gen 2 Migration
- Azure Arc Visual Studio Code Extension
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Alan and Sam discuss all things Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE). Alan goes through the history of MDE, what its capabilities are, and the platforms it covers. Here are a few other areas we cover:
- What capabilities does MDE provide.
- How is it different from other AV and EDR solutions.
- How is it licensed.
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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This week we cover Azure AI Content Safety provides developers with tools to analyze and moderate user-generated content, utilizing machine learning to detect and filter inappropriate text and images. Customizable rules, scalability, and seamless integration with Azure services empower developers to create applications that maintain a safe and compliant online environment.Sam takes the lead covering:
- What is content safety and the scenarios it is used.
- What is Azure AI Content Safety.
- The products contained within Azure AI Content Safety.
- What are the SKUs how much does it cost?
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Alan and Sam discuss Microsoft Defender XDR, a unified portal to manage you incidents across your MS Defender suite. Alan dives into the Extended Detect and Response (XDR) concepts and how it's beneficial to have all products in the same system.
Here are few other areas we covered:
- What is XDR?
- What is Microsoft Defender XDR?
- What Microsoft solutions feed into Defender XDR?
- How is it licensed?
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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This week, Alan and Sam talk about new features and services that have gone into Public Preview or General Available status in the last couple of months. We dive into a couple of these updates and peeked our interest.
Some of the Microsoft product features and update we covered:
- Microsoft Entra Internet Access Public Preview
- Defender for Cloud Apps - GenAI categories for cloud discovery
- Defender for Endpoint Updates (User Contain, Simplified connectivity, WSL plugin)
- Fee tier manage SQL instance
- New Chaos Studio faults for service bus
- DICOM on data lake preview
- Azure App Configuration Snapshots
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In this episode, we wrap up the season, where we explore our favourite episode of the season. We also talk about the challenges and successes we faced behind the scenes, and how the podcast has grown in terms of listenership and engagement.
As we bid farewell to the season, we also reveal our exciting plans for the next season, which will start on 5th January 2024. We announce that we will move to one season per year, but with at least 48 episodes, covering more topics and look to featuring guests.
This episode is a great way to end the season and to look forward to the next one. We thank our listeners for their support and feedback, and invite them to stay tuned for more updates and announcements. We wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday season, and promise to return with more amazing content in the new year.
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Alan and Sam discuss Microsoft's Copilot solutions. Alan talks about Generative AI and how it is being used in the world today.
Here are a few things we covered:
- What Generative AI?
- What are the various versions of Microsoft Copilot?
- How can Copilot help users be more productive?
- How are they licensed?
Ignite Keynote on Microsoft Copilot
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This week we cover Azure Container Apps. Container Apps is a serverless container service provided by Microsoft Azure, designed to simplify the deployment and scaling of containerized applications using Kubernetes. It offers a seamless and integrated platform for developers to focus on building applications without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure.
Sam takes the lead covering:
- What are containers, and why do organisations use them?
- What is Azure container apps? And how do they compare to other services in Azure?
- Which types of apps can be deployed and hosted?
- What are the SKUs how much does it cost?
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This week talk all things Microsoft Ignite 2023! Microsoft Ignite is an annual conference hosted by Microsoft, centred around technology trends, product innovations, and announcements concerning Microsoft's cloud services, enterprise solutions, and developer tools. The event usually gathers IT professionals, developers, business leaders, and technology enthusiasts in one place.
Alan is out at Ignite in person, we covered:
- The latest announcements at Ignite
- Alan and Sam’s favourite announcements
- The in person Ignite experience
- What MVP related activities has Alan been up to?
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Alan and Sam have a discussion around Microsoft accreditations and how they have recently changes. Here are a few things we covered:
- What are Microsoft accreditations?
- What has change recently around the exams for certifications?
- What are the new applied skills accreditation?
- Where do you start your Microsoft skills accreditation journey?
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This week we discuss Azure App Service. Azure App Service is a robust, cloud-based platform that streamlines web app and API development. It simplifies deployment, auto-scaling, and management, supporting diverse programming languages and frameworks. Developers benefit from a fully managed, productive environment, enabling rapid development and easy integration with Azure services. With built-in security and compliance features, Azure App Service ensures a reliable and efficient solution for building, deploying, and scaling web applications and APIs, ultimately enhancing productivity and user experience.
Sam takes the lead providing insights such as:
- Modern approaches to application hosting
- The features and benefits of Azure App Service
- How to deploy and manage applications on App Service
- How is scaling, performance and billing handled
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Alan and Sam the concept discuss cloud identities and how cloud identity providers like Microsoft Entra ID can help manage and secure those identities.
Here are a few things we covered:
- What is a cloud Identity?
- What capabilities does Microsoft Entra ID have?
- Can you bring your on-premises ID up to the cloud?
- How can it integrate into SaaS application?
- What security features are available?
- How is it licensed.
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
This week we discussed Azure DDoS protection, a managed service from Microsoft in Azure to mitigate against DDoS attacks. DDoS or distributed-denial-of-service attacks are commonly used to overwhelm internet facing resources in the hope of disrupting their operation. Azure DDoS protection is a simple to use managed service which allows organisations to rapidly apply protection to their resources.Sam takes the lead with providing insights such as:
- What are DDoS attacks, and why do we need to mitigate them?
- What is Azure DDoS protection
- How do you set up Azure DDoS protection
- Pricing
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Alan and Sam discuss how Microsoft Entra External ID can help organisations collaborate and provide identity to their services. Alan goes through the B2B and B2C options and their scenarios.
Here are a few things we covered:
- What are B2B and B2C identities
- How are these identities used
- What is an Microsoft Entra Multi-tenant organisation
- How is Microsoft Entra External ID licenced
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This week we discussed Cosmos DB, a No SQL and relational database system hosted and managed by Microsoft. Cosmos DB is a cloud first service from Microsoft on Azure. It’s a modern approach to a database management system, built to achieve global scale and high availability. There are many APIs to pick from:
NoSQLMongoDBPostgreSQLApacheCassandraApacheGremlinTable Storage
Sam takes the lead with providing insights such as:
- What is Cosmos DB and how it’s different to other database management systems
- What APIs are supported, and how do you decide?
- Operational considerations of Cosmos DB
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Alan and Sam discuss how Microsoft Intune can help manage your Windows 10/11 estate from anywhere that has an internet connection. Alan goes through the capabilities and how it can help organisations.
Here are a few things we covered:
- How has Windows endpoints traditionally been managed?
- What is Intune?
- How can Modern management help an organisation?
- What is the process to move to Intune to manage your Windows 10/11 endpoints?
- How is Intune licenced?
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This week we discussed Purview Insider Risk Management. Insider Risk Management is a compliance solution that enables organisations to discover, track and manage insider risk. Insider risks can be introduced to an organisation in a multitude of ways, understanding and correlating these activities is complex and needs to be automated, this is where Insider Risk Management shines.Sam takes the lead with providing insights such as:
- What are insider risks and why organisations manage these risks
- What is insider risk management
- Which systems can monitored
- How insider risk management allows organisations to take actions on identified risks
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
Alan and Sam discuss how Microsoft Defender for Identity monitors and detects unusual behavior's and attacks on Active Directory:
Here are a few things we covered:
- What is Active Directory
- Why do we need to monitor authentication on-premises
- What is Microsoft Defender for Identity (MDI)
- How is MDI licenced
- How do you deploy MDI
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This week we discussed Azure Lighthouse. Lighthouse allow organisations and partners access and manage resources and services in multiple tenants at scale. Lighthouse allows management of access, provides a simplified control plane to reduce operation burden allow your organisation to better collaborate internally at scale over multiple tenants or partners to manage and collaborate multiple customers securely and simply.
Sam takes the lead with providing insights such as:
- How multi-tenant management is used
- How are organisation using Lighthouse internally
- How partners use Lighthouse with their customers
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Alan and Sam discuss how Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps can help monitor and secure access to your SaaS applications. Here are a few things we covered:
- What is Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
- How do we discover shadow IT?
- How to monitor activity and files in SaaS Apps
- What is App Governance
- How can we secure sessions to SaaS applications
- How is it licenced.
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This week we discussed Azure Chaos Studio. Chaos Studio allows organisations to run test plans to introduce chaos. Learn how your applications and infrastructure are effected by infrastructure disruption without having to wait for actual disruption.
Sam takes the lead with providing insights such as:
- What is Chaos Engineering, and why it may be beneficial to your organisation
- What is Azure Chaos studio and
- What operations are supported with Chaos Studio
- In what scenarios you would use Chaos studio
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Alan and Sam discuss Microsoft Entra ID Global Secure Access. A feature that was announced with the rebrand of Azure AD to Microsoft Entra ID. Here are a few things we covered:
- What is Microsoft Entra Internet Access
- What is Microsoft Entra Private Access
- How do these features help secure access to the internet and to SaaS and internal applications?
- Do we know how it is licenced yet?
- How to add MFA and conditional access to legacy applications and protocols that are unable to support it.
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This week we discussed Microsoft Dev Box. Dev Box allows development teams to create development environments for their projects in the cloud. This enables development teams to utilise infrastructure in Azure that scales past their local machines to build effectively. Microsoft provides the infrastructure and management plane, developers and platform engineers can work together to build repeatable environments bespoke to each project to give developers the tool they need. Sam takes the lead with providing insights such as:
- What Microsoft Dev Box is and why teams may want to consider it
- How Dev Boxes are configured and deployed
- How developers can access Dev Boxes
- How Dev Boxes are managed and monitored
- Costs
What did you think of this episode? Give us some feedback via our contact form, Or leave us a voice message in the bottom right corner of our site.
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Alan and Sam discuss how Zero-Touch deployments can help organisation reduce the effort needed to build devices. Alan goes through some of the scenarios and the benefits. Here are a few things we covered:
- What are zero-touch deployments
- What are the business and it department benefits
- What is supported in Microsoft Intune
- How easy is it to get started?
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This week we discussed Azure Automation. Azure automations allows you develop processes in PowerShell and Python and deploy this content to Azure to manage and orchestrate. Azure automations can run in Azure or other non Azure resources. Highly connected and flexible, Azure automation provides a great amount of value for organisations to use automation to boost productivity and reduce repeatable tasks being carried out manually. Sam takes the lead with providing insights such as:
- What automation is and why it’s important for organisations.
- How Azure Automation can help.
- How it develop and deploy automations.
- Integrations and networking
- Costs
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Alan and Sam discuss how passwordless authentication can help organisations to improve their authentication health and increase their security posture. Alan explains the concept and the solutions available available. Alan also covers the rebrand of Azure AD to Microsoft Entra ID. Some of the areas we cover:
- What is passwordless authentication.
- What are the benefits of introducing passwordless to your organisation.
- What does Microsoft Entra ID provide for passwordless authentication.
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Alan and Sam discuss how Azure Confidential Ledger can help organisations to create private tamper proof stores of data. Sam explains the features of the solution and the benefits that it can bring:
- Why would an organisation need a tamper proof data store?
- What is Azure Confidential Ledger?
- How can Microsoft / Azure be kept out of the data store?
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Alan and Sam discuss why it is important to have a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution in place. Alan explains the benefits of CSPM, and dives into Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Topics that we covered are:
- What is Cloud Security Posture Management and why it is important
- What is Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s approach to CSPM
- What is the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark
- What are the pricing tiers for CSPM
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This week we discuss Azure Functions. Azure Functions allows you to build serverless applications on top of Azure. Serverless functions allow you to bring your code and let Azure handle the hosting and management of infrastructure. Functions typically deal with one business case at a time, allowing for a microservices architecture to be used, potentially improving interoperability and collaboration.
Sam takes the lead with providing insights such as:
- What Azure Functions are
- The advantages of server less applications
- Which languages are supported
- Integrations and networking
- Hosting options
- Costs
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This week we discuss how to manage Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) securely in an organisation. With hybrid working on the rise, more flexibility is needed to reduce costs, but not as the compromise of security.
Alan takes the lead, providing insights such as:
- What is BYOD
- What the challenges of adopting BYOD
- How Microsoft technologies can help secure BYOD
- App Protection Policies
- Session Control
- Conditional Access
- The license's needed to use the technologies discussed
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This week we discuss Defender for DevOps. It gives you visibility of your security posture within your CI/CD processes. Improves your threat protection and hardening of your Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) resources. Fully integrated with Defender for Cloud, Defender for DevOps is simple to roll out and provides a wealth of security insight. Sam takes the lead with providing insights such as:
- What DevOps is
- Why DevSecOps and SecDevOps are important
- Which platforms are supported
- What security insights can be shown
- How to configure Defender for DevOps
- How it integrates with your processes
- How to monitor it
- How much it costs
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It's the Season 3 Finale! Where has the time gone! Alan and Sam discuss the season, what their favorite episode were. They discuss some of the announcements at Microsoft Build 2023 that peaked their interest.
Microsoft Build 2023 Book of News
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Alan and Sam discuss the difference between Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). Alan goes through what to consider when choosing which technology to use for different scenarios.
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Alan and Sam discuss Azure DevOps services and its features. Sam gives us a tour of the features and benefits of Azure DevOps and how it can be integrated into your development process.
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Alan and Sam discuss all of the features of Windows 365. Alan goes through the pricing, benefits and how organisations can use this to provide secure access to their environments.
Windows 365 Cloud PC Plans and Pricing | Microsoft
Compare Windows 365 Business and Enterprise | Microsoft Learn
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Alan and Sam discuss how Azure Load Testing can streamlined you load testing QA process. Bring your JMeter scripts, configure the service and let Azure and Microsoft take care of the rest. Sam runs us through the why load testing is important, what the service can do and how simple it is to configure.
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Alan and Sam discuss how Azure Firewall can help secure your network environment. Alan discusses how to set it up, and when you should decide to use it over Network Virtual Appliances (NVA). They also discuss the pricing and how it might compare to NVA or on-premises firewalls.
What is Azure Firewall? | Microsoft Learn
Choosing the right Azure Firewall SKU to meet your needs | Microsoft Learn
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Alan and Sam discuss Azure API Management. Sam explains the key features and benefits of using API management to manage your APIs at scale.
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Alan and Sam discuss the Azure Private Link and how it can secure your services. Alan goes through the functionality available and the benefits of using Azure Private Endpoints to access PaaS.
Alan also announces his new achievement of becoming a Microsoft MVP in Security.
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Alan and Sam discuss Azure static Web applications. Part of Azure App Service, static web apps allows developers to deploy static web applications in conjunction with serverless function applications with modern development tooling and hosting support. We discuss the key features and benefits that Azure Static Web apps brings.
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Alan and Sam discuss the new Intune licences that have recently been released. Alan goes through the new functionality that is coming to Intune and why they help manage and support your endpoints.
MS Blogpost
MS Intune Plans and Pricing
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Alan and Sam discuss the functionality provided by Azure Cognitive Services, a group of AI powered cognitive solutions that can rapidly add advanced cognitive functionality to your applications and services, build on top of advanced pre trained models to accelerate your products abilities.
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Alan and Sam discuss how Power Platform solutions can help manage your lo-code/no-code application lifecycle. Alan runs through what a solution can be used for and what can be managed in Power Platform.
Alan and Sam discuss how The Azure Developer CLI can be used to help automate and manage key points in the application development lifecycle. Sam discusses what the Azure Developer CLI (azd) is, the functionality and benefits that it brings and examples of how you can use it in your own projects.
Alan and Sam discuss how Azure Key vault can help secure your certificates, keys, and secrets. Alan goes though the types of vaults you can use and how you can secure the access to the secrets. They also cover the various uses for key vault within azure services and application development.
Alan and Sam discuss how Azure Stack solutions can help bring the capabilities of Azure management plane to your on-premises and edge environments. Sam goes through the three solutions, what their capabilities are and example use cases / workloads.
Alan and Sam discuss how Microsoft Defender for Office (MDO) can be used to protect users from phishing attacks. Alan will go through all the security benefits, as well some of the education training features included in MDO. We will discuss how this tie into the Microsoft 365 Defender portal and XDR.
Alan and Sam discuss how Confidential Computing can be used to add additional zero trust principle layers to workloads running in Azure. Confidential Computing gives administrators multiple levels to layers of confidentiality in Azure. Sam takes us through what can be achieved and the impact this can have within your organisation.
Alan and Sam discuss how Microsoft’s Privileged Identity Management (PIM) can be used to improve your identity Security. PIM gives the ability to provide just-in-time access to management roles in Azure AD and Azure. Alan also goes into detail around the user experience and how PIM can be extended outside of the Microsoft Cloud.
Alan and Sam explain 15 ways that you can save costs in Azure…. ssh…. don’t tell Microsoft! If you have workloads in Azure, we hope that you will find some ideas that will enable you to save some money, who doesn’t love doing the same for less?
Alan and Sam discuss how Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) can be used provide application and virtual desktops from anywhere. Alan discusses how AVD works, the benefits to organisations, management and the cost. He discuss how you the solution can be deployed via Code and why you should check it out.
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss how Azure MFA can be used to improve you security posture. MFA is ubiquitous in 2023, however utilizing MFA in a secure and user first experience can be challenging. In this episode we aim to give you the knowledge and experience we have gained working on many MFA related projects over the years.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/e9dba9c1-e9fe-4534-aa41-528ba6d922d1
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss how Season 2 has gone. They discuss their best episodes, the podcast stats and what the plans are for Season 3 in the new year.
We would like to say thank all their listeners of this season and look forward to providing content in the next season.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
What did you think of this episode or Season 2? https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/017aee37-8747-46fd-bbb4-44055ec42600
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss Microsoft XDR and why it is now becoming a requirement in organisations. They both take the role of the 'Expert' and explains what XDR is, how it helps reduce security risk.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
What did you think of this episode? https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/ecbe2590-612a-4895-9baf-6172e5d31d57
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss Microsoft Power Platform and why it is a useful tool have in an organisation. Alan takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains how you can easily build internal apps, automate process, and present data using the platform.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/830b99c2-603e-4b8a-a565-de081ef0b26b
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss Microsoft Defender for IoT and why it is a useful tool have in an organisation to reduce cyber risk. Alan takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains how you can easily discover your device exposure risk and start to prioritise the remediation.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/f526206b-b3a3-44a7-831a-d6f03d9719af
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss how Microsoft Sentinel can help organisations have visibility of malicious activity in their environment. Alan takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains the capability of Microsoft Sentinel and how it is for any size organisation. Alan dives into the process from log ingestion to automated response to an incident.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/cfa2fda1-11c8-482b-88e7-2167cf1efd5d
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss Microsoft Ignite 2022, the announcements and how the in-person experience vs remote was. Sam quizzes Alan on his experience in Seattle and ignite.
Link to the Ignite 2022 Book of News - Here
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/8797b8a8-c203-4471-8b49-52e6667de873
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss Azure Sphere, it's features and the security and operational value it can bring to your IoT estate. Sam takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains his experience with the Azure Sphere Development Kit.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/2d5dd570-fdd4-4c92-8ea1-f2c61e23b80c
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss Microsoft's Threat Vulnerability Management and why it is a useful tool have in an organisation to reduce cyber risk. Alan takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains how you can easily discover your device exposure risk and start to prioritise remediations.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
What did you think of the episode? https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/18684f1d-ffbe-49f7-99c6-2b6ccc7c376a
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss how server applications in Azure can help you to more efficiently build applications for your business in a different way to traditional application development. We both take the role of the 'Expert' and give our experiences using these technologies to build applications for our customers.
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/89c1ccff-2552-44c9-97e0-e4f335a531b7
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss how Microsoft Purview Information Protection can help label, classify and protect your data in Office 365 . Alan takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains how you can easily start labelling document, as well as encrypt them to protect data leaving your organisation.
What did you think of the episode? https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/9d0739ba-285f-4fd4-b2d9-5cdc47dfbab1
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss how the Microsoft Purview – Data Governance Portal can help you to manage and govern your organisations data. Sam takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains the 'Train the Trainer' event that he participated in with Microsoft and gives an overview of the product.
Link to the Microsoft Purview Workshop: https://github.com/tayganr/purviewlab
Many thanks to the team at Microsoft for their time to take us through the workshop and give get guidance to all participants.
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/1e340985-7f64-4b1d-a7d9-42832221a1a0
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss how Identity Governance within Azure AD, part of Microsofts Entra family of identity products can help with your user lifecycle. Alan takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains how Entitlement Management, Access Reviews and Privileged Access can secure, review, and give access.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/5aa1adc3-4e30-4759-b41e-a6b1a3bb7fa6
Episode NotesAlan and Sam take a first look at Microsoft Entra permissions management. Sam takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains how the product allows you to discover and remediate permissions creep in your multi-cloud environments.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/f7b21a46-1b4d-42e0-8e70-433f33fe4d89
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss how Microsoft Defender for Cloud can help Secure your multi-cloud environments. Alan takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains how you can easily gain visibility of your multi-cloud environment and how you secure it using protection workloads.
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/814a68a6-5eae-40a8-84cb-9fd2a201c1b8
Episode NotesAlan and Sam take a look at The Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. Sam takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains his experience with the Cloud Adoption framework and highlights the reasoning about considering using the framework.
Get Started with Azure Cloud Adoption Framework
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
What did you think of the episode? https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/5b670b90-8301-4743-9e85-65af250f9df6
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss how Azure AD, part of the Microsoft Entra family can secure your identity in the cloud. Alan takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains his viewpoint of the product and why we should consider the premium features within Azure AD to secure and manage cloud identity.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/1bcd0bec-97c9-4a44-854f-f9504ee44a35
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss all things Azure Policy, a way to manage Azure compliance at scale. Sam takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains his viewpoint of the product/tooling and why it can help organisations to track their compliance level and enforce policies in Azure.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/ce66ff91-7aac-4368-a464-32f43ba49608
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss how Microsoft Endpoint Manager (MEM) can simplify device management whilst making it easy to secure them. Alan takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains his viewpoint of the product and why we should adopt MEM in our organisation.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/a65f79a2-1802-4820-bb97-02fb1fa02e51
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss Terraform, a popular choice in the Infrastructure as Code space. Sam takes the role of 'Expert' and explains his viewpoint of the product and why we should be utilising Terraform in our organisation and recommending it to our customers.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
What did you think of the episode? https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/f3377777-1137-416f-9a45-014e05359325
Episode NotesAlan and Sam discuss all things Entra, a 'new' product offering by Microsoft. Alan takes the role of the 'Expert' and explains his initial viewpoint of the product and why we should all be excited about this new product family from Microsoft. Entra is very new at the time of recording, and we give our first impressions on the product family and give you a high level overview of it's functionality
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
What did you think of the episode? https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/05620716-db0a-42c0-b4f1-54bfe993f6e0
In this episode, Alan and Sam discuss the Podcast, what's happened and what we are planning over the next season. Also with a big a apology that we have been absent for over a year.
Find out more at http://www.letstalkpodcast.co.uk
What did you think of the episode? https://pinecast.com/feedback/lets-talk-azure/063573a6-8f47-4fc8-98d6-ba85cd9fbcc8
In this episode Alan and Sam deep dive into Infrastructure as Code and specifically ARM Templates inside of Azure. We talk about what infrastructure as code is and how it can improve your infrastructure deployment process.
In this episode Alan and Sam talk recap all the latest news from Ignite! Even though Ignite was virtual this year, Microsoft announced a load of new features and products around Azure/Office 365. You can check the Book of News from Microsoft here: https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2020-book-of-news/
Episode Notes In this episode Alan and Sam talk around the move from on premises to the cloud. Why are companies doing this? What are the cost advantages? Is the cloud more reliable? When does on premises make more sense? We also have a quick recap of the latest Azure related news.
Episode Notes This episode we have a deep dive looking at Zero Trust, the principles, components and tools that enable us to be more secure in the modern workplace. Alan lives and breathes security day to day, so he gives us his insights into how Zero Trust is implemented in Azure/o365 and why you should be aware of this concept, regardless of your role in your workplace.
Episode Notes In this episode we look at Azure Security Center and the features and benefits that it can bring to a range of different teams working with assets in Azure. We highlight some of the vast range of features, how we use it day to day and introduce how you can get started using it right away.
A good place to start is the Security Center Community on GitHub here -> https://github.com/Azure/Azure-Security-Center or on Docs -> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/identify-threats-with-azure-security-center/
Episode Notes In this episode we cover many aspects of the learning and accreditation process within the ecosystem of Microsoft. We wanted to give a high level overview of the structure of learning and what you can expect from the exam process, Alan gives us some insight into his own experience of the exams he has taken in the past. If you want to start your learning journey with Microsoft a good place to start is: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/ the Microsoft Learn site has loads of free content to get you started. Also, check out the certification area of the learn site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/ this website covers all of the various exams and accreditations you can work towards.
Episode Notes In this episode we discuss the changing nature of who builds applications and systems on Azure/o365.
In recent years, with the proliferation of low/no code platforms, we have seen a rise in people within the business building solutions to their problems without the need for traditional development and project practices.
We cover who these people are, where they have come from and how we, as IT professional can help to promote and support transformation, directly in the teams that need these solutions.
We also recap the news over the past few weeks.
Episode Notes In this episode we recap the Microsoft Build virtual conference. Build this year, due to COVID19 was broadcast over 48 hours non stop across the world. Attendees watched virtually as Microsoft announced new products and feature updates for developers across the Microsoft product stack. We recap some of most important news to us, to keep you all informed.
Episode Notes Welcome to the first episode of the Let's Talk! Azure podcast. In this episode we introduce ourselves and cover some of the current Azure news.