Microsoft Ignite Day Two
News and Notes
Jason Webster
Field CTO - Microsoft 365 and Azure
Microsoft Ignite 2024 – Day One News
Day 2 continued at the Microsoft Ignite Conference with deeper dives into topic areas around Azure, Microsoft 365, and Security solutions. I will be attending sessions that focus primarily on infrastructure, security, and productivity solutions across Azure and Microsoft 365. During the holidays, we will analyze topics that are expected to be the most beneficial for businesses in 2025. For a comprehensive analysis and to stay informed about all aspects of the conference, check out our Microsoft Ignite 2024 Conference Recap recording.
Microsoft 365 + Copilot
Copilot Prompt Gallery – One of the most effective ways to drive adoption of GenAI is the sharing cycle of effective prompts between users. Prompt Gallery aims to do just his. Businesses can curate lists of prompts for agents that are customized based on role, job function, or routines that are commonly needed and make those available to users. Trending prompt lists can enable users to discover popular prompts within the organization. This type of sharing and collaboration supports the individual users effectiveness and growth in GenAI usage.
Microsoft Places – Now generally available, Microsoft Places is designed to help your business organize flexible office spaces. Integrated with Copilot, Places can recommend the best times to go to the office, optimal spaces to meet based on requirements, as well as provide workspace analytics on the usage rate of various rooms and buildings. This solution enables more effective hybrid work and readiness to support users when at the office.
Microsoft Azure
Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is loaded with incentives to help organizations migrate VMware centric data center environments to Microsoft Azure.
- Have a discussion around your VMware costs and next infrastructure refresh to understand the future of your data center footprint. Microsoft 5YR reserved instance costs are extended to June 30, 2025. Lock in today’s pricing for a predictable future.
- Assess your migration and get the “real cost” of AVS with a no-cost AVS Express assessment. All it requires is some basic information and an RVTools export.
- Don’t get locked in! Accelerate cloud migration with flexibility in transferring AVS reserved instances to Azure Native IaaS and PaaS services.
- Leverage all of the available incentives to support your migration, hybrid use benefits, and more through the Azure Migration and Modernization program.
Whether your destination is AVS, Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), or Azure native solutions, an eGroup Enabling Technologies Azure Migration Assessment can help your business get the cloud right the first time with the right fit, right security, and governance practices that drive success.
Microsoft Purview now supports Oracle Database in Azure.
Security
We kicked off today to really understand the state of security challenges in today’s threat landscape and how Microsoft is addressing those threats. Updated data shows:
- 72 minutes is the mean time to compromise data from a user-based threat.
- There has been a 2x increase in identity-based threats from 2023 to 2024.
- Microsoft is now tracking more than 1,500 threat actors. A 5-fold increase from 2023 to 2024.
What does this mean? Security must be at the forefront of what we do across Microsoft 365, Azure, the data center, and other SaaS/Cloud resources. Microsoft re-confirmed their commitment to the following principles:
- Secure by Design – Security comes first when designing any product or service.
- Secure by Default – Security protections are enabled and enforced by default, require no extra effort, and are NOT optional.
- Secure Operations – Security controls and monitoring will continuously be improved to meet current and future threats.
We remain committed to our guidance and strategy that every business should have an end-to-end security platform that is integrated and designed to work together while augmenting with third-party solutions to address specific needs and business-specific security priorities.
Helping our clients:
- Protect identities and secrets
- Protect networks
- Monitor and detect threats
- Protect and isolate production systems
- Protect engineering systems
- Accelerate response and remediation
It was detailed how adversaries will use GenAI to automate and accelerate vulnerability discovery and customize actions on areas that can be exploited. Use AI to create better disguises for malicious threats, generate more effective social engineering campaigns, and imitate data, email, and voice for malicious means.
Our actions remain the same. eGroup Enabling Technologies recommends that our clients pursue the NIST cybersecurity framework and zero trust by engaging in workshops like our Microsoft 365 Productivity, Security, and Compliance Roadmap, Incident Response Planning, or other security planning and design sessions designed to plan and implement security solutions across the threat landscape.
For those organizations that are adopting Microsoft Defender and Sentinel as their security platform, we recommend extending that with fully or co-managed 24×7 threat monitoring we provide with our Microsoft-certified ThreatHunter MXDR 24×7 security monitoring.
Reach out today to discuss your current security posture and learn how eGroup Enabling Technologies can help you plan, implement, and monitor your active defense and recovery efforts.
Conclusion
Stay tuned over the coming days and weeks as more details emerge. There are also some significant changes to licensing guidance between the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, Microsoft Cloud Agreement (MCA), and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP or NCE) launching on January 1, 2025. We will detail these changes that should provide you more flexibility in licensing from month-to-month and year-to-year to meet the everchanging needs of the cloud.
Don’t forget! Check out our Microsoft Ignite 2024 Recap Recording to stay informed.
We Can Help!
If you have questions about any of the information and updates discussed in this article, contact our team at info@eGroup-us.com or complete the form below.
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Contact our team today to get help with any of the updates mentioned above!
