RunAs Radio

The oil and gas industry is in the cloud! Richard chats with John Paul Cook about his work bringing various Azure technologies to bear on the oil and gas industry. Contrary to popular belief, the oil and gas industry loves software and has embraced the cloud to increase efficiency. John talks about utilizing various Azure products to do data collection, including the IoT Hub. But the fun really starts when you get into the analysis side, using stream analytics to capture data in real time and react to it, as well as analysis tools to understand the data more deeply. Cool stuff!

Stephen Rose is back and in a new role! Richard chats with Stephen about his work on OneDrive for Business, which is one of the great cloud-enabling products out there today. Stephen talks about the automation in OneDrive for Business with Office 365 that gets rid of big email attachments, instead automatically embedding a link to the file into the email - the file itself lives in OneDrive for Business the whole time! The conversation also turns to the sophisticated security models available through the cloud with OneDrive for Business, that focus on preventative behaviors, not just reactionary. File storage has never been more interesting!

PowerShell? On Linux? Why would you DO that? Richard chats with Tim Warner about the recent announcements around making PowerShell open source and available on Linux and Mac OS. What does this mean? The Linux world has been script-driven since it was Unix, so does PowerShell make any sense? Tim talks about coming up with common ways to manage both Windows and Linux machines, and where PowerShell adds some interesting capabilities by being far more object-oriented than text-file-oriented. It's still early days, and there's only an alpha version on GitHub to experiment with, but it looks to be interesting times in the future!

It's 2017, do you know where your config manager is? Richard chats with Microsoft PFE Steven Rachui about his experiences helping companies manage substantial System Center Configuration Manager infrastructure. With the 2016 edition, the ability to handle rapid updates to Windows 10 is key and introduces the concept of Current Branch, as opposed to going with a more conservative stable edition of Windows. The conversation around non-Windows mobile device management focuses on using a hybrid mode to work with Microsoft InTune, but there does look to be a future of on-premise solutions as well. Lots to think about!

Are your noSQL stores safe? While at NDC London, Richard chatted with Niall Merrigan about the latest wave of exploits targeting MongoDB, ElasticSearch and others. As Niall explains, the challenge is that the default security models for many of these products leaves them vulnerable to outside attack. As these attacks have progressed, they have presented themselves as ransomware - data is removed and a bitcoin account offered up to restore the data. However, to date, even when the ransoms are paid, no data is restored. Apparently there is no honor among thieves. Now is a great time to review your security vulnerabilities, and Niall suggests looking at your systems the same way hackers do, through tools like Shodan. Give yourself a security checkup!

Of course you can scale in the cloud - but exactly how? Richard chats with Corey Sanders who goes on a whirlwind tour of the many options in Azure to help your applications be reliable and scalable. First up is a discussion on Virtual Machines and Scale Sets - rather than making separate VMs for every instance of your application, you can build them in blocks up to a thousand! After discussing the kind of problems that need a thousand of anything, Corey dives into Service Fabric and Containers, getting more fine-grained and lighter weight so that you can scale faster. And it works with existing applications as well, opening the door to moving what you have today to the cloud!

JSON for IT folks? Yes! Richard talks to Aidan Finn about his experiences actually getting into configuration-as-code. Aidan talks about discovering the Azure Quickstart Templates as a starting point to automating setting up test and training labs. JSON is a simple file format but takes a little getting used to, and with Azure you can specify virtually every aspect of a virtual machine so that it can be created on-demand. And there are great tools available to make it easier to build and maintain these configuration files. Ultimately, if you are creating anything in Azure more than once, you need to get up to speed on this kind of automation - it's the future!

VPNs don't have to suck! Richard chats with Richard Hicks about the latest in DirectAccess, Microsoft's built in VPN technology that makes maintaining a secure connection for a remote PC a bit less painful. Richard talks about how the server-side of DirectAccess being pretty solid for Server 2012R2 and 2016. But the big improvement comes from deploying Windows 10 Enterprise - bringing key features like multi-homing so that remote PCs can choose from a variety of geographically dispersed data centers. The conversation also goes to the mobile device management side of things, since DirectAccess requires a domain-joined version of Windows, it's not for everything. What are the alternatives?

Have you used WireShark? Richard chats with Tim Warner of Pluralsight about his experiences working with this super-powerful open source network inspection tool. The conversation dives into the challenges of understanding what's going on with your network, both wired and wireless. WireShark gathers up traffic coming and going from a machine and analyzes it to identify what its for and where it's from. Tim talks about the challenges of seeing the network as a whole when it comes to Layer 3 routing, but there are tools to help. There are many reasons to want to understand your network traffic, but there are privacy challenges also - know the rules for your world!

The cloud is secure, right? Richard chats with J Peter Bruzzese about Office 365 Security - focusing primarily on Exchange Online. The social engineering of email is hitting new highs, with ransomware, wire transfers and other approaches to exploiting people. Is the only solution education of the user? While an important part of the equation, J Peter also talks about building a robust email infrastructure that fights back from various attacks.