Looking Back on HEAnet 2019

With Christmas fast approaching now is a good time to reflect on last month’s HEAnet Conference in Galway.

Expertly curated and managed by the HEAnet team as always, this year’s focus was “Shared Services & Digital Transformation”, bringing together a balanced mix of industry solutions and real-world stories from Higher and Further Education. After the opening remarks by Seán Canney TD and HEAnet CEO Kerrie Power, we explored the challenges of building collaborative research practices in Swiss institutes (including CERN).

Sebastian Sigloch, SWITCH

Throughout the day we heard real world stories about unlocking the potential of the Office 365 stack across heterogenous organisations, as well as using Microsoft technologies to protect from malicious attacks. Cork Institute of Technology gave a very timely talk entitled “The Cost of an Office 365 Breach in an Educational Organisation” which covered the steps they have taken to mitigate against future attacks which included taking an in-dept look at their complete Azure MFA rollout, putting in place conditional Access rules and awareness campaigns have been introduced.

The HEAnet Conference is always a great place to see new technologies and hear from Irish success stories. Micromail was were very happy to see our friends in FlowForma have a presence at the conference for the first time and there was a great deal of interest on their “no code” Process Automation solution.

Ursula Cullen, FlowForma

The whole event was a great success as usual and was a great chance to meet with people who we have worked with remotely all year. This year we took the opportunity to co-ordinate with our Ergo colleagues (Kevin Greene and James Callaghan), running an Azure Cost Management in advance of the Conference. We then followed up onsite with 1:1 meetings where we could explore individual challenges and offer advice on Governance and Cost Management. HEAnet make all the talks and slides available to view here https://conferences.heanet.ie/2019/talk.

Sean, Gareth , Kevin and James from Micromail and Ergo. 

If you would like to hear from the team here on how to optimise your Azure Cost Management, or any of the other topics touched on above, please feel free to reach out today – sean@micromail.ie.