Hello and welcome to the let's Talk.
Azure Podcast with your host Sam Foote and Anne Armstrong.
If you're new here, we're a pair of Azure and Microsoft 365 focus IT security professionals.
It's episode 40 of season five. Sam and I had a recent discussion around Microsoft Ignite and the news from November. Here's a few things that we covered. Microsoft Ignite Experience Key Microsoft Entra, Intune and Defender Feature updates and announcements, Azure changes, new features and retirements.
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It's a really great episode, so let's dive in.
Hey Alan, how are you doing this week?
Hey Sam, not doing too bad. Busy, busy.
Are you. Are you back in UK time zone?
Mostly.
Mostly physically, but not maybe emotionally. I don't know.
Emotionally, definitely not. But from a sleep perspective mostly maybe it's like I say, late evenings, early evenings. I may be caught having a nap just to balance.
That was happening before Ignite Alan, wasn't it? No, it wasn't.
Not as much anyway. Yes, no, I'm pretty much there. I had a good sleep on the way back. The flight was good back, things like that did catch the storm coming in. I think we were a bit choppy on the way in, but all good. I think the, the jet stream helped us as well because it's only like seven and a half hours to come back, so pretty fast. How's your week been?
Yeah, not too bad really. Actually had a week off this week, so yeah, it's been pretty, pretty chill really. Gives me a time to read the book of news and catch up on everything. Ignite. How was, how was the in person experience, Alan?
Yeah, it was. It was better than last year. A lot bigger. Let's just say that myself and my colleague Ben, I think we're doing 20 to say 20 to 30,000 steps a day there, which is a rather large increase, especially for my sort of step count. But yeah, very tiring. Long days, long evenings, things like that. So lots of the Hub was rather large this time. A lot of. There's a big. Microsoft had a big section as well. Yeah, I think I spent a couple of days in the Hub just catching up with various vendors and things like that and catching up with the Microsoft Teams and yeah, I was running the couple of the labs. They were fun, quite interesting. Quite a few questions in them so. So, yeah, that's good to be part of it. Of that, you know, part of that as well.
Yeah, that's really good. Yeah. Well, I'm glad to see it's getting bigger and bigger and it sold out so quickly as well. So, you know, it really goes to show that I think it's. I think the big benefit is obviously they've merged the partner, you know, conference in with it, so everybody's got more of a reason to go. You know, there's more of the ecosystem in the same room, isn't there?
Yeah, and it definitely gives chance for. Because there is potential there for customers and partners actually meet up where they maybe not able to, you know, because like ourselves, we know we were in the uk, but we do have some US customers that we can catch up with as well, you know, those sort of events. Yeah, it's moving to next year. It's in San Francisco. They've already announced where it's going to be and they reckon it's going to double in size.
Wow.
Almost getting to Orlando size, I think, at this rate. So, yeah, definitely getting up to full speed, I think, in that. In that space. So.
Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well, it's. It's no bad thing, is it, you know, to have those types of events return back to normal, shall we say? You know, because we've slowly seen it iterate back to how it once was maybe, you know, since the reduction in, you know, over Covid and subsequent years.
Yeah, exactly. And I definitely. I got to catch up with a few of the attendees that I met up with last year as well, which was good. Sean and Robin there. So that was good to catch up with them in person as well.
Nice. Should we start running through the news? I assume we've got quite a lot of updates this month.
Yeah. Okay, so I'll go. I'll go first. That's all right. So mine's gonna be a bit everywhere because there's some. I think there's some interesting things outside of like my normal sort of security space side of things, I suppose you could say. Unfortunately it's gonna be AI related some of it. Because.
Is there gonna be anything that's not AI related that you're gonna cover?
That's a small bit. No, it's not too bad. But, but yeah, I did, I did say to Ben that there's going to be at least one, you know, piece of silicon chip that's going to be, you created at this, you know, ignite. And I think there's like four or something like that if I remember something like that, two or three at least coming out, but yes. So let's Talk about Microsoft 365 Copilot because they did get it, did rebrand it recently from copilot for 365. So one of the things I thought was interesting that came out of Ignite was the new agents. Did you see any of that, Sam?
Yeah, I did. You know the, the rebrand of AI Studio to Foundry and all of that type of integration that we were referring to?
Yes and no. So they got some, they've built some out of the box agents that are pre built for Copart. So I think it's just outside of that, I think they're Microsoft ones. So they've got an agent for SharePoint which in effect you add it to a SharePoint site and then in co pilot or in teams you can at it and then all the data is grounded based on that SharePoint site. So you can ask it questions about that data specifically from that side of things. They brought an agent for self service, employee self service that's in effect going through policies that you might have and again you sort of tie it to HR data, a facilitator agent that hooks into teams and chats and is allowed in effect writes up real time notes for you in teams, you know, team meetings and things like that. So outside of Copilot and you asking it at the end, you know things, it actually interacts with you as you're going through the meeting and it's calling it out, which I thought was interesting. Did you see the interpreter agent?
No go on demo.
So if you're in a teams meeting, someone speak another language, you can turn this on and it will interpret them and change the language to your language. So Spanish to English as an example and then you know, speak it out, you know as they're talking, but in their tone of voice as well. So it like sounds like them but in English or. Yeah, the language that you speak.
So is this live, Live voice clone, deep faking?
Yes, I guess you could say that in that form. Yes. They demoed that side of things I thought was interesting.
Yeah.
The other one is Project Manage Agent now.
Now Alex Danger Danger though.
No, I'm not saying can replace anybody but some of the projects that, you.
Know, you said that, not me by the way.
But yeah, some of the projects that I work on, you know, I work alone, I don't have a PM because they're small enough to manage. In effect, you know this is helping create tasks, you know do some reporting for you progressing, you know, the tracking, reminders, notifications and all that sort of stuff. So I think it's just like a little helping, I suppose a helping hand to make sure the project keeps going. So I think that'd be handy. Just got to work out if you have to pay for it or not. That's going to be the next thing.
Yeah. So I was going to ask. I'd seen these agents. Is that. Is it all just included in your co pilot license?
What.
What happens if people are an army? Have we got any of that sort of information?
Yeah, I don't know yet. I've not looked into it. That's my next thing to see how much they cost if they do or if it is included.
Okay.
The next one's copilot related in teams analyzing screen shared content. So it actually analyzes what's on the screen and then can also summarize what is being done on the screen itself, which is quite interesting. So it's analyzing the video in effect, isn't it? And then telling you what's actually happening there. So that's going to be.
Yeah, sorry. Cool.
Oh it can. And just reading this, it can summarize. Oh yeah. Creating a content, which products had the highest sale, things like that. So if you're sharing a spreadsheet things and worst. That is actually quite insane actually.
Yeah, I was thinking that could be quite good intelligence for it teams to see what's going on, what's being shared. I was thinking DLP more than anything.
Yeah, that's true. That is true. What else was there that I wanted to talk about? There's some updates to the COPART and Outlook to help scheduling. You can ask COPART to schedule focus time or one to ones or to draft an agenda for a meeting. Things like that seems quite cool. Should be available by the end of November. So it's probably just a. I suppose. Probably should Copilot update a GIN or an Outlook update. They don't say where it's the new or the old Outlook.
Probably a new one.
Yeah. Okay. I think that might be it on Copilot, might not be it on AI.
But I think it's cool that they're making them into actual agents, aren't they? Because it's like it's kind of the same functionality that we've had. No, there is some new functionality there, but I was thinking like the. The one that takes your notes and things like that. Is it facilitator or something like that? Yeah, that was already kind of there Wasn't it? Or at least part of it. But it wasn't interactive, was it? You know, it wasn't like in the.
Meeting, shouting out at, you know, in chat and things like that. No.
Yeah, like, yeah, that's gonna be interesting to see how that interacts with the flow of a meeting. You know, are you gonna want to like mute it? Like what's it gonna do? It's gonna be interesting to see will.
It come up and say, you know, you've got five minutes for the meeting, let's, let's wrap up kind of stuff, you know, will it be like that as well? Rather than being prompts to yourselves, it might be actually in the chat going, hey, stop talking about this, we need to move on.
Well, it would be quite cool if it could DM you and nudge you maybe, you know, if you're saying a lot and all of that sort of stuff. Because what can you do? You can do that thing, can't you, where it tells you PowerPoint present power. Yeah.
Presenter training or something like that.
Yeah, something like that. It'd be quite cool if it could nudge you on certain things.
Yeah. Okay, so to Defender for cloud. So Defender for APIs in effect, well, not necessarily that skew itself, but APIs Microsoft have brought in API security posture into CSPM. So what that allows you to do and it's, it's in both free and the Defender CSPM paid for as well. So in the free one you get some recommendations about your API and also they get infantry. The good thing around this is that you can, once you can see them, there's potential that you can also see where you've got AI services because they're normally, you know, generally backed in front of behind them. And then when you do full, when you get the full Defender CSPM in effect, you can see attack paths and some other high risk things in there like some of your data classification side of things in your queries. So some of that other functionality that you're getting in the, where you paid for it, some of that sort of semi coming into the CSPM side of it.
So why have they given that away for free now?
I think that, I think that a lot of, I would expect that the, a lot of users wouldn't be paying the $200 a month to get the protection property side of things and everything.
Yeah. Is it just now a like an up, a tease for an upsell? Maybe now maybe. Yeah, because it's very expensive, isn't it? Isn't it? Yeah. So it's yeah, yeah, okay.
Yeah, I would. I've not looked at the pricing for it, but I assume you know an API manager instance or an API would then be classed as a resource for Deer Defender, $5 for it and things like that.
Yeah.
They have brought in container security posture as well. I've not really looked into this. Security teams were able to address vulnerabilities so they've building some extra stuff into the CI CD pipeline process and also starting to include Docker Hub and JFrog. Artifactory. We butchered that completely.
I have no IDEA what the second part of that was.
It's just JFrog. JFrog. Yeah. And it just says Artifactory. That's what it actually says. I don't know. But yeah, JFrog.
New to me, but I bet you it's massive.
Yeah, that's why me have actually butchered it. So they've brought in some stuff around. Again, it's a little bit of AI but AI security posture. It's more around multi. Multi environment. Multi cloud environments as well as looking at the infrastructure code and misconfigurations there as you're starting to do it, as well as attack paths, vulnerabilities from the code and runtime. So start to bring that into the. Into the fold as well. What else is there that's worth talking about? Probably from a. From a SOC XDR sort of operation side of things. There's a thing in here around that if your Defender, if you're. Yeah, you're got Defender for business. That side of things. You can now hook into Huntress Sock services. Now there's an integration there direct into their services. I guess it's kind of like a lightweight service that they do for small business. So that's quite cool. I think we did Defender for class some other things. Yeah, that's okay. Entra Private access and Internet access side of things. There were some updates in here, but one of them was that Copilot for security could also start reading the data from enterprivrivate Access or Global Secure Access sort of capability. They're adding it into the fold and they're looking to improve some of the functionality around. There's some previews now around TLS inspection and things like that. So it will start to come out to enhance their service there. I don't think there wasn't too much around Intune. The only thing around in not say Intune but Windows was the Windows Autopatch. No hot patch that came out.
Okay.
Autopatch already out the hot patching. So Being able to do updates without requiring a reboot for a couple of months. So they've had that functionality in Azure for some of the server workloads, but now it's come to Windows and Server Server 2025, we've had it. But on premise Server 2025 can also do it now or will be able to do it, which I thought was very interesting in that space as well. Not just Azure, probably a slightly smaller one, but Exposure. Microsoft Security Exposure Management became generally available as an announcement. So being able to see all your Attack Surface sort of exposures, attack paths and things like that all in one place because it all feeds in from Defender, you know, Defender Cloud and all the XDR solutions.
Didn't. Didn't we see very favorable pricing as well on that?
I didn't know there was a price for it.
Essentially not like as in it's. It's effectively just. It's gone ga, but it's just essentially all the data that's, that's fed into it that you pay for, not the products themselves, you know.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
Which seemed a bit mental to me that it wasn't even its own skew, because I get, I get that it is just a collection of the data that you've already collected, I suppose in a different viewpoint, but somebody's got to pay to maintain the service and build.
It and add content to it and things.
Yeah, right. So don't know.
Yeah, that is true.
Really good.
Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You can only see, you know, it's only valuable for the data that you're collecting or the service you got. You know, the Defender XDR service that you got enabled. I think there was some ideas around bringing in some other vulnerability data from other third party sources as well as I suppose I think some other integrations isn't there around the identity pieces into the identity threat detect and response side of things. So maybe that will feed some of it as well for the recommendations. So now we're going to go on to Purview, which seems from the security compliance and identity perspective, sort of space got the most updates.
Alan, wait, wait, wait just a second. You're going to talk about Purview?
Yes.
Okay, fine. Crack on. Crack on. This is unprecedented.
This is not my favorite area. No.
What is that? It kind of sounds like it might be now.
Might have to be because we're going to get this way, but.
Sorry, go on.
Yes, so they brought out a Purview Data Security Posture management. So we got another Posture management solution. Yeah, Visibility, Context, Insights around the Purview data security solutions bring it all into one place. So in effect giving you information, you know, from your information protection, your Insider risk management, DLP etc. Helping to identify policy gaps, things like that, where you should probably have some. So tighten up the security around the data as it sounds. So that's going to be really interesting to take a look at. Yeah, it's gonna be. At some point, some point there's going to be a posh. Well, I suppose exposure management should probably be it, but it's probably gonna be a posture management port at some point.
Yeah, I hope. Well, my first thought when I saw this was firstly people have. It's kind of chicken and egg people have got to have consumed but I assume it's going to be a portal to suggest. So it might be a good starting point for people because a lot of people open, you know, Purview or the new. Well, the new Purview portal or old compliance portal. She's actually been retired now. So anyway, new Purview pool and get very confused about where they should start, you know. So I think any guidance that we can give to people to nudge them along, you know, because our starting points with Purview are pretty simplistic I would say, you know, because I think a lot of people get overwhelmed by it and that sort of. It pushes it down their priorities. But I think as soon as people, if they're licensed for it, I think that's the big key thing. As soon as they start using it, they really start to see the value of it. But it's almost like they're too apprehensive to start. So I think if you can bring that all together in one place, I think that's a really powerful thing. And I'm. What I'm hoping is, is that it will expand into or build out a true monitoring capability. Because we've never really had a proper monitoring capability for Purview. We do have like the Activity Explorer and other screens like that, but it's nowhere near sophisticated enough for what most organizations want to ask it questions of. So I think hopefully this is what this is going to morph into and make it a lot easier for people to first get started and then secondly, once they have got started, making it as easy as possible for people to manage. So they keep doing it, you know.
For the long term. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I haven't, I haven't taken a look at it yet because I think it's. I think it's activated now. I can't remember I've not looked.
No I haven't I haven't checked it yet. I'll fire up over the next week in my dev tenant and see see what it's like.
Yeah so the other bits in purview is DLP for Microsoft 365 copilot being able to restrict what can be summarized by the you know the Copilot service very data things that and stop it from being grounded So I guess this is probably just to help with I guess there's a lot of concern around the access that users have to SharePoint and the files maybe they're not ready to do labeling things like that and there's other ways wasn't the SAM that you could try and restrict it but some of it was quite long I suppose long not long winded but long pieces of work to actually get done.
So hopefully this will streamline this this anti summarization control. I haven't. I haven't looked at it in depth. Is that using labels to do that is that hang off of a label.
It's a DLP policy in effect so I think you can choose the context you want to use to say what you can summarize on okay yeah well.
That'S good because we have seen. I've seen real examples of people utilizing Copilot to regenerate confidential works into something else that may not be caught by a like let's say you've got a. Let's say you've got a I don't know secret project. Project Project Allen we'll call it asking Copilot to summarize it and rewrite all references of Project Allen to Project SAM as an example might help you to circumvent some of your DLP policies potentially. So I think you know Copilot can be really useful for. For me it's really useful as like an assistant. You know where is this document? Where in the hell in my personal onedrive is X You know find this presentation that was shared with me six months ago but. But being able to limit what it can and can't do in a quite granular way is really important I think and is going to become more important I would say because essentially like it's like AI are back at this point or is it I don't know let's call it R back you know because you're going to want to say you know people can summarize internal documents but they can't summarize highly confidential documents. As an example which I think is right isn't it?
Yeah, or invoices, things like that that might not be labeled, you know, using.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and things that should be immutable. Right. Like, you know, like invoices especially, you know, once a finance team has generated an invoice that does not get changed after that fact. You know, what if somebody took that invoice and asked copilot to regenerate the numbers on it and then send it off like it was legitimate, you know. Yeah, I'm just thinking of loads like, as we're speaking, I'm thinking of loads of like nefarious ways that you could use copilot. But I think people are going to have to control it. And the vast majority of people I've talked to about Copilot in the data space are concerned about it, not concerned that it won't have the productivity benefits there, you know, are sort of marketed, which I, I'm on board with. I'm a user of it myself. I, I see it. But how you can control it, because with great flexibility comes data security challenges, doesn't it, you know?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. There's definitely potential for abuse of it, as it were.
Yeah, I, I think it's just, it's, it's a vector for immediate exfiltration. I think my biggest concern at the moment is external threat actors, compromising identities, which we see all the time with prison, email compromise and just essentially having, you know, AI powered Google search across everything. Sorry, I should say Bing search, I suppose, shouldn't I? But like it's real. Yeah. And you can interact with it programmatically, can't you? So it's like it's, it's even. Yeah. So it's something that needs to be monitored and maintained. It's just another thing, isn't it, in the ecosystem of SecOps that you've got to manage, isn't it? It's just like an, like another. It's now another discipline that will need focus and attention. So I do think organizations are going to struggle with that, you know, given their capacity restraints and limits.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Sorry, I just want to circle back on JFrog. As you were talking before, I looked at their LinkedIn page. They've got nearly 2,000 employees or just over 2,000 employees. So yeah, they're not small by any stretch of the imagination. I just live under a rock.
Yeah.
Okay.
And I pre. Butchered it, the other bits as well. So, yeah, apologies for that. In addition to DLP for Copilot, they're expanding the file types covered by Endpoint dlp. I don't know what they are, but they're expanding it. That's interesting. You can power Automate, integrate on actions as part of the policies now or will be able to. So instead of just creating alerts to be investigated, you now actually do some automation directly out of it. If you're not integrated with Sentinel and things like that, Security Copilot can understand DLP policies and give you recommendations, things like that. Or if you need to understand what it is and they've got a blanket protection for non supported file types, users will be able to enforce general protection for file types that Endpoint DLP does not currently scan and monitor.
So it's quite. The list is. No, it's not restrictive, but it is if you're using like quotes, exotic file types as I call them.
Yeah. So without being able to scan the content, things like that, I guess it can go well, if I see this type of file, I don't want it to leave kind of thing. Yeah, makes sense. That's probably in conjunction with the expanding file type coverage for dlp, isn't it?
Yeah, it's. Sorry, it's always the. It's always the edge. Exotic file types that causes the issues.
Yeah.
If you're happy, if you're lucky enough to work with a customer that just does, I don't know, Office and PDF, then you're absolutely fine. But you go into like manufacturing or something like that and it's just like AutoCAD.
Yeah.
Yes. There'll be some person with a workstation from that have got files from like 30 years ago in a format that only the Windows XP box that runs a machine even understands.
Right.
So anyway, I digress. I apologize.
Yeah, I think that was probably it for me. There's a bit, there's a little bit around integrations with insider Risk management for co pilot ria. Risky, risky AI usage kind of thing. But I think that was in preview at least, wasn't it? I think previously that's starting to come in anyway.
Yeah. You can kind of think about activity integration for Insider Risk management. They're going to connect everything. Like if you've been in IRM's portal recently, there's more stuff that's in preview in there than there is actually not in preview, if that makes sense. And IRM is. If it's configured and you've got the agent. You didn't talk about the agent, Alan. This. This unified agent that they're talking about. Or is that just.
Yeah, there wasn't. It's not it wasn't in the book of news. Oh, so yeah, we can talk about that.
No, no, you crack on. I thought you'd cover it to be totally.
No, I should have done. Yeah, I do remember it now. It is a key one to do. So let's talk about now. Yes, Microsoft have released or releasing a unified agent for the. Is it for all platforms? I think it's only Windows at the moment, isn't it?
I didn't look into it into that much depth.
Yeah, I think it's probably Windows only at the moment, but in effect, it's in effect bringing you Defender for Endpoint. Defender Identity, Endpoint dlp. Is there another one?
Did I see an OT segment to the circle?
Yes, I did see that. Yes.
And what? Because I dipped when I saw that.
And I was like, that was just. I didn't know if that was just. I say just. But the device discovery part of Defender for Endpoint.
No, no, no, it was ot.
It wasn't Iot.
It was ot.
Okay.
Yeah, so that's going to be an interesting one because I don't know how that's.
I was like, what?
I suppose in theory. Well, no, yeah, we'll have to see when we look at it. But yeah, that's being released. That means that integrations or enablement of those tooling is really simple now or will be really simple.
Yeah. And that's what we want, isn't it? We want one thing to do multiple things, don't we? That is, that is going to help with consolidation to Microsoft, I think quite dramatically, don't you think? Because, you know, if an organization moves from like another EDR to MDE and it goes on their server estate, then flicking Defender for Identity on is, shall we say that one of the hardest bits is negated from that. That's a very simplistic example. But it's going to make it a lot easier for those types of, you know, consumptions.
Oh yeah. Because, you know, today Defender Identity, you need an agent installed which isn't, you know, hardship at all in itself, but it needs resource and it stops itself when there's a lot of, you know, compute and things like that to not, you know, kill Active Directory and things like that. This is, you know, baked into where MD is.
My pessimistic side is thinking, how do we benchmark this? How do we make sure it's fit for purpose for live production use? Because it does kind of sound a little bit scary, doesn't it? You know, because at the moment, like, let's use The Defender for identity example, you have to go through a sizing. You have to go through a deployment like process, don't you? This now, I assume is going to be. Oh, well, we've already got Defender for Endpoint. Let's just flick Defender for Identity on, you know.
Yeah.
Well, are there going to be efficiencies gained by. Because they're essentially looking at the same logs, so.
I think there is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. That's exactly how I think it is. Because do you.
So do you think the agent is just a log collector now and it's sent server side for processing now and you're just flicking on different categories of things to send.
That's. That's an effect, what the other one did. But it had to be. It had to sit on top. What was using a. I suppose you could say it's using another technology to do that. And because they've refined MDE to the point now where it's, you know, it's been awesome anyway, but you know, where it's actually pretty good at the log collection, everything. Because they've now integrated. Is it Zeek. I think.
Yeah.
Capability into it where it can actually capture the logs better and everything from the, you know, the network side, that actually, that's what MDI needs as well. So it's just like you said, reusing the same stuff that's being used for MDE and doesn't need to add the extra resource on top. So, yeah, it's definitely going to be refined in that sense.
Nice. Really good.
So, yeah, that's it for me. There was absolutely tons more. That's just a snippet.
Yeah, 100%.
It's like 300 announcements or something. 300 changes. I think they said that the keynote was two and a half hours.
I know because I didn't catch the start of it and I was like, oh, it'll be finished by now. And I connected and then I think somebody was talking about AI Foundry and I was like, cool name. And then I actually just disconnected at that point because I was like, I needed to see this from the start, basically.
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a long one, but yeah, lots of. Lots of info. So, yeah, that's probably the stuff for now anyway. I'm sure we'll catch up on some of the other stuff as this month or probably.
Yeah, it's. It's still pretty new, isn't it? Like it's going to take some time and some cycles to process, I think.
Yeah. So what about you and Sam, what bits?
Okay, well you've covered quite a lot of what I was, but I'm happy for you to do that. Okay. New virtual machine SKUs, new Azure Nvidia Blackwell AI driven SKUs were just like basically insane, like specs, basically. I dread to think what these are going to cost but essentially the, the latest from both AMD and Nvidia in terms of compute, you know, across the board. I, I think it really is for AI type workloads essentially. So we'll, we'll see when they land and, and what they're actually going to, going to bring for us. I don't know if you saw much about Azure Local, Alan. I don't know if that's just a rebrand of like Stack or something like that, but it's something that I've put on my list to have a look at.
Yeah, I did see that and the first thing I thought about was hci.
Yeah.
And you know, on the back, you know, when you're back in the desert or whatever, I think it's a bit more, I think it is every brand. I think my interpretation of, of it was that it was more, it's more of a more advanced one of it, you know, because you can in effect run your, your AI workloads, things like that on it. It seemed a bit more intense.
Okay. Yeah, definitely something that needs to be researched because I do really like the idea of, for hybrid workloads, organizations that are cloud aligned to be able to have that sort of seamless experience across both their, on prem. Well, hybrid, remote, whatever you want to call it, and cloud workloads. I think that's really important for people. There's a new start experience for Excel, Alan, did you hear about that?
No.
Why is it not top of your list? Like, you know, Excel is. Anyway, there's a new start experience for Excel, a generative start experience which allows you to supposedly create quick templates for different Excel sheets that you might need to work on. The reason why I'm talking about this is because I do believe. Well, no, this is a fact that the Office app integrations of Copilot have been a bit weak, shall we say. Yeah.
Is that fair to say in some of the apps?
Yes, in some of the apps. But we do know that they are making big changes there, so it's interesting to see and I had heard quite a while ago that somebody had basically said that they were going to refresh all the experiences and they're going to become much better. So I'm actually going to Go and try this new Excel Start experience because this is the type of thing that I think AI is going to be really good for is because I don't know about you, but if I haven't done something before and I want to know about like a standard operating procedure or something like that, I'll Google that, right?
Yeah.
And what would be great is for me to. And if I'm going to dump it into Excel, maybe I'm making like an MVP for a form or an operating procedure or something like that. Having Excel do that for me live as I start could be very, could be very powerful I would say if it works. And I'm gonna, I am gonna be a bit pessimistic because I haven't been so impressed outside of the what I'll call this. It's not standalone anymore. It's not standalone but like the, the team's co pilot like chat experience. Because that is like top tier Chef's Kiss, isn't it? Like that is amazing. So yeah, if you're paying for the license, I want it everywhere basically as a consumer, you know I, I think.
That chats got better again when I was doing it today it seems even better than the first like version of it. It's.
It's a, it's immense. Like it. I just, I asked, I asked it nicely. I will say please and sometimes I say thank you to it as well. Like I think it's a person but some of the stuff it pulls is just amazing. Like you spoke about this on this call and here's the relevant document that's buried in your onedrive. Oh thank you. It would have taken me. Well I wouldn't have found that and I would have had to recreate it. Serverless GPUs on Azure Container Apps. So yeah now you're going to be able to do serverless GPU which is, I mean but it's like serverless CG CPU I suppose. But that's going to allow you to scale those AI accelerated workloads with GPUs in a serverless fashion. Also dynamic sessions as well in Azure Container Apps now generally available. It allows you like really quick access to secure environments essentially so the code that requires true isolation can be run through dynamic sessions. Not something that I've ever used, but I thought was a really good update there. I'm going to skip over all of the rest of those notes. What are we talking about? Is it Windows link we talking about?
That was on my list.
It was, it wasn't Alan. Cuz I Just raised.
But, but, but what's it called? Unified Agent took over then you forgot.
About both of them, didn't you? Yeah. So is this a, Is this an ARM dumb terminal for Windows 365?
Right.
Is that what we're.
Thin PC in effect, thin client.
Sorry. Yeah, yeah, interesting. I saw it was $349, I think I've got in my notes.
Yeah, I thought it was less than that actually, but I thought it was 249. But that might be UK maybe.
Okay. Oh, you think it's £249. Let me just have a look. A Windows 365 link, it's called. Yeah, let's have a quick look. I'm just pulling up the specs now. I should have got. But yeah, yeah. MSRP at $349 generally available April 2025. So now it's got your screen and all it can do is connect to Windows 365. Do we think this is a goer?
So I guess the question, the question around this is you can rebuild Anything to Windows 365, boot to an effect, do the same thing.
Agreed.
So if you add old hardware, things like that, you know, old desktops, maybe even laptops, you can potentially do it. The only thing I think that's the benefit to this is that it's fully managed out of the box in effect. You know, it's very simplistic and I think that because it's ARM and things like that, they're guaranteeing the quality of teams calls and things like that with it. They're saying it's high quality teams integration so it's able to process the audio and video and things like that where I suppose on a other machine that's not necessarily guaranteed to going over to Windows 365. So yeah, I think that's probably it. But it's, it's pretty cool. I mean that like I said, I think there are some other. They're joining that world or that ecosystem because you've already got the thin, you know, the, the gels, I think they're called. Things like that that can talk, that can connect to Windows 365. But maybe the performance of them for audio and video maybe isn't as good. Maybe that's the reason. Yeah, I think what was interesting, a few people at Ignite was wondering, were hoping that this was going to be part of your subscription to Windows 365 in some form or a small add on to it because it's the only way you can access it kind of thing.
Yeah, true. Well, because it's, it's. I don't know, it's, it's redundant if you don't have Windows 365. Right. I think that's the thing that scares me about these devices is that when you're so tightly coupled to a singular service, it doesn't support avd, it doesn't support Dev Box.
So I think I said doesn't today. I think probably because it's all the same service.
I know. But yeah, I can only, I can only go with what is. What is being talked about now.
Oh yeah.
And I just, yeah, it just, it kind of. I mean if Windows 365 is your solution, then it makes sense. But I don't know. Also there's something, I don't know, there's something a bit weird about that. You can't flash it. It's like an actual Windows PC. If you need it to do something else, it seems like its lifespan is highly limited. You then pay for compute twice, don't you? Because arguably a lot of the Windows 365 SKUs that people connect to could have just been run on this box itself, couldn't it? You know, what's the lowest skew? 2 core, 4 gig of RAM, something like that. 8 gig of RAM, you know.
Yeah. And I suppose you can buy as an example a Dell Optiplex, like what they call 3080s. They're super small factors which are probably a similar size and you could run Windows on them even after all.
I think we've also got to think about the management cost though, haven't we? If you went down that route, this is like. If you've got a chunk of your workforce connecting to Windows 365 on the regular, I'm thinking like support centers, those types of places, you know, or you know, where you've got a lot. You're using Windows 365 and you just want a fleet of the same box. People sit down, authenticate with it and they connect to their remote machine. Right.
And you can just switch out for the next one if it breaks and then probably return it to Microsoft to be fixed, et cetera. I think they did say these were there. There's a whole thing about it being sustain, you know, sustainability and that. They're easy to repair. Yeah. Designed to be long lasting, repairable.
Right.
And they're made of a minimum of 50% of recycled content, things like that.
Okay, yeah. Interesting. And at the end of the day. All it's doing is USB pass through into teams and video streaming, isn't it? So it's going to be super low power. It's going to be as tiny as well. It's like 12 centimeters by 12 centimeters, right? Yeah, it's, it's minute. So it's great from, from those, that.
Perspective.
That'S pretty much it from ignite from me, to be totally honest with you. There's some other stuff but I don't really want to go through all the AI updates for different products to be total loss with you because it's not. You can AI all the things. That's all I'm gonna say. Basically you do a thing, you can AI it, AI it. Now the only other one that I wanted to just. Sorry, two seconds. I just had a note for something else which was cool. Oh, Azure Chaos Studio is now available in Canada central region for all of our Canadian listeners, which I thought was. I just, it's, it's launched. What can I say? It's an update. The only other thing that I did actually want to just talk about is App Insights Code Optimizations. So what's cool is if you're using Application Insights, this is now generally available, but it will show you potential code optimizations. Because what happens is, is when you run Application Insights, you, you, when you're in production, you, you give it your debug. I can't remember what they're called. Debug, like header files, basically. And what that basically means is you can, you can reverse your compiled code back into readable code. Because imagine if you've got like a bug on your production software. You don't want to be getting like compiled code back that you've got to like sift through, if that makes sense. So you use a, what is it called? A debug. Oh, sorry, I can't remember what it's called. But essentially Application Insights allows you to see the actual code that's running, but it also shows you how long it takes to execute that code as well. So that's why Application Insights is really powerful for developers because when you roll out an update, you can see all your KPIs and all your metrics and see how what you've changed, how that's affected and you're going to now get code optimization recommendations essentially. So that's cool. I think that could be very handy, especially if you've rolled out something that you haven't noticed I think is, you know, pretty damn cool.
Yeah, it does sound very valuable because Also it saves on potential. You can save on resources and things like that. Can't you say?
Well the this is the big thing is a lot of my sort of previous life was deploying like custom built applications into Azure and trust me when I say this, you will want to optimize your binaries going from on prem to cloud. A virtual CPU core is not the same in the cloud. I'm sorry every cloud provider, but it's just not. So you do want to do a little bit of low hanging fruit optimization. It can save you a lot of money in the long run and it can also save you a lot of headaches with scaling for, for spiky and bursty type events. You know, it is very important in the cloud. So having something to assist you in that is going to really help you. Not for the betterment of Microsoft, but definitely for you and your organizations.
Cool.
And that's it for me.
Nice. This nice short episode.
You got us covered pretty well. Thanks for your update, Alan and I'm glad you had a good time at Ed Ignite again.
Yeah, yeah, it was good. So yeah, what's next week?
Callum?
Yes, Next episode I'm going to look at Azure Update Manager and Hot Patch. I think I'm just going to do a couple of sort of areas, kind of, you know, patch management side of things because I think it's quite key to look at. It's always key to keep things up to date but just other ways that you can manage it in Azure and on premise. So I think it's worth sort of talking about.
Nice, that'd be great.
Cool. So did you enjoy this episode? If so, please do consider leaving us a review on Apple, Spotify or YouTube. This really helps us to reach out to more people like yourselves. If you have any specific feedback or suggestions to our episodes, we have a link in our show notes or you can leave a comment on our YouTube episodes.
Yeah. If you've made it this far. Thanks ever so much for listening. We'll catch you on the next one.
Yeah, thanks. All.