How to Improve Your IT Management with Microsoft

Carolyn Norton 0:00 Hello. My name is Carolyn Norton. I'm the practice director of cloud services here at Palacio, and today we're going to talk about improving it management with Microsoft. In today's rapidly evolving it landscape, organizations face numerous challenges in effectively managing their IT, infrastructure and operations. You have legacy systems, disparate tools and manual processes that often result in inefficiencies, increased costs and security vulnerabilities to overcome these hurdles and drive better it, management practices, businesses need to have a comprehensive solution that integrates and seamlessly works with their existing environment. And so today, we have our guest, Eric Robertson, who's going to be here to share some insights on it challenges that IT leaders face, and provide some personal experience in navigating these challenges. So with that being said, Thank you, Eric for joining us today. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Thanks. Eric Robertson 1:09 Carolyn. Eric Robertson, Director of it at velasio, I've been having the fun challenge of, you know, herding the cattle, making sure everybody has the tools and the resources they need to get the job done while making sure we're secure, keeping our customers secure, keeping our partners secure. You know, security is a big part of all of our jobs today, and making sure people have those tools and resources they need to get the job done effective and efficient 100% and Carolyn Norton 1:38 with that being said, is security one of the most important things IT leaders have to Oh, today, what are those, those those common challenges, and those top challenges that you're facing as an IT leader? Eric Robertson 1:50 Yeah, so I would say there's three big ones going on right now. That's that balance of cost cutting and innovation. So what we're hearing the how to do more with less. So how do we continue to stay on the edge while not increasing our spend, and sometimes even being asked to decrease our spend? So how do we do that? That's a big one. Lot of questions come on. How do you continue to innovate? Give us those tools while, while not, you know, increasing the cost that is usually associated with more tools. Of course, there's security. You know, we're in that ever evolving world where people want that data that we have, that gold, that we're protecting, and how do we keep all that safe? And you know, as new technology comes out, of course, there's more more ways of getting at it. So how do we stay ahead of the curve and make sure that we're keeping all that stuff safe? And then the last one, I would say, it kind of goes with the others, is just kind of, how do we adapt with change? So, you know, we're in this AI generative AI world right now, and new tools are coming out. So how do we stay on that bleeding edge and make sure that our team has what they need to do? But again, we're protecting all that data, that goal that we've been creating for all these years, and how do we make sure that they can get to it while also keeping it secure at the same time? So, so, you Carolyn Norton 3:05 know, all these challenges, and a lot of these challenges, have been around with it for a while, right? They tend to live in that same space. How do we protect the data? How do we stay cutting edge, not bleeding edge, cutting edge, being in that same realm. And then, of course, you know, let's not go crazy with the cost. So it sounds like a tail that's old as time. What have you done and what have you seen other IT leaders do to tackle these challenges, both in their current state, but also set you up for the future? Yeah, Eric Robertson 3:35 that's great, great question. I think the big thing is finding a vendor like Microsoft, where they have tools that cover almost every scenario, and then with that, because the tools are together in what they call the Microsoft stack, they're already have that integration, and having all these disparate systems causes all this extra complexity. And if you have that complexity, and you have to figure out, how do I keep this piece secure, and how do I pass the data from this system to that system, and I'm getting these signals on this screen, and how do I correlate that data together? I think it's it's one of those big hurdles of of what we have to overcome is just being able to get all that stuff into a concise way so that we can work with one set of tools that are able to communicate easily and effectively and cross the data between the different systems, which is what everybody wants, no matter where they're working. They want to be able to get to the stuff and from the back end, when we get all these either security alerts or activities that are going on, how do we see from a single pane of glass so that we can make informed decisions on what we need to take action on and not be burdened by too many signals. How do we kind of see which ones are those important ones? Way through the noise, way through the noise, lot of noise coming at us. We want to cut it down and take the action on what needs to take. You know, we don't want to be burdened. You know, alert fatigue is real. It is burdened by alert. It's Microsoft has been Carolyn Norton 5:01 around for a long time, though. So What? What? What specific Microsoft technologies? Because, again, Microsoft has been with us for a long time. One would say that our data already most of the population, I don't want to speak for everyone, but most of the Microsoft world is, is Microsoft centric? So what, what particular tool sets inside of Microsoft are you leveraging? Are you seeing leaders leverage that is not in place today, that is is helping with these current issues? Eric Robertson 5:31 Yeah. So I think one of my favorite things, and a lot of people overlook it, is when you move into like that cloud world. So let's take Azure, for example, when you start to go there, you're you're like, oh my goodness, this is great, but there's so much stuff. And what do I do? And hey, I can spin up this VM, but did I do it right? And is this set up correctly? So one of my favorite tools is the Azure Advisor. And I think being able to have something that kind of tells us and guides those that might not know or kind of provides those best practices. We're able to have those actions right away. No longer are you, like, Did I miss something? Did I make a mistake? Like, now I have my security recommendation, my optimization, my reliability. Like, you're, you're not relying just on people's knowledge or kind of filling in those gaps. And you're, you're, you're able to see where you can improve the dashboard, build Carolyn Norton 6:23 in that skill gap for for an organization that maybe isn't in the cloud today, it's a lot to try to ramp up for a team. Eric Robertson 6:30 I think the skill gap is a is a big issue, and I think having tools that are able to help fill in and guide you. So if we look at Azure Advisor from, like, an infrastructure and SaaS and IaaS and PaaS solution, like they're telling us, like, how do we make improvements to get better? How do we keep this secure? So it's giving people, kind of, like, a roadmap, another reason why I'll go, I'm gonna jump to secure score, another one of my favorite tools. We're now able to kind of have, like, Hey, here's where our security posture is, and now here are the actions that we can take to improve it. So people are like, let's move to the zero trust, you know framework. Well, how do I get on that journey? Is a common question I get asked by a lot like, I want to start this. I hear it's where I need to be. It's going to make me more secure. But I don't know where to start. And by having something like secure score, where, hey, the higher the score is going to give you a bigger impact. It's going to be more meaningful. Making sure MFA is on, making sure you're using the right type of MFA. Because not all MFA is treated the same. It's not all the same security. It's it's continuing to evolve, and by Microsoft giving us those recommendations, it's giving your teams the ability to see that. And from a leader's perspective, you can see and say, Hey, why aren't we doing this yet? Like, here's the stuff that I see. You did awesome job. Really happy. But now we have all these other actions to take, so let's start, you know, identifying when we can start tackling these and making us even more secure, Carolyn Norton 8:00 which is the wonderful part here is these recommendations don't really stop right, that the telemetry that Microsoft gets from all the organizations that are leveraging their tool set helps you as a leader, get new recommendation. How are other people doing it? Should I be doing this? How do I incorporate that, that Intel into my IT team Eric Robertson 8:22 exactly, and I think it's, I think we're going to even see it more with copilot. I don't want to turn this into the copilot show, but I know everybody's talking about it, but I think having that generative AI where Microsoft's using all this data that they're they're capturing from everybody, and able to then say, hey, for example, let's look at securities co pilot. Oh, my this, this alert just came in. Well, another company who has, you know, is getting something similar. Is this an attack that's going on across different things, and now this other signal is lit up. So now I they can start to make these correlations, and they can start giving you, like, remediation playbooks of like, hey, how do you tackle it? This is great. Now I have all my stuff tied into the Microsoft ecosystem, and I have my devices being managed. I'm getting my security alerts going there. So I'm getting all these signals, and Microsoft is able to say, hey, the accounts compromises that devices compromise. We need to start severing these off and limiting their exposure so that we stop it before it gets out of control, and we start to see those lateral movements, so those higher privileged accounts, so really powerful stuff, I get really excited. Sorry, that's not a bad Carolyn Norton 9:31 thing. I mean, again, this is, this is why we're talking about what IT leaders tend to face. I mean, there's, there's a lot that an IT team and IT leader and an organization has to take into consideration in order to make sure that their business is running effectively and protecting both the business's reputation and the business's data. So it just continues to become this, this daunting task, and how to, how does, how do these tool sets help both edge. K provide insights, allow an organization to take a step back, whereas in before, it took, you know, it took probably months of planning. And I think this is what's going to happen. Here's what I'm hearing. Oh, but now things have changed, because technology nowadays, you have all this information at your fingertips, plus, to your point, you have some opportunities to automate some of these responses. If there is a remediation that's being flagged, here's how I want you to address it. If there is a gap here, or if there's an opportunity to optimize there. You know, I know. I want to just go ahead and do these things. I don't have to sit here and have this large committee call and decide every single, you know, bell and whistle that we want to enable. And it sounds like that's what you're leveraging when you're talking about the Microsoft tool stack, Eric Robertson 10:49 exactly. And I think you know now we'll bring in another tool. Let's talk about power automate, one of my favorite tools. So all all that automation that you just referenced, we need that. And you know, when you want to do more with less. How do you How is that possible? You got to automate because otherwise you're going to have physical bodies that need to do these tasks. So again, how do we automate those, those simple remediations, or those simple tasks that we're responsible for doing day in and day out? So account creations, account deactivations, you know, enabling people to to reset their own passwords or set up different MFA authentication methods, like all those types of tasks. Like, we need to figure out, how do you automate it so that you don't need a person that's being like, okay, submit your ticket. So now I could reset your password to get you back into your account. Like, that's wasted manpower when they could be doing something that's, you know, more beneficial innovating, making additional automation so that we continue to innovate and go through this digital transformation that all the companies are now going through and and staying again ahead of that curve, so that automation is that key piece, and tools like Power automate that starts to bridge all these systems together is super powerful and gives gives smaller teams that flexibility to start really tackling the constant flow of I need to do this. I need to do that like Carolyn Norton 12:11 touch on the smaller teams part. I don't hear this as much, but I know in the past, you know, as we start to talk to clients about these tool sets and what's possible with them periodically in the old days, I don't know that I hear it so much these days, but I know it's a concern, and I'm sure with AI, it's a concern that's coming back up as you start to leverage these tool sets. It's supposed to make your job easier. There's always this concern about, well, does that mean that I don't have something to do now because the technology is doing it for us. What's, I know, my opinion on it, what's your Eric Robertson 12:42 I think technology only makes us better. So it's not necessarily getting rid of these technical jobs. They're still going to be needed, but it's taking those, those users and giving them different responsibilities every we still need these, these bodies in order to do more automation to you know, there's constantly new tools, and in order to stay ahead of that curve, you're constantly, like, from a security perspective, if you're not constantly changing, you're just lagging behind, and you're gonna get hit by that. So there's still things that we still have to do on a day to day basis. We haven't even talked about backups and Azure Backup, and how awesome that is, and how one incident with having a bad backup strategy could be, oh yeah, a company's destruction. So there's still tasks that need to happen. There's still there's still bodies that need to be responsible for those things, and how do you recover once they happen? But it's now giving your users the tools to let them do more. So again, it's that do more with less. So we're still staying maybe the same number of people, but now we're able to do different tasks. And people aren't just pigeon holed into like, small little subsets, but they might have more responsibilities. And that's where we really start to see these superstars on your team start to come out and be like, Hey, I got, you know, I want to learn this. I want to do this new, cool technology, and that's how you kind of stay ahead of that curve, by giving them more freedom to innovate, Carolyn Norton 14:09 the opportunity to get exposed to Okay, the day to day stuff is being handled now, and we're checking and we have checks and balances in place to make sure that those you know, like you mentioned, with the backup, that they're actually happening, and that they're being tested and validated, which we still have to do to some degree, but I also feel like it also exposes the team to see what other challenges are out there, or if there's other efficiencies you mentioned, you know, optimum optimizations and efficiencies within the org beyond what they're seeing, there might be other things inside of the organization that might benefit from what you just did for this item can be transposed or maybe some different version of that for this other item as an IT leader. How does that work in terms of kind of venturing beyond the technical space, so to speak? Yeah, yeah. Eric Robertson 15:00 I think, you know, it is pivotal in all organizations, and I think we play a big part in, again, letting people do what they need to do, and giving them those tools. So by partnering with those other departments practices, we're we're able to bring some of these tools that either we're using in house or things that we're starting to explore and saying, Hey, your data, you want to be able to do this reporting, and you're using this old school, you know, bring your own database, and you want to move to more of a data lake model, where we're able to get more insights and be prepared for the co pilot revolution that's coming down the pipe, like there's things that it needs to be involved in so part of those discussions, but also be able to have the freedom by not having to do all that manual stuff with some of that automation, so that we can be a part of those conversations and truly bring the skill set that other teams may not have Carolyn Norton 15:58 100% It's not just it anymore. It's really, you know, business processes and how can things be improved. You talked about a couple of Microsoft products. Are there any other products you touched on, Azure Backup? You want to jump in on that one, the safety net of an organ. Eric Robertson 16:16 I know you love Azure Backup, and I love Azure Backup. And I think, you know, people don't talk about site recovery as much, but it's another feature that kind of coincides with it. So I would say Site Recovery having that ability that if your data center like, let's say you have an on premise data center still, or you're in a hybrid work model or or even on another cloud environment, having that ability to restore somewhere else almost instantly is, again, how much downtime can your company handle before it's going to go out of business? So having that ability to kind of shift the workloads easily and fast is is crucial. So again, this is a cloud technology is really cool. Having hybrid environments where you have some of your workloads still on prem is kind of being the norm now, not but even having a large footprint in the cloud and leveraging some of those cloud tools. So I'm gonna bring up another one of my favorites, Azure arc. Love it. Love Azure arc. So as someone who deals in a hybrid cloud environment and being able to manage the on prem stuff, and doing Azure arc to to highlight some of the on prem legacies, let's say deficiencies and and have them connected into a cloud, single pane of glass where I can see all of my cloud resources on prem resources, see all The Compliance around them, all the alerting in one kind of single pin is is super powerful. And for someone that's working across all these multi clouds, bringing those in as well, you're able to just kind of like, no longer bounce between I gotta go to this portal for this and where's that server? Is that server up? I gotta go to this port. Like you're able to kind of have that one single place, and then the automation that's unlocked once you're there. Now we're talking about being able to spin up, spin down, you know, all the remediation, hey, something got triggered. We need to, you know, isolate this VM from the mix, like we don't know what's going on. Let's, let's, we could start doing all this automation around alerting, which is, again, gives Carolyn Norton 18:19 you 100% insight to your digital real estate, whether it's wherever it is, it's it's your organization's digital real estate that you want to be able to control, manage and effectively take care of. Yes, Eric Robertson 18:31 one spot, one spot that one, that single pane of glass, is super valuable, I think, from any, any, any leader's perspective, not having to go to all these different areas is super powerful. And then from getting those alerts, like doing doing a cm, like Azure Sentinel, again, we're now taking all those signals, all those alerts, putting them into one place so that we're getting that full picture, without that full picture, you know, hey, my device set off an alert, but now I have to go to another system to go see. Did the account actually have something that went on with it? Did my email? Did did they click on an email? Microsoft's ecosystem? You're, if you're invested into the whole thing, you're getting all those signals. They're all coming together. You're like, oh, this person clicked on a bad link, and luckily, with Microsoft's AI, oh, it happened to zap it from the 30 other mailboxes that hit that say that, and you're like, wow, they just stopped it from me having to go in the back end and do a purge on all these mailboxes. I just zapped it out instantly without me doing anything. So again, it's that real time. How do we keep the user safe and still let them do what they need to do, which I think is super powerful. So in Carolyn Norton 19:41 that vein, let's talk security, right? Security? Everyone knows they need it. I haven't met anyone. I'm sure you have anywhere that says, No, I don't care about security. It's not important to us. So how? How beyond what we just talked about, you know, what are the common security challenges that these tool sets have? Our. Be alleviated for the organization and for IT leaders today, right there obviously challenges in the past. Now they're kind of settled down. And then what are the new challenges that organizations have to keep in mind as they try to strengthen their security posture? Eric Robertson 20:15 Yeah, I think we touched on it already with with, you know, we got to stay ahead of the curve if you're not innovating, especially in, like, the security space, and you're just like, oh, I set up this thing three years ago and I expected to keep me safe moving forward. Like, oh, wait. Everyone said, Let's go to MFA. Well, we've started to learn not all MFA is treated equal. So again, we we have, we're being guided, which is big piece. It's like, how do you know where you're supposed to head next? Microsoft is guiding us so that we know not to go down path and we're able to go and do what we need to focus on the things that are going to improve our security posture. So we're we have a tool that's telling us, Hey, this is going to impact a lot of people, so we're going to roll it out a little bit slower, but it's also going to make our security posture way more positive. So we still want to do it, but we now know we kind of got to give it a little lead time and let our users know, like, Hey, we're going to be forcing you to do number matching on your your authenticator, because we don't want you to to approve an MFA request that isn't valid. So Carolyn Norton 21:22 there's something. Is that something you have to juggle you you're as an IT leader, you're responsible for protecting the organization. But conversely, you also need to have these tool sets enable the end user to do their job. So how does that play a factor you mentioned slowly rolling it out as a way to help the adoption rate towards something that you're trying to accomplish, but also give the users the ability to do their jobs. How does that factor in? Eric Robertson 21:52 So it's you have to tiptoe so again, we got to keep everything secure. We got to keep our account secure. We got to keep our data secure. We got to keep our devices. Secure, but we need to let them all work, and we can't hinder them to say, hey, I need a pat. I need you to give me admin rights for a second so I can do this. So how do I get around that? So is it by creating a trusted app catalog so our users are able to get to the applications they need when they need to, so that they're not being hindered by saying, hey, I need to install another piece of software. It wasn't part of my thing. By having some, something like a app catalog with trusted downloads. Again, you're, you're, you're getting, you're getting away from a big security threat by now, saying, don't go to the internet and just grab anything we got you. These are our trusted applications. You have free rein to install them. They've been validated. We'll keep them up to date, and you'll always have the latest version. So again, it's one of those. I kind of took your question and moved it around a little bit, but we're making the users able to continue to operate with at least as little friction as possible. There's going to be some friction, because not everything is going to be frictionless, but we're trying to minimize that friction. That's like a big part of its job is we have to be annoying, but we can't be too annoying, because we want to make sure they can work well, Carolyn Norton 23:14 you're you're trying to serve two different, at least two different, masters, right? You have leadership that you're trying to work with and making sure that the organization is protected. But then you have your user base, who you're effectively trying to support them. You're trying to make sure that they're able to do their jobs, that they're efficient, they're doing what they need to do. And how do you how do you juggle those two worlds and make sure that you're as the IT leader who ultimately has these two feedbacks that you have to keep in constant contact with, do what you need to do, to do all the protection, all the innovating, all of the efficiencies that we talked about earlier. So I mean, it makes sense. This is something that you know, we have to keep in mind when we're talking about the tool sets. It's not just how do we get our jobs done? But how do we take in the human factor and factor that in as well, factor factor, factor. So we talked about security, we talked about power, automate as a way to add efficiencies. So a lot of these are cloud native tools, and you kind of touched on it already. You You have to, you have the challenge of taking care of your digital real estate that's in the cloud and on premise. What are the benefits of having these solutions that are in the cloud help you with your on premise scenario, not just from your server perspective, but I'm sure there's other digital real estate that doesn't reside in the cloud that you need to take care of? Yeah, Eric Robertson 24:42 so I think it's, it's by having tools that support both. And again, it's that single pane of glass. So you know, how do I make sure my SQL Server that's on prem is getting the latest updates, is making sure that it's security like this, certain ports are or block. And that I have, you know, it's optimized, and the reliability is there. You know, those recommendations are being bubbled up by all that awesome AI and machine learning that's inside of Azure. So that Azure Advisor who's going to be like, Hey, here's what we could do to make this better. You know, if this one server goes down, that's going to affect this entire cluster of applications, do we need to have a secondary SQL backup just to make sure that if you know, we're not relying on one server to be our fail point? So it's helping again, we're getting rid of the guessing game, and we're getting more to what do we need to do? And, and, and Microsoft's recommendations through secure score, through Azure Advisor, through all these different advenues are helping us kind of weed through like there's so much stuff going on, but what? What should I be focused on? And that that's a big part of its responsibility is, is identifying what you need to be responsible for, and how do you make things better? And they're giving us those recommendations, which I know we've said multiple times now, but I can't stress enough of the importance of that, because you're either, like we said earlier, missing some skills. There's skill gaps, there's, you know, more less people doing more to ask. So, you know, you're all over the place. So how do you remember which areas need to be touched using, you know, structured deployment, so all things are set up the same, and maybe something got changed. Okay, well, how do we know something got changed? There's only one of us that is monitoring this one thing. Oh, it got flagged in this so I now see somebody made a change that flagged a security vulnerability. I now know I need to go back and address this and figure out how is this change made? And being able to see that from, again, that single pane of glass gives us the insight from the users doing it and the people who are making sure it's actually being done. Carolyn Norton 26:48 So how do you think AI is going to play a role here? We don't have to. We know all the cool stuff that's happening around AI and what it can do and what possibilities are getting unlocked with new venture that we're working and we're walking into. How do you foresee AI and machine learning help IT leaders with exactly what you're talking about? Better insights, prioritization, optimization, security, vulnerability, all of the again, the stack of responsibilities that IT leaders have to have. How does a AI possibly help in this world? So Eric Robertson 27:27 before we go into that, I'm gonna, I'm gonna just answer one other question that you didn't answer, but I want to answer. So chat GPT, which is the big player in the space. We all hear about it. It's great. But then we see all these articles coming out about, like, oh my goodness, Samsung just released their sort you know, like IP secrets into the wild and stuff. I think being able to support these cutting edge technologies like generative AI giving our users, hey, we don't want to, we don't want to handicap them, but we want to make sure you can do what you need to do. You know, there's policies that you know, it has to be responsible for, so that it's telling the users do. And the good thing about where copilot is coming in, so Microsoft solution where it's going to be integrated directly to your tenant that is now your your large learning model is now focused specifically on your tenant, so that where people are scared with chat, G, B, T, and your secrets escaping. You're now keeping it within your control and your purview, so that again, it's it's alleviating one of those big fears that's coming with generative AI is that, hey, I asked a question. I want to know the answer, and I want it to write me something. But now I don't want other people to know that I asked this question and I what my answer wasn't I got into it. So I think that's where Microsoft co pilot is really going to capture a lot of especially the IT security minded folks and say, hey, I want to give my my users, these tools to make their jobs easier, but I also have to keep my stuff safe. And so by getting it tied into the tenant level, and what Microsoft is is proposing is where we're we're in control of this data, and it's not leaving our control. That's what we're all kind of we need from a business perspective, we're a Carolyn Norton 29:11 fencing where, where we can use these innovative tools, but they stay within the organization, so they get the exposure. But the data. Again, that goal that you're talking about, that you talked about earlier, still remains within the organization, whatever new innovation and technology that gets introduced, like generative, AI, Eric Robertson 29:30 correct, Carolyn Norton 29:33 yep, valid point, and it is a big concern these days, and Eric Robertson 29:36 it's going to help with the skill gap. Again, it's one of those areas, so an area that I'm excited the security co pilot, is going to be able to make so once a security event happens, you then have to figure out, how did it happen? Why did it happen? You know, what's going on with this? And one of the things that you spend a lot of time is kind of doing that research of what went on, and how do you then prevent it from the future? Here, and security copilot is going to have a nice little feature that says, hey, generate me a report of what endpoints were affected. How did the How did it traverse? Where did it go? And it's going to do a lot of that legwork that people spend a lot of time on, and make it clear and understandable, depending on what your audience is, because you also have to sometimes scope it for the audience. Is it the technical audience, or is it the senior leadership team who just wants to kind of have a broader picture and understanding of how it happened and how are we going to stop in the future? So I think that's a big piece. We're going to kind of take some of these kind of mundane tasks and alleviate it, even from a security perspective, so that we kind of have those tests done for us, which is one of things I'm most excited about, generative AI, writing those emails, right in those reports. One Carolyn Norton 30:47 of the things I always talk about when it relates to cloud is just being in the in the right spot for these cool tools that come out right now, it's AI, right? Last year, we really weren't talking about AI, and now all of a sudden, that's the big thing. And my my interpretation of all this is you have taken steps. You've taken those recommendations, you've looked at what the industry is, is dealing with, you've looked at Microsoft recommendations, and you've kind of positioned things. You don't boil the ocean in one shot, right? You take things little by little. And I think now that we're entering this generate, generative AI world, it sounds like you're positioned as an IT leader to benefit from what's coming in regards to copilot, because again, you have made all these investments and tools. You've been leveraging these tools, and it's been helping your day to day. But now there's even more of a possibility to continue to expand that with what's forthcoming within copilot. Am I wrong? Am I Eric Robertson 31:53 no, I think you, you nailed it. I think that's exactly it. I think it's, it's about setting up. You know, we have this data, that valuable data is within the tenant, and now how do we expose it in a safe way to the people who need those for the right responses? I think a lot of the time it's hard for people to even find what they need to find, because we have so much data that this is going to help alleviate that, and it's going to help bubble it up. Now, of course, that comes with the converse, and it's gonna be like, well, now I hope our controls were in place, because if somebody has access to that data, they might not know how to get to it, but they still have access to it. Is that gonna expose something? So you still need to make sure that you're in a security minded but Carolyn Norton 32:38 that's why those recommendations come into play, right? Because you, you're, you're still, essentially, you're still following these, these key it, principles of data protection, data management, efficiencies. Name it. We've talked about it in this, in this video, but like, as long as you're doing these items to continue to modernize and innovate and set the organization up in the best possible position. When these new tool sets come out, it sounds like you're in the best possible position to integrate these new cool features, these new opportunities, because you've already laid the foundation within your organization. Even if you're not there yet, you can get there, so that by the time, whatever the next thing is, where you're you're in a good spot, correct? Eric Robertson 33:26 You're already down the road. And I think that's a big piece, is we're already, if you're already on the road, that's great. You're there. And for people. But the the movement to this, let's say Microsoft stack road. It's it, there's it's a low. It's low to get into and it. They made it very simple to jump onto it. And now, as long as you're there being on it, you're ready for that next change. You're ready for that next challenge. You're ready for that next bump. Because a lot of it is also bumps. And I think that's where the cloud really is good, because, you know, again, we're going to that more flexible, scalable environment, whereas on prem, which, you know, still has benefits, you weren't as flexible. You kind of were like, what? How much am I going to spend? So we're going from that capex to that OPEX, and so that's going to be the big thing is it gives you that flexibility to shift with what are the new priorities? Because companies priorities are constantly changing, and it gives you that flexibility to kind of roll with the punches, as I like to call them. It allows me correct Carolyn Norton 34:33 Absolutely. So I don't know that I would have predicted AI, although some would say it was yes. Um, we know where we are today. We know the cool new thing out there beyond AI, what? What do you foresee in the future for it? It leaders, organizations as as a whole, like, what? What? What's in the future that maybe an organization needs to be thinking about in terms of running their business? I mean, this is this, this the technology and the people and various other things run the business. And this aspect is such a key critical component. What does the future lie? How does it look like in terms of technology? Eric Robertson 35:19 I think we're gonna continue to there's gonna always be new innovations, and I think it's about staying cutting edge as possible, and being like, having that agility to adapt. Things are gonna change. You know, like you said, generative AI wasn't really talked about as much, and then all of a sudden it blew up out of out of nowhere, and was just like here it is, the pandemic. I know we don't talk about as much, but that was another big one. How are you going to support your your workforce that used to all be in offices, now be remote. Carolyn Norton 35:49 These are the bumps, right? Eric Robertson 35:51 Those are the bumps. You just got hit by a cyber incident. What are you going to do? What's what's your what's your strategy? Get back online? How are you going to stop this from happening in the future? Were you prepared with good backups? Did you have a mutable backup so that in case your backups got compromised, they couldn't be compromised like there's so many different things that you're you're constantly trying to tiptoe around and make sure you know you're you gotta make sure your users are happy. You gotta make sure everything's secure, and you also have to be cost conscious. So having the tools that kind of scale and are flexible to shift with you is that is, is where I would say you just need to be on a platform that is showing that they're innovating with the times and staying ahead of the curve. And I think Microsoft and this co pilot is, is they're really proving to us that they're, they're ready to take us to that next. Carolyn Norton 36:42 I agree with you. And then, and that's essentially what we're saying to organizations, innovate, transform, be ready for your next what, whatever that future is, because we don't know, we don't know what's possible. We don't know what's forthcoming. But again, if you set yourself up just right you're going to be, you're going to be in that best possible position to take advantage of whatever someone innovates and creates going forward. And it is, is one of those things that you have to make sure you're on the on the know, and you have the recommendations and you know where the wind is blowing, so that you can help the organization make those decisions, gain those insights and leverage these tool sets. Thank you. Thank you so much for spending time with us and sharing your insights as an IT leader, and sharing what you've done and what you've leveraged from your experience to help organizations you know, unpack the power of technology, there's there's so much out there to your point. How do you really know what to do and how do you harness it? Yes, exactly. How do you get the best out of what's out there? So I want to thank everyone for joining us. Thank you, Eric again, for joining us. If you want to continue having this conversation and explore how volatile can help IT leaders, enhance the process, the processes that work the organization through the Microsoft stack, please reach out to us. We're more than happy to continue having this conversation, and we're so happy that you took the time to attend this and hopefully we'll see you again soon. Thank you. Bye.