 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by two guests for this segment. We have Jeff Mielef, who is the Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, and Scott Schnoll, who is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great having you. So before the cameras were rolling, we were talking a little bit with you, Jeff, about this idea of helping customers connect to the cloud and helping make product deployment easier and increasing customer satisfaction. Do you want to walk our viewers through a little bit about your approach to that very large task? Sure, absolutely. So one of the main things that my team does at Microsoft is work with Office 365 and really, I guess more broadly, Microsoft 365 customers in their journey in onboarding to the cloud and figuring out how to optimize their connectivity to our cloud services. It's a very different mentality when you think about how you may have deployed on-premises services in the past and had to think about very different things in terms of securing those on-premises services versus now having all of your users egressing their traffic to the internet coming into Microsoft's cloud and how you're going to properly kind of categorize that traffic, protect it in a way that actually makes sense, but also make sure that it gets to Microsoft in an optimal way so that we can provide a great end user experience to our customers. So we're spending a lot of time thinking about guidance, primarily, around how to classify all that traffic, what all those different network streams are, what all the end points are that you need to connect to and building tools and documentation. We do quite a bit of presentation at events like this. We work with network partners across the whole Microsoft ecosystem to help them implement that guidance in their products and hopefully provide a great experience to our customers. And what are you hearing from customers? What's really keeping them up at night? Well, I think the shift that I described in sort of the change in mindset around the different things you need to consider when you move from on-premises into the cloud, it's no longer this notion that all of your internet traffic is untrusted and needs to be scanned in some super intrusive way and that you need to protect things in the way that you do when you're trying to prevent your users from looking at cat videos or whatever they normally do on the internet. And it's now the crown jewels of your corporation. It's all of your intellectual property that you have now entrusted to Microsoft to store and process in our data centers. You need to treat that traffic differently and you should be treating it differently. That's the big conversation. All right, so Scott, there's a word that I heard from Jeff there, which is really important. It's trust. So Microsoft obviously trusted out there. One of the things I gave Microsoft kudos years ago is, well, it used to be, I deployed this application on the server, I wrapped it, I know it, it's complied it, I tested out and everything. The push to Office 365, which Microsoft did from our standpoint, kind of aggressively was getting customers used to doing things in a different way. Can you talk about the security, the trust, the compliance, how you help customers do that new thing which new companies are doing, but even if I'm a 10-year-old or 50-year-old or 100-year-old company, I want to be able to do things as agilely and as well as that brand new startup that can start from a clean slate. Sure, yeah, well, we have a saying that comes from our leader, Satya. Microsoft runs on trust. And how do you demonstrate trust? Largely by being as transparent as possible. So what does that mean? We're transparent about where your data is located when you store it in our cloud services. Who might have access to the data? What subcontractors do we use? What data protection mechanisms do we have in place to protect it? We also undergo regular and continuous, rigorous auditing of our data centers, of our software, of our processes, and we publish all of that information for all of our customers, perspective customers to see. They can download any of our audit reports from our service trust portal. They can review information about government requests for information, and they can actually go to our transparency hub and see a lot of other interesting information about what happens when they do join our cloud services and store their data in them. I mean, it's really interesting talking about this because trust in the technology industry today, it's not all companies are running as transparently. I mean, is that what, as you started out by saying this is Satya Nadella's Microsoft Friends on Trust, do you think of that as a competitive advantage? Absolutely, absolutely. I, in fact, I'm on the Office 365 trust team, so I may be a little biased here, but I would like to think that some of the work we've done, particularly with our service trust portal, where we're publishing all this information and the new compliance manager tool that we've developed that really takes it the next step so that customers can not only trust us, but they can actually walk through both our internal control framework and their own tenant settings to figure out what they need to do to be compliant with this particular standard, GDPR, some regulation, et cetera, et cetera. Jeff, I want to talk about the network some because when I hear some of these changes, you talk about security, talk about enabling multi-cloud world, the network can either be that bottleneck, or that boat anchor that holds us back in the past, or it can be that enabler. That was the promise of SDN was, oh, we're just going to make this software and services that no matter where I can. So tell us how Microsoft fits into this. How does this fit into the overall story from your standpoint? Yeah, and it's probably important also to differentiate a little bit that in general, the work that my team does is very much focused on Office 365, Microsoft 365, and there's kind of two parallel stories here around connectivity to Azure and consuming Azure infrastructure as a service and the services that they're providing versus the software as a service side of Microsoft that we're really providing guidance around. But yeah, you're absolutely right. The interesting thing around the networking piece is that you still very much have to consider the physical logistics of getting the bits and the bytes out on the wire and how you're going to do that in the most optimal way. We're doing quite a bit of work with SD-WAN providers, with secure web gateway vendors, cloud proxy vendors to try and figure out how we best kind of play together and ensure that the path between the end user and our cloud services is the most optimal. We're doing a bunch of infrastructure work to kind of move our cloud as close as possible to end users. And we're very, Scott was talking about transparency. We're being very transparent in what those architecture investments are and how we're doing that with the idea that if customers understand that and we're doing it in a way that's also consistent with other SaaS providers, that our customers can, as they rethink their network architecture, begin to consume some of the advantages that we bring to the table and that all cloud providers, Microsoft and non-Microsoft, begin to bring to the table just with this notion that everything is provided over public endpoints on the internet. Those become closer and closer to the end user with routing technologies like Anycast, using GODNS to resolve endpoints close to the end user. And over time, as we push those endpoints closer, as we move data centers closer and actually move the location where data is stored and being physically processed closer to the end user, it just gets better and better, right? And we move from where Office 365 started to where BPOS started with a very small number of data centers initially in North America and then APAC and Amia to having massive numbers of data centers in all regions around the world where we're just continuously adding more and more go locals, ideally the experience and the features and functionality just get better and you can take advantage of that. When you talk about what you're learning about how you can work to best together with providers and partners, you said you're learning how to best play with each other. What are some of the best practices that have emerged in terms of how you go about it and what your mindset is when you enter into those relationships? We've kind of tried to boil our guidance down into kind of four key points. The first being egressing traffic locally for users. And you think of this as like a medium or large scale enterprise business that has many locations. As opposed to the old traditional method where you might have an MPLS when you're doing all your internal connectivity over that and then you're getting your traffic out to your business partners or the internet in one central location. We really want people getting their traffic out onto the internet in each one of those locations. That particular piece of guidance I think is driving a lot of the conversations with SD-WAN providers around how we can help our customers deploy SD-WAN devices at each one of those sites, properly identify office 365 traffic and get that out onto just the commodity internet circuit while keeping your own internal corporate communications on VPN connectivity, perhaps over the internet or the traditional MPLS network. And it's really that classification I think that helps. We're doing a lot of work around building a actually new API that's just been released, REST API web service, specifically for this purpose where we identify both network ranges as well as endpoints, FQDNs that are associated with all of the Office 365 traffic and we categorize it for things that you should be optimizing and doing the least amount of processing possible and just getting it out there. Things that are not so important from a performance perspective that if you need to, you can absolutely go SSL break and inspect, do whatever you need to to make you feel comfortable with that traffic. All right, one of the things we're looking at this week is definitely in Satya Nadella's reign, it feels like there's a new Microsoft. However, on the other hand, when I look at people at Microsoft, there's lots of some of the most tenured people in the industry. Other than IBM, I think Microsoft's second. Scott, I'm looking, you've got a session I think's been going on for 10 years here at the show, exchange tips and tricks. Sounds like it's one of those things that people love coming to the show is like, ooh, great, this is the insider. Where's the Easter eggs and the cool things? Microsoft's known for that. We used to poke and learn from the experts. Gives a little insight as to how, what's the same and what's different about Microsoft and yeah, tell us a little bit about your session. That's a great question. So I've been with the company, this is my 15th year now. I spent first 10 years in exchange engineering, few years in customer experience and now like I said, I'm on the trust team where I'm doing regulatory compliance work. I've seen this company change in some respects, get mature in important areas, financial responsibility, the way we build products, just the overall tone of the company if you will. But then some of us, Jeff's been here longer, people who have been here for a while, they still have the same passion for the company. So I think what makes us successful is that our drive and our desire isn't changing from Microsoft and what we're trying to accomplish, but we're just getting better at being able to do it. We, you know, collectively, we tend to share a lot of our experiences. So even though we may work on different teams, on different things, we all try to stay networked and connected and share what we're all doing and really work together to make things better overall. In terms of the overall company, I don't know that you could say that there's been too much of a radical change. I know Sacha does bring sort of a reboot mindset along with him, and there is a definite feeling of that. But for me, it's still like the same wonderful company that I wanted to join years ago and finally did and will retire from it if I have my way. Yeah, I'd just add a couple of quick thoughts on that. So I would agree that, you know, I don't know that I've seen a massive, immediate shift as Sacha has come in. There definitely is, you know, the feeling that you mentioned, but I would actually argue that the bigger shift has come from our move to cloud services and away from, you know, packaged products and releasing every three years. And I think one of the things that really excited me to come to Microsoft and has kept me at Microsoft is the ability to have such a large scale impacts, given the number of customers that we have, the number of products that we have, and with the move to cloud services, the rate of change, the rate of being able to actually push that change and push those positive impacts out to people has just gone up dramatically. That's a lot of fun to see. And the quality reach too, the quality reach because we can be always up to date in the cloud versus, you know, some on-premises customers who may not stay up to date very well at all. And that can be a problem for them in the long run if they don't maintain currentness, especially from a security perspective. So I think, yeah, definitely the move to the cloud has changed things in that regard quite a bit. Great, well thank you both so much. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Absolutely, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from the Cube's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit.