Microsoft Ignite is an event of huge importance to us at Transparity; it’s an opportunity to be among the first to hear all the exciting new announcements from some of the most incredible people at Microsoft. So, when it was announced that Ignite The Tour was coming to London in January, the technical team jumped at the chance to attend! Much like the main event in the USA, we came away with an enormous amount of information about what to expect from Microsoft in the next 12 months. Unsurprisingly, everyone’s key takeaways were different, but there are a few new services and features that we could all agree would present enormous opportunities for our customers.
One of these was Azure Information Protection (AIP) – Unified Labelling Management, which is available in the Security & Compliance Center. Set to replace the existing Azure Information Protection client, the major benefit is that this will now integrate with Office 365. That means that once you label something with AIP, you don’t need to do it again in Office 365 as the classification will be migrated across. It’s really useful for ensuring your documents are seamlessly and continually protected.
Another feature we wanted to hear more about was Microsoft Threat Protection. Announced at Ignite in 2018, we’ve been waiting impatiently for general availability of this automated threat response tool. Combining data from Office 365 Threat Intelligence, Windows Advanced Threat Protection and Azure Active Directory Identity Protection, a central dashboard offers security teams a holistic overview of their environment and allows them to identify new threats much more easily. We were also intrigued by Role-Based Access Control, which allows you to more granularly assign different administration and access rights to Azure resources within your team.
However, for me the true benefit of Ignite came in the form of the time the team were able to spend together. While we’d love to have sent everyone to Orlando for Ignite last November, it really wasn’t feasible. However, we were able to send eight of our consultants to London. As a pureplay Microsoft Gold partner, it’s essential for us that the technical team are up to date with the very latest Microsoft innovations so that we can let our customers know what up and coming technologies will be available to solve their challenges. In a fast-paced business like Transparity, it can be tricky to find dedicated training time, but attending Ignite The Tour offered the valuable chance to learn together as a team.
Dale Hayter is core cloud technical lead at Transparity
This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.
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