 Oh my goodness. I think I pressed the right button. I think the right box How you doing Rod? I'm doing fairly well I a little sad though that we're live because I was enjoying that music it made me feel I don't know if you feel this but it made me feel like I was on like a cruise ship with Captain I thought being invited to the captain's table for dinner It is rather interesting when they find that royalty-free stuff to see what actually works but Thanks for joining today. We're actually filling in for a bunch of folks. We're trying to swap the different people in and out and one of the mainstays of AZ Update is Pierre Romain on our team and Pierre got the lovely job of driving his daughters over to Montreal, two-hour drive from where he lives to be able to drop off for a vacation so he figured a live remote take would not be good Just with the noise in the background noise stuff like that So we're both stepped up to be able to do it today man. That's gonna be fun Yeah, it's it's the difference between like an action movie and a drama I guess so Pierre would we have the action movie with all the car sounds and it would be pretty absolutely This is teamwork, right? This this shows Shows our team great teamwork. So yeah, happy to do this happy to talk about all the good stuff we have Well in in in light of that one of the things that I wanted to talk about first in our air quotes banter section is talking about the The windows hybrid event that we had earlier this week. Did you get a chance to watch that on tuesday? I did well on tuesday. I watched pieces of it because obviously I'm never idle. That's just me. It's like an OCD thing. So i'm always doing something I'm always doing like two or three things So I did kind of catch some of that But then yesterday I went back and watched the things as a security person that I felt were More aligned with what I wanted to hear. So yeah, I did listen to all the security stuff yesterday I thought was pretty interesting Nice, you don't have that linked up on your screen resource that we could take a look at This is where we'd have the professional short links, but I don't know if we actually created the short links or not, but main way that we got Is um Oh, see there's you she used you should be the one that's on the main page not me So yeah, I'm on uh, yeah Let's go with that shared screen right there. So Yeah, so one of the announcements that came up as part of that is The windows auto patch as an example and you had a particular interest in this particular one What what exactly brought your eye for this concept of the windows auto patch? Oh, yeah, there's a this whole history thing here Some people don't know so I was on the original Team I was a contractor on the original team that created the original patch management guide at microsoft way way way way way back yet, um, so I'm semi Semi responsible for patch tuesday so everybody can absolutely hate me But this windows auto patch was I kind of gleaned this this week. I thought this was absolutely interesting Those customers that have been so hard tasked with updating their systems every month for ever Now microsoft can actually help you with that. It's called auto patch Auto patch you turn some or maybe all of your patching tasks over to microsoft I thought it was interesting how we'll actually take a subset of your environment do a little testing with the patches and pull those back And then if everything works, we're just gonna we're going to auto patch your systems for you more kind of like this This whole idea around the cloud and services and pay as you go and this whole utility concept It's absolutely amazing particularly for those customers that can take advantage of this Right now it also uses all of our signals that we get from other people if they're having problems with those patches It uses the ring system if you will to kind of gradually phase them out the different people Which is cool. It's all kind of anchored in our back end solution that is using Windows update for business as the main back end where you can control the different settings for all the different machines But it uses our information on being able to pull them back If they're working if there's troubles, but you still have control But we basically look after the infrastructure and the rollout and the scheduling that sort of stuff So pretty cool stuff. There's another whole section that was there talking about security And I know you're a security person And so in there, I'm just curious if you had anything with the security fundamentals breakouts that it was there anything in there that kind of caught your eye Well, we have some really excellent new features coming particularly for windows 11 Everything that we do at at microsoft. I hope folks get this is all modeled around kind of this zero trust idea So people think about our cloud. They think about our on-premises tool security tools zero trust It sounds right that just is a given. Yeah, you should focus on that But it goes even further because based on this hybrid work event and the discussion we had this week This is being modeled into windows 11. I mean, it's already there But I think it was exposed much much better In that it breaks down all the way from the hardware All the way to the applications the operating system the identity that's built in and then also All the way for that connection to the cloud where these systems can be managed with microsoft Defender for endpoint What really stuck with me though was the numbers How successful our products and services have been in protecting our customers. I actually wrote this down here 9.6 billion malware threats identified and and Remediated 35.7 billion phishing and other malicious emails identified 25.6 billion brute force attempts. That's huge 800 plus password attacks every second As both says the staff stuck for me. That's this that's the zinger that you mentioned 800 password attempts per second That we're catching as far as where that is That's insane if again, I finally found the url if you want to go off take a look at it It's not a nice short form one, but this is the event. It's completely free to go off and see the breakouts There's three of them We're talking specifically about the security fundamentals breakout for the stuff that was in there The big thing that caught my eye was just the level of interesting and breakdown that david did With regards to the demos that he brought out like the dude is literally Pulling up fiddler to look at the traffic between the website and teams and the other stuff to be able to So no over here this packet tells you this or else. Uh, he brought out the best one which I thought was Capturing the traffic between the tpm and the cpu Live on the bottom She steals the bit locker key and then talking specifically with that with our new pluton silicone. It's coming out So I have a amazing stuff. Yeah, so I have a in-person conference coming up next month. It's uh, it's Most it's usually a in-point manager type conference. I'm bringing security stuff into it and I was Those demos you're talking about. I absolutely wanted to steal some of those So I should be looking for the uh, the expense report coming in from you for some additional hardware. I take it Hey, yeah, much like me. Here you go Nice Cool stuff go off and check out that particular event. Uh, some really cool stuff inside the fundamentals piece We also talked a bit about the it management for hybrid work section as well The demos are not quite as slick as the other ones are but you know, give them props for some of the announcements that came in there Um, very cool stuff. Uh, they have a bunch of resources and links during those sessions about 20 minutes apiece So go check those ones out. But you know, we've got some actual news that came out from new releases that came from this week For things that are coming up and I believe the first one we're going to be talking about is uh Yours it is specifically about azure backup. What's new with that man? Absolutely. I I thought this this kind of stuck out to me As a security person, right? So I have to have a certain skill set to be able to remediate things threats and things like this But at the core as a security person It's all about the data, right all about the data the metrics Um, this was hugely important to me. So we've released just Recently some capability around metrics and metric alerts for some of our storage capability But now right this week released it for blob storage Which is huge and I can't tell you the number of times working with Microsoft Sentinel our customers have said Hey, I need to be able to track All storage accounts and we've kind of been I don't know Not quite as Full on some of those storage accounts and now it looks like that capability is coming into play And this is absolutely awesome awesome This absolutely meets what customers have been requesting and asking for for a long time This is going to give you Stuff about did the restore job work? How's the health of restore job? You know because at the end of the day When you're talking about potential disaster recovery You need to know that your backups are pretty good, right? So this is this is good stuff to be able to tell at least from that perspective whether or not things are going to work nice the Backup solution definitely enhanced for being able to do stuff more monitoring take that you can do and take in place Which is awesome And we've got a link on there for being able to go off and check out the details On the backup support metrics and the reporting you can do on that one there for some new updates Pretty cool stuff. Yep. Um, what one caught my eye from our update service was actually talking about the bastion support Uh for using kerberos for authentication. It's it's a small little update, but it's still important to know that's now possible Uh, the basically, uh, it can now work with um, both the basic and standard skew as far as how you're using azure bastion Uh, and simply some docs and resource links from this particular update talking about how to set up kerberos authentication Inside your bastion environment and also how to configure it to use Uh kerberos authentication as well Now i'm curious rod like, uh azure bastion deployed Yes, no, are you an interested Individual talking about bastion again kind of hinting on your security background. I kind of would know the answer But I thought I'd ask well. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I do have it deployed in my own environment and with it quite a bit it it does Give you kind of a sense of well, let's use the word. I'm sorry security It does kind of give you some security knowing that those connections are are secure and safe, right? Um, the other thing I Hesitate to say this, but I have to last time I was on the show with pier We talked about bastion and I just have to be very clear. It has to be pronounced a certain way. Otherwise, it sounds like another word You just got to be careful about that. It's azure bastion And it yeah, it's uh, it's a really good service This I remember when this azure bastion first came out in um in ga last year and customers absolutely ate this stuff up so This support for kerberos is is is pretty awesome and as I think customers will find over time There will be even greater support for a lot of our other services as well Right What I like is that we keep on extending the functionality of it I mean we started off and it was just literally a web interface to be able to go off and take a look at a Remote desktop type session through a web interface, which was kind of clunky but worked But now we've actually got like ssl you can go go and do through the bastion house directly with your native client Uh, we've got rdp capabilities And then now we actually have a different level of a higher level of authentication with kerberos authentication taking place So I love how we keep on innovating to it, but ultimately it's your jumpbox as a service Jb as I guess it is For being able to act with your actual resources as a good good practice to be able to often do different things You might have to trademark that by the way. I know I need to go off and get that twitter account Um, what do you got up next for your next item that we have to talk about? Oh, yeah, so this one actually comes with a with a with a short story So some folks know that I co-host a weekly podcast called microsoft security insights Um nice in and a couple of our guests talked about mdi not this week, but last wednesday Evening we talked about mdi and one of the things that was brought out as part of that conversation was In microsoft defender for identity is almost a near perfect Product one of microsoft's near perfect and customers say this all the time because it works. It's awesome. It works great But in relation to personal security product all it literally does is monitor and alert, right? It couldn't remediate. It could there's you couldn't take action on whatever that was. Well Fast forward of this week. Guess what we announced this week that we now microsoft defender for identity supports response actions It's limited Right. It's limited to these two disable user and reset user password But literally we're talking about identity and from a security analyst perspective if if I can do two things If I can reset a user's password or I can disable a user because I believe that that account might be potentially Compromised I've protected the rest of my environment. So those are huge while it's only two things those are huge And according to the product team, there's more actions coming. So it's getting Microsoft defender for identity is becoming more and more aligned with what all of the rest of our security products can can do as well So that's that's that's really awesome. Nice And as always we've got a nice link inside the blog that was so see that's associated with this particular recording on it The ops talk to get access to all those links additional resources All the links that we have also point to docks resource pages and or microsoft learn modules. You can go off and try them yourself And we basically just done the work of bringing together some of the more interesting topics to chat about here During the show. So defender. I wasn't even aware of the the defender for identity response actions that were possible so that's kind of cool that you brought that up and Cool stuff that the last article that we have to chat about right now Is about something that is near and dear to my heart as someone who used to Go through a whole bunch of hosting and work with a bunch of different hosters and content that sort of stuff Is the availability to do BYO IP bring your own IP Don't go off the tongue as nice as like an i as acronym or something like that But the whole concept of bring your own IP. I mean your public IP address like I still remember back way back in the day The you know what the address is that they use for microsoft on training materials. Remember that or do you know that one rod? I I don't I don't 131 107 and then Boom boom like I remember that one there and always in all the labs that they used to have for 131 107 If you do an ns look up on that address range It actually comes back as being owned by microsoft right so back in the day We own our own IP address ranges and you build up your reputation of your house secure How you know your your identity of your your computer in your Organization based on the IP address ranges that you potentially own and you might want to use those as part of your Applications that you're deploying and your resources and workloads are deploying up into the public cloud So we now have the general availability of being able to bring your own IP address ranges into azure themselves And these are the public ones. You're not your internal ones. These are the public ones So it comes in very handy if you've got some resources that you've now moved up into azure But then now you need to reference those public IP addresses and they would normally point to your on-premises boxes Through the firewall and redirection now they can point natively and directly up inside of azure If you wanted to with bring your own IP they could basically be onboarded as azure regional custom IP prefixes Which is the typical term for how it works And then we've got a link to doing the custom IP prefixes This has been available in preview mode for a while now But now that we're actually hit ga. We're now kind of excited to say that you can now By o ip up into the azure world By oi No, that still doesn't work Man, I don't know what it is After having this explained to me yesterday, I absolutely love this because I've run websites for years Right and you always have to you always have to change your dns and point to ip to it If you change services or hosting companies and stuff, so Yeah, I get that this is from a security perspective too. I think I don't want to overlook this talking about that reputation company that ip arrange and things like this God forbid that you would have your ip Put on some deny list somewhere Right. There's a lot of this back in the day. Remember those? Yeah, yeah, and it could happen and you talk about the reputation and being able to bring your Your ip addresses over that these trusted You know connection numbers, right? That's that's that's really good. That is kind of a security component. So I actually love that Absolutely. Yeah, I remember that having to worry about keeping your ip ranges clean Having to take them off the different spam bot lists or stuff for mail relays. Oh, yeah All that fun stuff Again, these are only four items that we found that were kind of interesting. They were relevant to bring up inside the aza update show um, we mentioned the event at the very beginning which was the um Hybrid work and we specifically called out the two breakouts For managing your environment and also securing your environment There was one more that we wanted to bring up We didn't have it inside our official show notes that you brought up which was a beta exam What was that? What was that talking about because I saw you tweeting about that earlier this week that you had some problems with the system uh Not really problems Are you you were too anxious to take it that that's what it was? Yeah, they announced it was going to go live yesterday And I've been waiting and and even yesterday morning I was hitting the refresh button because I wanted to schedule this exam absolutely as soon as possible So which which one was it just say one knows Which one which one was it? But you're waiting for the beta. What was it called? sc 100 sc 100 going live got it Right, so we we have this whole series this sc series of exams now sc 100 through sc 400. I think there's another one as well um, but these are Cover our Our security platform products More so from like a an analyst or someone that works with our products works with security this sc 100 Is the one that kind of pulls everything together from an architect security architect perspective With standing up the architect this the platform Setting up the infrastructure Governance and risk making sure everything is secure and doing it from a zero trust perspective. So this is actually pretty huge Um, I did finally get to schedule it It's actually scheduled for this afternoon. I think I take it at three o'clock this afternoon So I'm really excited about that the cool thing about it though is that If you pass this one along with and I've got that list right here These others if you have these already you get a cyber security architect expert badge and I that's all that's what that's what I'm in it for I always want the extra stuff So really you're looking for completion of all the different expert badges that you can grab. Is that what it is? Yeah, yeah, I I think I think if I go back and look I think I have every certification we have so nice, um, just one of those Another ocd thing of mine that you know, I have to admit to Um, definitely. Hey, I remember my my my mcp certification page used to be about four pages long from all the stuff I took I have kind of slowed down a little bit as the newer ones have come out, but I still am Plugging away at various different ones, but thanks for talking about the sc 100 It for for the for that particular exam anything that you would point to as like a good study guide resource any kind of tips So There are a few and in fact this this link we have to this page There are a couple on here There's not a lot because it is a beta exam. Okay. Okay, not a lot in reference to study materials um And because it is a beta We're offering the first 300 people that take the exam or schedule to take it before may 5th and some Money off the registration Because I registered because I'm a microsoft person it doesn't take away from those 300 people So, okay, good. Thank you. I've taken your seat So, yeah, you can you can do that but from a study perspective It's literally just I personally I think it's just hands-on We have a lot of really good learn modules um That can cover a lot of this stuff But at the end of the day you need to combine those learn modules with actually with actual hands-on if you want to pass this Stuff I've taken all of the sc series exams and nice if I hadn't worked with the product I probably would have failed each one. So right so the those resource links are helpful I find it usually works out quite well going for the exam objectives page on microsoft learn Taking those objective pages put them inside of a one note and then going off and finding the docs and finding the learn stuff That's associated with each one of those objectives to be able to go off as my starting point for things Cool stuff. Speaking of of some training and some other online capabilities There's some cool stuff going on with our team that we put together Which is called the learn live study hall for hybrid Right cool stuff. Do you have the link for that one there we can show for everybody? Let me see if I can grab it. I think I was in the midst of it when um, I'll let you find and I'll talk about a little bit So we were approached by a team internally at microsoft that handles Generating and sourcing different skilling resources. I know because I'm saying the word skilling I'm driving pier crazy right now if he's listening because he hates it with Skilling so I'm going to say skilling as many times as I can in this section But they approached us for a skilling initiative That was going to be talking about how to skill people up With regards to their hybrid capabilities And so uh thomas mower on our team went ahead and helped coordinate the effort of finding resources for everyone and finding presenters to be able to present the content As well. Uh, so you've got the slide up there. So let me pull that up for everybody to be able to see but The the idea is that we've got I want to say almost like a dozen and change almost more than that Of stuff lined up on the main page for the resources you can go off and find it here But we're talking about all the different connectivity that we have on the hybrid sense We're pairing up both internal microsoft people of product team people and microsoft mvps as well To be able to deliver these they're all about as you can see here 90 minutes long Which is a interactive chat back and forth and look at the learn modules together And the demos and stuff like that and then go through some skill testing questions This is going to be going starting uh actually in a week or so and finishing up in mid may So it's a it's a good long endeavor of a couple of them a week And they're also time zone friendly to work both in europe and also in north america And a little bit early except the north american ones work for our friends over in australia and the asia pacific region two For some content. So you'll see some friendly faces here as possible hosts for these particular entries And you'll see some really good content as we go through Anyone in there stick out for you as an interesting my friend Yeah, I think this is uh, this is an awesome endeavor. I have to tell you because um It's it's sometimes finding the appropriate time to go through some of these learn modules on your own You kind of get you know pulled away to do other things this remote work It takes a certain personality to really just stay, you know, nose in focused all the time So being able to do this with somebody That's yeah, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, definitely. So go check that one out Go sign up. They're all free to attend 90 minutes a piece block them in your schedule Uh, you can also see them on demand after the fact. Uh, so there'll be some good content coming up there um In our community event section, uh, just obviously shameful self promotion Uh, I'm even dressed up accordingly according to the parts patch and switch is going to be on later today Uh in about an hour and 35 minutes or so at a at um twitch.tv slash patch and switch Joey snow will be joining me show all that other guy. What's his name again? Um, Steve I think it is. Yeah, Steve's going to be joining us too Uh for some good shenanigans of just kind of blowing off some steam But you mentioned at the very top of the hour the thing that you do on wednesdays Uh, what's the name of that one there? What's going on with there? And is it every wednesday and who's part of it? Oh, yeah, so it's called microsoft security insights if folks don't know that was kind of the original name for a lot of our security platforms right kind of the codename So that's the name of the podcast it is a podcast every wednesday night 5 p.m Eastern time live on twitch Okay, um, and we're nearing our 100th episode which is pretty fantastic to think about And it goes for about an hour hour 15 minutes the replay Uh, the audio replay for podcasts, right? Um, it comes out the following week Usually monday on all the podcast platforms Some exciting news coming up that we're starting to slowly migrate to a microsoft platform microsoft reactor for production and For the show which is pretty awesome in itself It's it's co-hosted by myself A couple of my colleagues internally brody and edward and and we have one non microsoft person who's absolutely amazing with security red teaming stuff so frank and It's it's a really good really good event We we talk about all things microsoft security. We have partners on we have product managers constantly That want to come in and talk about what they're doing what they're excited about We have folks from our field who are working with customers constantly It's literally all across the spectrum all across the board and it's a really interesting relaxed Um conversation That's awesome, man. We make fun of your first episode that's going to be going on with the reactors April 20th. We're having on matt sosman who is currently product manager With the microsoft identity in an engineering team. So got it. Cool. I know matt. He's a good guy So uh, should be a good guest to have on yeah awesome stuff, man Well, we we've got one last thing to hit on in our normal schedule stuff Which is what is the learn module of the week? Yeah, I think i've said the word uh identity about a hundred times today during the show I thought you know might as well finish with that We do have this this says exam sc 300 this microsoft identity and access But it is absolutely if you go down to the bottom of this page. There is a whole learn module associated with this Oh, yeah Not just a module. Yeah, well not the right the whole learning path talking about our identity Solutions being over with microsoft identity and stuff like that. Um, and as I mentioned earlier This is great to prepare you for that exam But you also need hands on and there's a lot of capability that we provide the customers to give you either hands on in your environment Or we'll give you a little demo Environment that you can get a little bit of hands-on experience with so Cool stuff, uh microsoft learn modules always good to have and obviously that one there with identity identity is one of the cornerstones for being able to correctly Secure your environment. Is it not it is the first Step in securing your environment if you don't have identity managed you literally have no security Well, very valid point I like that very valid Cool stuff, man. Well, you know, I think we're just about done anything for closing comments anything For well, hopefully they'll let us back to host the show again, but uh, it's like one of those things Yeah, it's like leaving the leaving the car keys with the kids and going out of town, right? I just don't know what's gonna happen Um, yeah, hopefully they'll have us back. I enjoy myself probably a little too much sometimes, but yeah Nice. Well, hey, thank you very much everyone for joining us really appreciate it. Uh, you know a little bit clunky We managed to make it through There's some great people that go off and made some comments. I saw some team members and some community members on the different platforms the facebook's the You tubes and the twitches so again join us again next week for another episode all this information is available on the blog for itopstalk.com And the episode has all the different show notes and all the different lengths rod Thank you very much for joining today and helping me co-host and also Thank you and a hit tip of the hat was out to pierre for trusting us with the keys to the car Uh, and uh, we'll see you next week Yep, have a good week