Microsoft Ignite The Tour 2020, London

I was fortunate to recently attend the Microsoft Ignite The Tour in London. It’s just amazing at the effort and commitment Microsoft makes to improve its customers’ business. The hospitality was outstanding and there is little wonder why Microsoft is such a successful company. The event was well attended, and the sessions offered in-depth insights and best practice adoption paths. I found myself struggling to decide on what sessions to attend. The event hosted several Microsoft partner product offerings which is interesting to see some of the technologies that sit around the Microsoft 365 and Azure stack. Everything from security and identity management through to migration and user management.

It was great to meet up with some familiar faces over coffee, share some success stories and catch up on what everyone is doing with these incredible tools Microsoft has developed. I thought I would share some insights about these I picked up over the two days in a few of the sessions I attended.

Patrick Chanezon walked us through Azure security fundamentals. Using the Azure Security Center tools we can ensure best practice when building and configuring resources, how we can leverage Azure Sentinel to actively respond to suspicious activity and threats. How to connect securely to your Azure Resources using the New Azure Bastion. All this helping to assess and improve your security posture with Secure Score.

Role-based access control in Microsoft 365 by Alice Appleton focused on the role-based access control or RBAC. In this session, we learnt about how to centrally manage, granular role-based access control in Microsoft 365. Highlighting workload-specific admin roles and global reader role. This allows you to improve your administrators’ access security and reduce the number of Global administrators currently in your estate.

In April Edwards session on Data Storage in Azure, she introduced the various storage options available on Azure, from blob to SQL databases. We learnt about Azure Cosmos DB as an alternative to traditional Blob or SQL storage. I believe Microsoft uses Cosmos DB to host the Xbox platform. So, you can imagine the scale and power needed for such a mammoth system like Xbox. April demonstrated how within an Azure storage account you can quickly and easily deploy a static web site with very little resources. This is great for when the Marketing department comes to you at the last minute and needs a website for this or that event.

Our very own Kevin Greene (Ergo Azure MVP) session on Azure Monitor offered a brilliantly in-depth illustration of how you can drill into your resources and application whether they’re hosted in the cloud or on-premises. This is incredible given you can have a consistent monitoring tool regardless of where it is. One of the highlights of the session was Application Insights that monitor the availability, performance, and usage of your applications in real-time and lets you diagnose errors and performance issues proactively.

Overall there was a lot to cover in just 2 days. It wasn’t possible to attend all the sessions. Thankfully Microsoft has made some of the sessions available on demand. I encourage you to follow the link and to get some of them in while you can.  I totally enjoyed the event and would like to thank Microsoft for hosting the Ignite tour in London.

Onder Deger, Kevin Greene from Ergo and Stewart Kennedy, Micromail all pictured above