Challenges of Built-In Microsoft 365 Security and Management Tools

[MUSIC PLAYING] It turns out there are a bunch of gaps in the native solutions that Microsoft provides. Now again, this has not meant to be an indictment of Microsoft. It's meant to be a recognition that, although, they can do anything, they can't do everything, and they can't do it all at once. So there are areas of their workload portfolio where they don't provide equal levels of hybrid support. There are way too many interfaces to go look at things or administer things in the service. Great example of this is the evolution of the Security and Compliance Center. And we don't have time in this video for me to go over every change that Microsoft has made from those first introduction. But it's culminated in having the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Admin Center and the Compliance Center. Along the way, we've had a bunch of intermediate iterations. And every time they change the user interface that people use, they make it a little more difficult to find exactly what you're looking for. That's not to say those changes don't have value, it's just that they're disruptive. You have to be able to use PowerShell. That's the next complaint that I have. Now, it's fair to say people have been warned for years, hey, you're going to have to learn PowerShell. When Microsoft first introduced Exchange 2007 with its reliance on PowerShell, the handwriting was on the wall. But the fact of the matter is that if you're going to do something that manages users in bulk, you're going to have to be comfortable using PowerShell. And that sounds OK when you think about that as a one-by-one problem. But when you think about it in terms of making sure that all of your administrators have the same level of knowledge and skill with PowerShell and that all the PowerShell scripts or tools that they write are all effectively debugged, and secured, and protected against loss, and maintain under version control, a lot of organizations don't do that. What they end up with is the silos or islands where Chris has one set of scripts that he uses, and Petra has one set of scripts she uses, and Mike has one set of scripts that he uses. And there's no cross-talk between them. There are other problems too. Everybody-- well, almost everybody has too many global administrators. There are too many people with too many permissions. It's too hard to troubleshoot and investigate things that go wrong. And there's just not good enough coverage in most environments to do the kind of recovery that you may require after a ransomware incident or some other kind of security problem. [MUSIC PLAYING]