Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast

Hosted by Ben Stegink, Scott Hoag

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Episodes

430

Latest episode

Nov 2026

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EN-US

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Ben Stegink and Scott Hoag discuss the latest in Microsoft 365 and Azure for IT professionals.

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60 recent

November 5, 2026Episode 44037 min

Episode 440: The J Factor: Bringing Your Experience to Generative AI

Welcome to Episode 440 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. Recorded live at the North American Cloud and Collaboration Summit in Branson, Missouri, this MS Cloud on the Road conversation has Ben sitting down with Jay Leask of Microsoft and Microsoft MVP Norm Young. Norm turns host and asks what their work looked like before generative AI: hand-written PowerShell, manual conditional access reviews, and deliverables that took two weeks instead of 45 minutes thanks to transcripts and Copilot Cowork skills. From there it gets philosophical. They talk about whether your own experience (the “Ben factor” and the “J factor”) still shows up in AI-assisted work, why Ben feels some of the fun and creativity of the job slipping away while billing for faster work gets harder, and what automation means for people whose jobs cannot simply be reskilled. They close on whether models trained on AI-generated content will plateau or regress, whether the current spending pace can last, and why the sooner AI becomes just another feature, the better. Show Notes North American Cloud and Collaboration Summit Copilot Cowork overview Use Copilot Cowork: Cowork skills Connect with Jay Jay Leask on LinkedIn Norm Young on Sessionize Jay Leask Jay Leask is a Principal AI Workforce Engineer at the Washington DC Microsoft Innovation Hub, where he works with customers on Microsoft 365, Copilot, and modern IT practices. He brings more than 25 years of IT experience, much of it with public sector organizations, and is a familiar voice at community events like the North American Cloud and Collaboration Summit. Norm Young Norm Young is a Microsoft MVP and solution architect who focuses on Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform, with a particular interest in Power Platform governance. Based in St. Catharines, Ontario, he is a regular community speaker and blogger on how Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform work better together. Prior podcast context Ep 432: AI-Era Consulting Billing for Microsoft Cloud Delivery Ep 427: Copilot Cowork Hands-On Experiences Ep 417: Workplace Ninjas US, Zero Trust, and Conditional Access! Ep 410: Joy and Jay take over and talk Change Management About the sponsors Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits. Intelligink designs, secures, and modernizes Microsoft 365 and Azure environments for organizations of every size, working alongside your internal IT team or MSP. From security audits and Copilot readiness to migrations and ongoing fractional cloud services, it’s the same production-tested advice Ben shares on the show, applied to your tenant. Book a conversation

October 22, 2026Episode 43938 min

Episode 439: Azure SRE Agent vs. the Azure Copilot Troubleshooting Agent

Welcome to Episode 439 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott dig into two Azure agents with confusingly different names: the Azure Copilot Troubleshooting Agent and the Azure SRE Agent. Scott’s mental model is that the Troubleshooting Agent is the free, human-in-the-loop entry point built into the Azure portal. It runs as you, works one problem at a time, and opens a support request when it gets stuck. The SRE Agent is a paid operational platform with its own managed identity. It watches your logs, alerts, and repos, forms hypotheses, and can act in review or autonomous mode, much like a new member of your team. They also work through the SRE Agent’s Azure Agent Unit (AAU) billing model, the built-in guardrails worth copying into your own skills (no deletes, no Key Vault, respect for resource locks), and the VNet integration that lets the agent reach private endpoints and on-premises systems. They close with why you might spin it up for a few days just to see what it finds, and their ongoing wish for one place to manage every Microsoft agent. Show Notes Azure Copilot Troubleshooting Agent Agents in Azure Copilot Overview of Azure SRE Agent Azure SRE Agent portal Evaluate Azure SRE Agent (30-day trial) Pricing and billing for Azure SRE Agent Azure SRE Agent pricing calculator Run modes in Azure SRE Agent Execute mitigations in Azure SRE Agent (safety guardrails) Azure SRE Agent network integration Configure network controls for Azure SRE Agent Prior podcast context Episode 438: Taking your WorkOS and LLM Wiki to the Next Level Episode 434: Reading the Spec Sheet on Microsoft’s Agentic SOC Episode 432: AI-Era Consulting Billing for Microsoft Cloud Delivery Episode 419: Security and AI: Security Store, Security Copilot, and Agents About the sponsors Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits. Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

October 8, 2026Episode 43847 min

Episode 438: Taking your WorkOS and LLM Wiki to the Next Level

Welcome to Episode 438 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. Back in Episode 429, Ben and Scott introduced LLM wikis. In this episode, they come back a few months later to compare what those wikis turned into after real daily use: personalized work operating systems, or a WorkOS, that tie together tasks, meetings, research, communications, and recurring workflows. Scott walks through the skills that now run his day, from a 9:00 a.m. prioritization pass and meeting prep to meeting capture, end-of-day review, and clipping ingestion, all while keeping governed documents in Microsoft 365 where they belong. They also dig into how a workflow matures from an on-demand skill to a scheduled skill, a loop, and finally a deterministic Python script that any interface can call. Scott shows off his locally served web dashboard pinned in Edge, Ben shares the custom Obsidian plugin Claude built for his command center, and they compare notes on choosing a source of truth (Markdown versus Asana), filtering Teams noise down to the signal, and what these systems actually cost to run each month. Show Notes A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs LLM Wiki v2: extending the pattern with lessons from production Agent Skills open standard About agent skills for GitHub Copilot Use Agent Skills in Visual Studio Code Building effective agents Conductor: Deterministic orchestration for multi-agent AI workflows Obsidian Web Clipper Prior podcast context Episode 429: Getting started with LLM Wikis Episode 430: Scouting out Microsoft Scout Episode 422: Back to the Terminal: The Rise of AI CLI Interfaces About the sponsors Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits. Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

September 24, 2026Episode 43739 min

Episode 437: Nasuni and AI-Ready Unstructured Data with Nick Burling

Welcome to Episode 437 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Nick Burling, Chief Product Officer at Nasuni, joins Ben and Scott to talk about getting unstructured file data ready for AI. Nick digs into why 70 to 80 percent of enterprise data sits in file shares and object storage, how that data tends to end up ungoverned and risky to point AI at, and Nasuni’s PSYCHIC framework for making it proprietary, secure, current, indexed, hybrid, and continuous. The conversation covers Nasuni’s AI Activate, the MCP based service that enforces permissions before a query ever runs, and the recent DryvIQ acquisition, which adds content classification, redaction, and policy enforcement on top of that index. They also get into where this overlaps with Purview and Copilot’s own indexing, how DriveIQ reads and respects Microsoft’s existing sensitivity labels, and why 97 percent of orgs are piloting AI agents while only 43 percent call those projects successful. Nick closes with practical advice for anyone evaluating a platform like this: pick one high value use case, define success metrics up front, and keep the initial scope small. Discosure: This is a sponsor interview with Nasuni who is a sponsor of the podcast. Show Notes Nasuni Nasuni Research Finds 97% of Enterprises Are Adopting AI Agents, Yet Most Projects Fail to Meet Objectives Nasuni Acquires DryvIQ, Enabling Organizations to Classify, Secure, and Activate Unstructured Data to Unlock AI Business Value Expanding Purview DLP and Information Protection to Foreign Platforms Nasuni Resources Nasuni News AI Program Success Related episodes: Episode 431: Agent Governance Is the New App Governance Episode 429: Getting started with LLM Wikis About our guest Nick Burling is Chief Product Officer at Nasuni, where he leads the company’s product strategy at the intersection of enterprise data management, cloud infrastructure, and AI. He is responsible for shaping Nasuni’s vision for how organizations manage, protect, and activate unstructured data for enterprise teams and AI at scale. This includes expanding the company’s capabilities for continuous cost optimization and protection, while empowering compounding workforce productivity through AI-optimized unstructured data. An accomplished product executive and entrepreneur, Nick brings deep experience translating technology innovation and market shifts into clear strategic advantage. His career spans leadership roles at Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft and IBM, as well as early-stage ventures he has guided from launch through successful exit. At Nasuni, he leads the teams defining how enterprises will manage and act on unstructured data in an AI-driven world. Nick Burling’s Forbes Technology Council profile . About the sponsors Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits. Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

September 11, 2026Episode 43638 min

Episode 436: Finding the Entra Tenants You Didn't Know You Had

Welcome to Episode 436 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott dive into Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance. Almost nobody runs one Microsoft Entra tenant. Mergers, divestitures, dev and test environments, regional partitioning, that one AI proof-of-concept somebody spun up on a credit card. Organizations accumulate tenants the way they accumulate SharePoint sites. The difference is that nobody ever built an inventory of the tenants, and central IT frequently cannot name them, let alone say whether they are configured safely. Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance, now generally available, is Microsoft’s first-party answer. It is genuinely four products under one blade: it finds the tenants you did not know about, gives you a least-privilege way to administer them without local accounts, monitors their configuration for drift against a JSON baseline, and gates the creation of new ones so the next tenant is governed from birth. Show Notes Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance is now generally available What is Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance? Deploy Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance end to end Related tenants in Tenant Governance Licensing for Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance About the sponsors Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits. Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

August 27, 2026Episode 43536 min

Episode 435: Power BI Meets Git and MCP

Welcome to Episode 435 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott take a lap around what’s new in Power BI, starting with the two MCP servers now in preview, one local and one remote, that can clean up your data model, write DAX for you, and turn a messy pile of tables into an actual usable semantic model. Ben shares how it helped him tame a 44 table QuickBooks Online mess, and why he had way better luck with it than with Copilot in Power BI. From there they get into PBIP, the newer Power BI project file format that breaks a report into files you can actually put in Git and collaborate on like real developers, branches, rollbacks, and all. It has been in preview since 2023 and still lacks solid guidance from Microsoft on wiring up CI/CD, but Ben and Scott dig into why it is worth adopting anyway, even if you are working solo. Show Notes Overview of the Power BI MCP servers (Preview) Power BI Desktop projects Git integration Power BI Modeling MCP Server Episode 90 – Power BI and Data Democratization with Alexander Arvidsson Episode 287 – Power BI Field Parameters and Microsoft Entra Optimize your semantic model for Copilot in Power BI Power BI Desktop projects (PREVIEW) Power BI Desktop projects Git integration Power BI projects, Git, and Team Collaboration About the sponsors Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits. Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

August 13, 2026Episode 43447 min

Episode 434: Reading the Spec Sheet on Microsoft's Agentic SOC

Welcome to Episode 434 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. Microsoft announced Project Perception on 2026-07-27 with a lot of “workforce of AI agents” language. In this episode, Ben and Scott discuss what Perception really is, what it needs from your tenant, what it costs, and what happens the first time an agent asks you to approve something. Six agents. Seven playbooks. Every one manually triggered. Each agent gets its own Entra Agent ID and a permission grant. There’s a lot to unpack. Show Notes Save $200 at TechCon365 with code Ben200: https://www.techcon365.com/Seattle/ What is Project Perception? How Nationwide stays ahead of attackers with Project Perception Key concepts in Project Perception Agent categories in Project Perception Microsoft Security Copilot Security Compute Units and capacity Work with playbooks in Project Perception Prior podcast context Ep 431: Agent Governance Is the New App Governance Ep 419: Security and AI Ep 416 and Ep 412 Ep 406: Agents of Insight Ep 377: Microsoft Copilot for Security About the sponsors Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits. Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

July 30, 2026Episode 43345 min

Episode 433: Passkeys, Passwords, and the End of SMS MFA

Welcome to Episode 433 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott discuss how Microsoft 365 authentication is moving from “make passwords safer with MFA” to “remove phishable authentication wherever possible.” The practical conversation for IT pros is no longer just whether MFA is enabled. It is which methods are allowed, which users are still on SMS or voice, how passkeys change the user experience, and how to balance security, accessibility, recovery, and support load. Show Notes Passkeys were supposed to replace passwords, but they’re failing for the most predictable reason Microsoft Entra authentication overview Passkeys by default and retirement of Microsoft-provided SMS and voice authentication Plan a phishing-resistant passwordless authentication deployment in Microsoft Entra ID Run a registration campaign to set up a passkey or Microsoft Authenticator Practical Protection: Understanding Entra ID and Passkeys Important Change Coming for Entra ID Passkeys in November 2025 Microsoft to Stop Providing Telephony-Based Authentication Methods for MFA in February 2027 How to enable passkeys (FIDO2) in Microsoft Entra ID About the sponsors Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits. Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

July 16, 2026Episode 43242 min

Episode 432: AI-Era Consulting Billing for Microsoft Cloud Delivery

Welcome to Episode 432 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott discuss how AI is not eliminating Microsoft 365 and Azure consulting, but it is changing what clients think they are buying. Show Notes Inside Consultants’ Messy Shift From Hourly Billing Episode 431: Agent Governance Is the New App Governance Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness report Microsoft 365 Copilot usage report Microsoft Secure Score About the sponsors Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits. Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

July 2, 2026Episode 43148 min

Episode 431: Agent Governance Is the New App Governance

Welcome to Episode 431 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott get into why agent governance is quickly becoming one of the most pressing challenges for Microsoft 365 administrators. As agentic workflows become more common across Copilot, Copilot Studio, and third-party platforms, organizations are dealing with a sprawl problem that looks familiar but hits differently. Agents bring their own identity, data access, permissions, lifecycle, and security concerns all at once, and unlike traditional apps, a single user can now have dozens of agents acting on their behalf or autonomously across Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, and beyond. The episode walks through Microsoft Agent 365 as a starting point for building that control plane, including the agent registry, user and permission scoping, and the certification tab where publisher attestation gives some visibility into compliance claims though with notable gaps. Ben and Scott also touch on the Shadow AI preview in the Frontier program, the challenges of graph permission readability in the permissions view, and why the agent lifecycle problem, think what happens when the person who built a custom agent leaves the org, is something administrators need to start thinking about now before consumption billing turns an unmanaged agent into a surprise line item. Show Notes Overview of Microsoft Agent 365 Episode 409 – Preparing for Copilot- Securing Your Microsoft 365 Data and Beyond Episode 425 – Exploring Collaboration and Governance at the MVP Summit with Joy Apple Manage agents in the Microsoft 365 admin center Agent management in Microsoft 365 admin center Shadow AI in Microsoft 365 admin center (Preview) Understand agent details in Microsoft 365 admin center About the sponsors Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits. TrustedTech is a leading Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) specializing in Microsoft Cloud services, Microsoft perpetual licensing, and Microsoft Support Services for medium and enterprise-sized businesses. Their robust team of in-house, U.S.-based Microsoft architects and engineers are certified in all 6/6 Microsoft Solutions Partner Designations in the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program. M365 Licensing Consultation M365 Tenant Assessment Copilot Readiness Assessment ShareGate is your migration and governance solution for Microsoft 365. ShareGate helps your teams simplify tenant migrations, get Copilot-ready, and take control of Microsoft 365 governance. Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!