Episode 178 – Securing remote work using M365

In Episode 178, Ben and Scott dive into what you should think about when securing Microsoft 365 at a high level and run down the areas you'll want to focus on first. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to Episode 178 of the Microsoft Cloud IT pro podcast, recorded live on May 15 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users. Where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. Is this episode Scott and Ben take a high level approach and rundown what you should consider when securing your Microsoft 365 environment, based on recently published recommendations from Microsoft. - [Scott] Mic check one, two, three. - [Ben] Mic sir? - [Scott] Sure. - [Ben] Are we checking for Mic? - [Scott] Why not, let's do it. - [Ben] We're gonna get zoom bombed by mic. - [Scott] That's how your weeks gone huh? I say my, I say mic check and you're gonna make mic jokes. - [Ben] I'm gonna make mic jokes. You know what I got a lot of sleep last night after not sleeping the night before. So that may affect my sense of humor. - [Scott] So either way you would have been grogging out of it. Love it. - [Ben] Yeah, pretty much. However, I did make an upgrade to our home network today. - [Scott] Oh, yeah? - [Ben] Yes, I now have. - [Scott] You renamed the WiFi from FBI surveillance fan to stay away there's COVID - [Ben] No, but that would be kind of funny. I now have redundant internet coming to our house. It was even more nerdy than renaming the WiFi. - [Scott] Oh, cool. So you run everything into a router that's gonna support that failover for you then? - [Ben] Yep, I have a unifi USG, and it has a LAN. Well, so it has a LAN and WAN, and then a LAN slash WAN. So you can use it for whatever you want to. So right now it is set up as two LANs and I have a AT&T going into one way LAN, Comcast going into another LAN. And if one of them drops, it automatically fails over. - [Scott] Perfect, can you bond those connections together and use them both at the same time? Or is just one strictly there for failover. - [Ben] So technically, I could. - [Scott] Technically. - [Ben] Technically I could do. - [Scott] I could have even more bandwidth. Like I can see you like the Infinity Gauntlet in your hand, you're just squeezing. - [Ben] Yeah, I could do lots of things. So I did test it, I actually like reached over and just turned off my Comcast modem. And AT&T picked right up and turned it back on, it flipped over, I could see it in all the logs where it switches your primary way in connection, however, what I think I'm going to do. So Dan Patrick, over at CES Alliance wrote an article about this on the Build Five Nines site. And he and I were actually talking about this and trying to figure out some of the routing, I think I'm going to stick a bunch of my family and streaming devices on one way in connection, and keep the other one for work stuff now as all of that- [Scott] Gotcha. - [Ben] All right? - [Scott] Well, yeah, you might wanna just like separate them and keep them all on one and potentially do the failover thing, right? 'Cause then if you put one on one and one on the other, if one goes down then stuff. - [Ben] So I think and I need to go through Dan's article and probably talk to him a little bit more about how he did it, is you can do both, where it still works as a failover. And you can have them on both VNet. So it's essentially like two VNets that, you can do policy based routing, but then it still will fail over when it fails over. I need to dig through all of it a little more. - [Scott] Gotcha. Yeah, it's a little bit of a setup to do what he was doing. 'Cause yes, he was doing a couple things with like policy based routing on his USG user. - [Ben] Yes, exactly. So I'm gonna go through that. I may try to do that because it would also help with my other problem is that Xfinity limits you to so much bandwidth a month. - [Scott] Not right now, they don't. - [Ben] Not right now they don't. But when they do go back, so I've been paying for extra because I have a tendency to go over my allocated bandwidth. - [Scott] I do the same thing you do. Yeah, we're limited to one terabyte and. everybody says, how do you go through a terabyte? Well try having two kids at home who are streaming everything all the time? My job requires streaming like, what was I doing today? Oh, yeah, just doing some deployments and trying to test them locally meant downloading, not just a bunch of ISOs and doing installs, but full VHDs for environments. So those really don't like zip up and compress very well. So it's easy to blow through, 20 gigs in a small download. And then you kind of do that every day a couple times. And it adds up quick. - [Ben] Yeah. So see, what you can do is you can get redundant internet. Because now you're paying almost the exact same amount. And it's like five or $10 more to have a second internet connection. Technically, now, instead of paying $50 for unlimited, I just have two of them, and I have a two terabytes which I don't know that I've ever gone over two terabytes. - [Scott] Only if you split your traffic the right way. - [Ben] Right, so that comes back into some of those policy based, if I can split all my streaming over one, and all my work over another, I might be able to get away with dropping my unlimited internet and putting that money towards my redundant internet. - [Scott] Interesting. I guess that works if you live in one of those magical places, so people internationally are laughing at us 'cause they're like, what do you mean magical place? Well, one of those magical places where you can have two internet providers. The neighborhood I live in is one of those magical places where it is Comcast or Bust. - [Ben] I'm sorry. - [Scott] Oh, well, I could get AT&T like DSL, but it's really, really, really slow. It's not worth it. I miss my days at firehouse, let's put it that way. - [Ben] Fair enough. I like my Comcast, so I have the Comcast one gig. That's my plain one. And that also helps you go over your internet in a hurry when you can transfer data at a gigabit per second. You can blow through a terabyte really quickly. And then my AT&T is like 50 Megs, so that is most definitely my backup. And I don't know if it'll work for streaming we'll have to see. But that is my non Cloud related not news for the week. - [Scott] Good for you. I'm glad You're geeking out in all the right ways over there. - [Ben] Yes, I do. Outlook add-ins are a great way to improve productivity and save time in the workplace. And Sperry Software has all the add-ins you'll ever need. The Save as PDF add-in is a best seller, and is great for project backups legal discovery and more. This add-in saves the email and attachments as PDF files. It's easy to download, easy to install, and Sperry Software's unparalleled Customer service is always ready to help. Download a free trial at SperrySoftware.com, S-P-E-R-R-Y-S-O-F-T-W-A-R-E.com, and see for yourself how great Save as PDF is. Listeners can get 20% off their order today by entering the code, Cloud IT. That's Cloud IT, C-L-O-U-D-I-T, all one word at checkout. Sperry Software work in email, not on email. So should we get on to our topic or do you have any not news you wanna talk about? Any Build sessions we should pay attention to now that schedules out? - [Scott] So I haven't looked at the schedule for Build, but I did go through my Build attendee box and hang my lanyard up with all my other lanyards. I think there's gonna be in general, I think Build will be a little bit more developer oriented this year. It looks like it has less kind of market texture sessions. Like certainly there's the keynote and things in the beginning. But there's a pretty wide variety of sessions out there, wait, I think I saw in the catalog, they even have a couple of sessions on, like, dedicated to Rust. They're going in a certain way. If you are signed up for build, awesome, go take a look at the catalog. If you are not signed up for Build, go register and put that in and or go view any of the videos or things afterwards. It looks like they're limiting session registrations. So some sessions are filling up, which I find funny. - [Ben] You know what I just realized, Build's gonna be over by the time people hear this, I think. - [Scott] Yeah, well, well they can go watch the video soon. - [Ben] Go watch the videos. - [Scott] They will all be recorded. - [Ben] Yes, if you're listening to this sorry you missed Build go find videos. - [Scott] It'll come back around again. It'll be there someday. - [Ben] Yes exactly. I did not get a Build box, I was not on the, I was not quick enough, I was too slow. Because it looks like they only sent those out to like the first few thousand attendees. I don't know how many the first few thousand is, but I was most definitely not in the box list. And I think I've seen some others that were not in the box list as well. - [Scott] Gotcha. Yeah, I was so it was a, what was it? It was like a bamboo lunch box. It was some stickers, some socks, a lanyard and kind of a welcome to, oh welcome to Build card so. - [Ben] Got it. - [Scott] So it was a nice thing to get. But it's not like you're missing out on a free surface go or something like that. - [Ben] Well, I kind of wanted the socks. But other than that, I'm fine. However, if you are listening to this, and you missed out on the Build bikes and you want swag, let us know via Twitter or Facebook or some way, go to the podcast, leave a comment. Because we have a ton of stickers that we don't have anywhere to give out because life has been canceled. And we will send you stickers because I have like 500 of them in my office and nowhere to go with them. So it does not Build swag, but we have swag, if you want it,...