The Best Tech Talks of 2018

  When we decided to reformat our Tech Talks engineering office hours back in June, we had no idea what to expect. We knew that we wanted to share our deep access to Microsoft and our other partners with Agile IT clients to help them make more informed IT decisions. The results exceeded our expectations as we built a stronger community between our partners and clients, but also an incredible library of resources for our clients and subscribers alike. Here are some of our Best Tech Talks of 2018.

 

Matt Soseman goes just a bit over time.

When Matt first joined us for a Tech Talk we expected a quick 15 minute demo of how to protect your Microsoft 365 environment against Ransomware. In the 45 minutes that followed, Matt discussed the Petya ransomware attack and then covered the entire suite of EMS tools and how they worked together. It all came together when he came back to re-examine Petya, only this time showing how each of the described tools would have stopped the attack at various points.

SSO Magic.

If you believe the “relevant XKCD”, SSO works like so: Arrive -> Click Button -> MAGIC - Use Product”. When John Gilham, our CTO, and resident SSO / SAML champion did his Tech Talk on setting up SSO using Azure Active Directory, he lifted the hood to explain how SSO really works.  He then went on to show how SSO not only merges productivity and security but how SSO and can reduce an admin’s work load when provisioning users.

Phishing With Kevin.

Picking a favorite Tech Talk with Kevin Martins is a hard one. But when we got the chance to go phishing with Microsoft’s resident phishing expert (Really, he wrote the book) we had to. Kevin quickly runs over some stats and best practices regarding phishing protection before launching a simulated phishing attack in Office 365 As Kevin said best, “Sure, Lets go ahead and attack our users!”

Auditing your Licenses.

When Maggie McGrath, Agile IT’s Service Desk Manager, gave an internal presentation on how she performs Microsoft licensing audits for CSP clients she didn’t realize just how much impact it would have for our readers when we asked her to give a tech talk on it. Working with real license information from a recently onboarded CSP client, Maggie showed how she was able to identify under-utilization and redundancies caused by Microsoft’s ever shifting features and packages to enable a client to save nearly $6000 a month on Microsoft licensing. At the same time, she explained how and when to perform your own license audits to make sure you aren’t wasting budget.

Pentesting with Kali Linux in Azure.

David Branscome, Microsoft Solutions Architect, gave a thorough tech talk of how to provision of the popular pentesting tool Kali Linux in Azure and then how to run a site substitution attack to identify credential theft vulnerabilities for your users.

Using Azure Information Protection to protect data in and out of the cloud. 

Jon Wojan, Microsoft Security Specialist, joined us to show how to use Azure Information Protection to defend your sensitivie information both in the cloud and on premises. 

Azure Academics.

When Rich Carlsen told us he was moving over to Big Compute and wouldn’t be doing anymore Tech Talks with us, we were happy for him, but would miss his expertise in all things Azure. Breaking from the usual “Demo Heavy, PowerPoint Light” theme of Tech Talks, Rich gave a tech talk on how to became an Azure Expert. In rapid fire style, Rich gave a talk that exposed dozens of ways to learn all things Azure, no matter what your learning style is.

The 0365 Substrate.

We’ve extensively covered all of the tools available in Microsoft Enterprise Mobility and Security. When Microsoft’s David Branscome joined us for his first Tech Talk to discuss how to apply compliance baselines in Microsoft Teams, we knew he came highly recommended from the Microsoft security team. While his hand-on demo was one of the best we have seen, the real gold of the talk was the ah-ha moment at 6:39 when he discusses the how Teams (and other Office 365 tools) uses existing security controls in Exchange and Sharepoint to provide protections across your entire environment.

Agile DevOps.

One of the things that makes Agile IT unique is our process. From the use of repeatable code to assure consistency in delivery to continuous improvement processes. Agile IT CEO Conrad Agramont background as a programmer shined as he explained how to use Azure DevOps to manage IT infrastructure.

Agile It Tech Talks are a service for our Managed Service Provider and Cloud Service clients. Each week, we invite a subject matter expert to demonstrate a technique or functionality followed by an open Q&A with Agile It Engineers. These are just what we consider the best tech talks of 2018, you can browse the whole collection here.