Hello Everyone!

Grab a cup of coffee (preferably a pumpkin spice latte for me) and get ready for this packed article! Microsoft Ignite took place last week, with various in-person events across the globe. It’s exciting to be back and in-person for events again!

With Microsoft Ignite each year there are A TON of product announcements. Before I dive into some of my favourites, I want to talk about the in-person experience here in the UK.

While the main event was broadcast live from Seattle, the UK offered a local viewing of the event with in-person talks over two days, October 13th and 14th. The UK Spotlight featured speakers and sessions from our UK-based partners, MVPs and other internal Microsoft Experts. The reality is we were limited on in-person numbers, so Microsoft had to develop an event that was truly virtual. Also, we had to make many schedule changes due to people getting Covid or having other personal circumstances arise. This seems to be the new normal for in-person events, and we have to pivot.

The tagline for Microsoft Ignite this year was ‘Do more with less’, really focusing on easier adoption to the cloud and increasing innovation, all while delivering this more securely. The UK leveraged the fact that they were hosting in Manchester, which happens to be the fastest growing city for tech in the UK.

The event brought home a feel of community and innovation local to the UK. There was a huge focus on filling the skills gap that we have, showing the success of others, and driving innovation with UK customers. I was extremely fortunate to be the host for this event and was able to interview folks from several universities that are changing the way we deliver education, by focusing on diversity, an adaptive curriculum and providing students with the tools to be successful in the industry. I also was able to interview people from Manchester City Council on how they drive inclusion into how they hire and how they have taken a diverse approach to their teams.

The UK event really focused on how others achieved success and we ensured their stories were heard so that others can build off of others’ success. Now, let’s take a look at some of the highlights from the technical sessions from Ignite:

Low Code/Power Platform – I don’t know how to write code! That’s okay, because Microsoft has developed some amazing tools to enable you to build websites, introduce automated workflows, process documents and build apps with low to no code. When you’re looking for ways to create automation without any coding background, check out low code options and take advantage of free training. There is also an opportunity to earn a free exam voucher!

Hybrid – We’re all about hybrid! There were announcements around the new Azure Arc-enabled SQL server, managing Azure Kubernetes Service with Azure Arc, and brand new features around Azure Stack HCI. I love the new feature of Azure Elastic SAN, completely scalable!

AI – There were a lot of cool features added to Microsoft products that allowed for the use of more languages, better accuracy, and overall better media experiences. One of the cool things they announced was the Responsible AI Dashboard, which is geared around making responsible AI decisions and helping customers to make more data-driven decisions. The AI and ML updates are leveraging what we can do with our data.

Security – Security is for everyone! We dedicated day two of Ignite in the UK to security and it’s great to see it at the forefront of everything we do. Personally, I am excited to see how we’ve launched more features for Microsoft Defender, Purview, endpoints (including InTune), M365 and even AKS and Azure Virtual Desktop. You can read about the announcements here.

Windows – While there have been some updates around Windows Government capability and the Windows 365 App, I’m excited to see the introduction of Organizational Messages on Windows 11. Personally my email is a black hole, so being able to send and view important messages to our organisations is great for reminding people of important updates and training, while it de-clutters our inboxes!

You can catch up on the entire Microsoft Ignite Book of News and look at all of the updates.

During Ignite, the Cloud Skills Challenge was launched. Sign up for free learning paths with the opportunity to earn a free exam voucher! Choose the challenge that is right for you, complete it, earn your free exam voucher!

Before we go, I just want to say that the PowerShell team did NOT get a session in at Ignite. To remediate this, they have put together a PowerShell 7 Unplugged video. It covers off how to install PowerShell 7 all the way to the latest features, including their latest roadmap. Check it out!

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, enjoy the beautiful autumn colours and stay safe!

Learn more

• This article was written for the Monthly TechNet UK IT Pro Newsletter – sign up today!
• A look at the Microsoft Ignite announcements
• New Azure features and functionality for September​ 2022

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We’re welcoming in the autumn here in the northern hemisphere, with kids going back to school and everyone returning from summer holidays. The summer was filled by many events going back to in-person and it seemed that June and July were packed with them! Black Hat, Tech Live London, Cisco Live, Women in Tech Conference, and the Gartner Symposium were some of the big names out there this summer. Hopefully you were able to attend, be it virtually or physically.

Here at Microsoft, the product groups have been a bit quieter as they’re all getting ready for Microsoft Ignite. As we saw with Microsoft Build, we’ll be hosting regional live events. If you are fortunate enough to live in the UK, France, Germany, Latin America, or Asia you could attend the event LIVE and in-person! Keep watching the event page here for updates and information to register.

We’re also keeping an eye out on other events that are happening in October and November around the globe. You can keep up to date on the Microsoft-led events near you on this website.

Keeping up to date on the latest product releases can be tough. To keep up to date on products and community technical posts I’d like to recommend subscribing to Azure Weekly, as it’s a great way to see all the updates in Azure in your inbox. Also, every product group at Microsoft has made their product roadmaps publicly available. You can also subscribe to Azure Updates to keep yourself up to date on the new features being released.

I’d also recommend following the ITOps Talk Blog, a great source of regular blog updates for you, the IT Pro community.

On September 20th, we hosted the Microsoft Tech Days event ‘Putting the Ops in DevOps.’ This event was created for IT Pros, to understand a few DevOps principles (Git, Source Control, CI/CD), delivered by community experts that have all been on the journey to embracing a DevOps mindset. The event is available on-demand, and I strongly recommend tuning in if you missed it.

I hope that everyone is staying healthy and hopefully that autumn colours are not starting too soon!

Yours technically,

April Edwards

Learn more

• This article was written for the Monthly TechNet UK IT Pro Newsletter – sign up today!
• Microsoft Ignite returns October 12th – register today!
• New Azure features and functionality for August​ 2022

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Hello folks,

It’s been great to see in-person events take off again! Many events are working in a hybrid model, which seems to be working really well. It gives the opportunity for some people to appear in person and others to join remotely if they cannot make an in-person event.

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft Build kicked off on a global scale. While it was streaming sessions around the clock, various locations held in person events: Japan, Germany, LATAM, UK, and France. There was a great in-person representation in the UK from various customers, partners and Microsoft MVPs, and it was great to see the amazing work that everyone has been doing in the community.

While Microsoft Build tends to be labelled as a ‘developer’ event, there was a large amount of announcements for the IT Pro community too.

Below is a list of some of the key announcements that targeted the IT Pro community:

• SQL Server 2022 has a load of new features with a focus of modernising your apps.
• Build and Deploy Containerised applications and databases for hybrid environments with Azure Arc. There is a lot of capability coming out for hybrid management.
• There was also another great session on Azure Arc using Kubernetes, check out this session from my very own teammates Orin Thomas and Viniscius Apolinario!
• Not only did PowerShell turn 15 years old recently, but there was a great session on how to deploy scripts from Azure AD PowerShell to Graph PowerShell.
• Mark Russinovich gave a great session on Azure Innovation.
• Accessibility is something that many don’t realise we need. Personally, I found I had ways of coping that I never even realised. This session shows how Microsoft has been enabling folks with hearing, vision, cognitive, learning, mobility disabilities and mental health conditions to do more. Learn how all of us can be more inclusive with the products we deliver from day 1.
• Microsoft Certifications are a hot topic with customers and the community alike. Check out the session with the latest updates on MS Certification exams!

You can check out all the updates via the Microsoft Build Book of News.

For those of you that don’t want to tirelessly read through the Book of News, I’d like to direct you to a drawing by our own Nitya Narasimhan, who has visually sketched out ALL of the announcements from Build in one awesome drawing. It can be found here.

Want to do some skilling up?

Check out the Azure Skills Navigator for System Administrators, look at where to start and where to go to get skilled up.

Upcoming in the month of July is a load of in-person events. I encourage everyone to check out some of the great conferences coming up and maybe even join a local (or global) meetup group. There are some great technical sessions from the community, and community is key to driving our success!

Learn more

• This article was written for the Monthly TechNet UK IT Pro Newsletter – sign up today!
• A look at the announcements from Microsoft Build 2022
• What to catch up on from Build 2022
• New Azure features and functionality for May​ 2022 – Microsoft Build edition

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We have a year of exciting new things to come. As we enter into the month of January, this is a great time to look at new personal and professional goals for the upcoming year. With working from home still a relevant part of our lives this is a great time to look at how we communicate, as well as ways we can freshen it up to increase collaboration and communication within our teams.

Let’s look at some ways we can improve our connection to the people in our teams and our customers.

• Daily Stand-ups: While this is something that’s traditionally done in the developer community, it’s been something that I’ve been encouraging and implementing into my IT Pro/Operational teams as well. These can be done on a daily basis, or maybe 2-3 times a week, depending on where we are with a project.
  • Hold a daily 30 minute meeting in the morning (this might be someone’s afternoon if you’re working across time zones).
  • Each person states a) What they worked on yesterday b) What they’re working on today c) Are there any blockers? – in a round robin style.
  • After each person in the team has quickly answered the above, open it up to team discussion or address the blockers.
• Weekly team lunches and morale building events: Encourage your team to have coffee or lunch together for 30 – 60 mins. Another idea is to set up a team morale event – quiz style fun, a team building activity, or an hour to talk about everyone’s technical side projects (i.e. home automation, learning a new tech or language).
• First 15 minutes: Use the first 15 minutes of team meetings to chit-chat about anything, keeping in mind that you’re taking 15 minutes off the planned agenda.
• Join a group channel on Teams or Discord that is for fun only. Maybe call it ‘watercooler’ or ‘random’ – whatever works for your team.
• Join online tech community channels like the ITOps Discord channel.

This is a great time to not only re-connect to those around us, but also get further involved into the tech community. Communication is now more important than ever. You can also check out how to integrate Microsoft Teams into GitHub or Azure DevOps for full project traceability and communication for your teams’ deliverables. Microsoft Teams has the ability to hook into many third party applications.

In case you missed this in December, the annual Festive Tech Calendar was put together by the community, for the community. You can catch up on all the missed episodes on their YouTube Channel.

There is also the Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge that offers challenges around various technical topics:

• Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
• Azure Data Scientist Associate
• Azure AI Fundamentals
• …and more!

Have a happy 2022! Here’s to looking forward to the new year!

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At Microsoft Ignite in Nov 2021, some of Azure’s security products were renamed to show they protect more than just Azure: 

• Azure Security Center is now Microsoft Defender for Cloud 
• Azure Defender is also now Microsoft Defender for Cloud 
• Azure Defender for IoT is now Microsoft Defender for IoT
• Azure Sentinel is now Microsoft Sentinel 
• Microsoft Cloud App Security is now Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps 

Let’s take those product names and build a jigsaw puzzle of security tools! Microsoft Defender for Cloud gives you a base level of security recommendations, alerts, and security posture assessments, for Azure workloads and workloads Azure can see using Azure Arc (like Servers running Windows and Linux on-premises or in other clouds).  

You can then add Microsoft Defender for “X”, for a greater level of detail on specific workloads like Servers, Storage, SQL etc, which all feeds into Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Oh, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint – that’s licensed as part of Microsoft Defender for Servers. 

Next, those signals can surface into and be investigated with Microsoft Sentinel – the security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) tool – which can also take signals from third-party systems that are compliant with a standard security logging format. For example, add your on-premises Enterprise-grade firewall, and now you’re building the bigger picture of activities and vulnerabilities in your environment.  

And finally, Microsoft Defender for IoT helps manage the security of IoT devices, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps discovers “shadow IT” use of Software-as-a-Service applications, including storage of sensitive information and suspicious behaviour like large uploads. Both also integrated into Microsoft Sentinel. 

Check out our blog for more details and hopefully this jigsaw picture will help you choose the right security tool for the right job! 

Learn more

• This article was written for the Monthly TechNet UK IT Pro Newsletter – sign up today!
• New Azure features and functionality for November 2021
• Getting started with Azure Quantum
• How to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of your application
• It’s up to you to lead the hybrid future: New Hybrid certification arrives this December

The post The security tools jigsaw puzzle appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

We’ve had an exciting few weeks with several significant events across the technical community and the Microsoft ecosystem. These events all had multiple feature announcements and crossed referenced technologies to align usability and productivity, and there has been a lot of excitement throughout the technical communities.

We had GitHub Universe at the end of October, which announced new tools to enhance productivity across IT teams. The event also introduced new and highly anticipated enterprise tooling that provides organisations with enhanced security and compliance requirements.

Just after Ignite was .NET Conf 2021, which didn’t focus on just application development, they were able to line up new feature releases in .NET 6 with the product releases announced at Ignite 2021, enhancing immediate support for the technical community.

The event that we look forward to each year, Microsoft Ignite, took place in early November, and there was an immense amount of product announcements!

Below is a list of some of the key announcements that targeted the IT Pro community:

• Azure Arc enabled features with Azure Stack HCI, VMware vSphere, and machine learning.
• Azure Virtual Desktop supporting Azure Stack HCI.
• Azure Automanage enhanced features for Windows Server and Linux VMs, including support for Azure Arc-enabled server VMs.
• Azure Stack HCI has new features updates and tooling, as well as integration in many other services.
• Azure Container Apps is now in preview as a managed service, removing complex infrastructure.
• SQL Server 2022 is now in preview!
• Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets introduces a flexible orchestration mode.
• Azure Virtual Machines are now delivering better performance at a better price!
• Azure Monitor has announced greater capabilities with better integration into vendor-neutral instrumentation and enhanced troubleshooting for a better monitoring platform.
• Azure Virtual Machines Selector is now generally available, helping customers find the proper performance and price for their VMs.

You can check out all the updates via the Microsoft Ignite Book of News.

PowerShell is also turning 15 years old! Check out the Ask the Experts session with the PowerShell product group and community MVPs.

During the Ignite keynote, Satya stated: “The Microsoft cloud offers the best integration across the entirety of the tech stack while offering openness at every layer … The Microsoft cloud helps orchestrate all of your heterogeneous digital investments across every layer of the tech stack.”

Until next time!

Learn more

• This article was written for the Monthly TechNet UK IT Pro Newsletter – sign up today!
• New Azure features and functionality for October 2021
• Plan and implement a hybrid environment
• Introduction to Azure hybrid cloud services
• Azure Orbital, and why you should skill up for the future

The post An exciting few weeks for IT Pro announcements! appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Today’s myth is that it’s hard to get started with Azure DevOps – but first let’s look at the ‘why?’. Maybe, as an organisation, you made the decision to embrace this tool, or you’ve been asked to explore it by your team. It could be for a whole manner of different reasons, so we’re going to look at some of the different use cases, and why it’s really good.

First of all, it’s any code, any platform. Azure DevOps can deploy to any cloud on-premise, and you can bring any code to our tooling. This means it’s not just for Windows developers, or .NET developers, but for everyone – be it multi-platform, open source, or your on-premise environment.

One thing it’s really great for is CICD – or Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery – and it does this with automation. So things like infrastructure code, using third-party tools like Terraform, or deploying ARM templates into Azure, can all be done automatically. You can even look at automating your actual code with your developers, automating it through our Azure pipelines.

In the video below, I walk you through how you can get started with Azure DevOps, and how easy it is to get started on your own DevOps journey.

For more information on using machine learning with Azure, check out these useful resources:

• Get started with Azure DevOps
• Evolve your DevOps practices
• Build applications with Azure DevOps
• More from the Azure Mythbusters series

The post Is it hard to get started with Azure DevOps? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Today we’re going to take a look at the myth of migrating apps to the cloud taking way too long. Let’s say you have lots of apps on-premise, and you want to move them to the cloud. You, as an organisation, might think it takes too long, and that there are too many contingencies.

One of the things we hear is that an organisation can’t make the move due to having monolithic and legacy applications – the code is too old, and it just won’t work. Let’s bust that one right now – monolithic apps can absolutely run in the cloud. There are different ways to move them, from lifting and shifting them, to transpiring code into the cloud.

Another common issue is that they’re worried their code has too many dependencies, whether that be to something on-premises, or to an app. Perhaps they don’t even know what all of the dependencies are, and that might be blocking them from getting their apps on the cloud.

In this fifth instalment of Azure Mythbusters season three, April Edwards walks through how to get your apps into the cloud, and why these myths won’t stop you. Check out more details in the video below, and learn how app migration isn’t so difficult!

For more information on using machine learning with Azure, check out these useful resources:

• Get started with Azure DevOps
• Evolve your DevOps practices
• Build applications with Azure DevOps
• More from the Azure Mythbusters series

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First of all – what is DevOps? If I’m in a room full of people and I ask each one of them what they’d describe as DevOps, I’m going to get different answers from every single person. Is it automation? Is it a job title? Is it development? Is it operations? Who is responsible for it?

So let’s define what DevOps is. We have a definition of DevOps by Donovan Brown that we use here at Microsoft:

“DevOps is the union of people, process and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end customers”

We are continuously delivering value to our end users. That’s the key part. Now that we’ve defined what DevOps is, let’s take a look at the benefits.

In this third instalment of Azure Mythbusters season three, April Edwards takes a look at the benefits of using DevOps in the workplace, and why it’s a tool for more people than just developers.

For more information on using Azure for DevOps, check out these useful resources:

• Get started with Azure DevOps
• Evolve your DevOps practices
• Build applications with Azure DevOps
• More from the Azure Mythbusters series

The post Azure Mythbusters: Isn’t DevOps just for Developers? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In this edition of Azure Mythbusters, we’re taking a look at the “Azure Isn’t For Open Source” myth. There are three main reasons why some people believe this is the case:

Microsoft only supports Windows

It is true that when Azure was first created, it was called Windows Azure. Microsoft eventually rebranded it to Microsoft Azure because they wanted people to know that it isn’t just about Windows. When the cloud was first created, there was a lot of IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service workloads, so that’s what people thought about it. Azure has truly grown a lot since then.

Microsoft Azure is not for developers

The first thing to mention here is that Azure is an enabler. We want it to be an enabler, so all organisations can run their workloads on the cloud. So first thing’s first – let’s talk about code. If you work in Node, Ruby, Python or Go, you can bring it onto our cloud – we fully support it. We also want to enable workloads that are open source, so we have different flavours of Azure for different flavours of Linux. Docker and Kubernetes? All available in Azure, today.

Azure doesn’t support Linux OS or open source software

For the third point, be sure to watch the full video below:

In this first instalment of Azure Mythbusters season three, April Edwards takes a look at how Azure is for more than just Windows. For more information on using Azure with open source software, check out these useful resources:

• Migrating open-source workloads to Azure
• .NET Core and open source
• Introduction to the Open source Analytics Offering

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