Welcome to episode 406 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on 07/11/2025.

This is a show about Microsoft three sixty five and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you.

In this episode, we had this grand plan of talking about something other than Copilot, but then the analyst research agent came up and maybe we got a little carried away.

So we kick off the show by spending a bit talking about these two first party agents from Microsoft that have recently been released, how we use them, and what our experience has been with both the researcher and the analyst agent.

From there, we actually do manage to move into some non AI news as we talk about the recent announcement from Microsoft about the Microsoft Sentinel portal in Azure going away and transitioning fully to the Microsoft Defender portal.

Enjoy the show.

Do you ever walk on a plane and you feel like there's a kid flying the plane that you're getting on?

I'll let you know tomorrow when I hop on one thing.

That always makes me feel old.

I'm like, oh, man.

The pile I don't know why.

I don't know why the pilot of an airplane, I feel like a pilot should be older than me.

I know some pilots who are older than me and have retired, and I'm kind of glad they retired.

Joshua Foer: See, there is also that point.

Yeah.

Joshua Foer: I've been feeling especially old this week, so my youngest child

is turning 16.

Joshua Foer: Oh, congratulations, I think.

Is this a congratulations?

Sure.

I like, it's we're getting closer taxi service?

We're getting closer to having yet another one out of the house, so but, like, this is a weird year.

So my oldest is going to college, my youngest is turning 16, And then I didn't realize it this week, but, you know, I don't know how much you kinda think about like your parents and kinda people in your family aging as well.

It was my dad's birthday this week, and my dad is 76.

And I was looking around, and I was like, oh, I've got a 16 year old.

I got my dad who's, like, 76 over here.

I'm 45 and feel like I'm a pretty broken person, so, like, I can't even imagine, like, making it to 76 like my dad at this point.

So I've been thinking a lot about age this week.

Yeah.

You know what?

One hit me with my parents.

My parents are getting older as well.

What my dad was my dad just turned 70.

So he's a few years younger than your dad, but they bought a new vehicle, like, last summer.

And my mom made the comment of this might be the last vehicle that we'll ever buy because by the time this vehicle it was a newer vehicle.

By the time the vehicle hits mileage, breaks, whatever, they won't be driving anymore.

And that one hit me.

I'm like, oh, no.

My my parents can't be that old that they're not ever gonna buy another vehicle.

Depending on the age your kids get to, by the parent time your parents age out of that vehicle, you might be looking forward to it.

So with an 18 year old and a 16 year old, we had to break down and buy a third car because we were tired of just shepherding people around jobs and things like that, but we absolutely had the conversation.

I remember my wife and I had it.

We're like, which one of our parents is old enough that they're not gonna be driving soon, so maybe we can go get a cheap car?

Yeah.

Not work out that way because all of our parents are still driving, so we had to go find a a cheap one off marketplace, one of my wife's friends, things like that.

So, yeah, the but your kids, we've talked about this on the side.

Few.

I still think your kids are, like, three years old when in fact they're not.

But by the time your kids are old enough to drive, especially the younger the ones who are younger today, maybe that car that your parents got, if they take good care of it, it'll be passed down to you.

It might be.

Yeah.

Because I'll have kids driving anywhere from the next, like, three and a half ish years to ten years.

Yeah.

Which we just bought a new car.

I was borderline of, like, three years is a little bit too long to save our old vehicle.

And I won't lie.

I'm not sure that when our kids start driving, they're gonna wanna drive around a Sienna, a Toyota Sienna minivan with a 110,000 miles on it.

So a few more years, I'm gonna be in your boat, Scott, looking for a replacement car.

Well, you can ask Microsoft Researcher or Copilot researcher or Researcher Copilot.

Researcher for Copilot.

Researcher agent inside of Microsoft three sixty five Copilot, I think I got all that right.

Yeah.

Something like that is now out and available.

Have you had a chance to play around with this one yet?

I have.

I will I have not used analyst as available too.

We'll just preface that in case we jump between them.

Analyst and researcher, both agents when available.

Research I actually really like researcher, Scott, and it is we could debate the validity of all these different Copilot tools, ChattGPT, Claude, etcetera, what they do.

You're gonna laugh.

What I use Researcher for, I get you can book a meeting with me through my website.

Like, if anybody goes to intelligent.com, wants to find out more, they can book a meeting.

There's a bunch of links out there to book meetings with me, and I get whether it's new clients or just people that stumble across my website, I'll get requests for meetings of and I'm like, who is this person?

Like, it'll be super vague.

It'll maybe come from a personal email address and not a work email address.

LinkedIn, I don't always like people to know that I went and, like, started stalking them on LinkedIn, where so and so looked at your profile or so and so from this company looked at your profile.

I use Researcher, and I'll, like, go search Bing or Google, get their LinkedIn URL if I can find them, and, like, go tell Researcher, hey, go tell me about this person or give me a background of this person.

I've done this for companies, new clients.

Before my first meeting with them, I'll go in and tell Researcher, hey, can you give me a background of this company?

And it'll, like, give me a three or four page report on this person's job history, whatever researcher can find out on the Internet about a particular person or company, and it's actually helpful.

It, like, gives me a good background of that particular person, that particular company just so I don't have to go scour a bunch of websites and can have a little bit more context of who this person is or who this company is before I meet with them the first time.

And from what I've seen, it does a really good job of it.

It's surprisingly good, very dependent on, I think, the context you can give it and what you pump in.

So it's definitely one of those tools, like, what you put in is what you get out of it kind of thing that can help you out.

So I've seen folks on my team using it in a couple of different ways, and we definitely have some I have some members of my team who totally lean in.

I think they live all day in CoPilot, and then I have some other ones that dip their toes in the water and try it out and everything in between, but we've had a couple folks get hands on with Researcher, so funny enough, we just went through performance review season.

Okay.

I was kinda comparing and contrasting results here between regular Copilot and the researcher agent, and the researcher agent does a surprisingly good job.

Like, if you pump in things like, here's my past performance reviews, here's how I wrote my self assessment for this year, help me structure my thinking in the right way, help me quantify my impact as an individual, as a member of a team.

The company I work for, we have multiple dimensions to person evaluations, so you can kind of pump those into as context and say, hey, in the company I work in, here's how I'm evaluated as an individual.

Here's how my peers are evaluated, things like that.

Surprisingly good job to the point where I could see it being helpful for folks or even helpful for maybe me as like a manager in the future to be able to structure my thinking and get better insights into things like helping team members get promoted and going through promo docs and things like that.

I've used it for PRDs, so for, like, product requirement documents, like, justifications, specifications, things like that.

It's been really good there, especially when, in my world, I'm often kinda comparing my thinking and trying to ground it in capabilities that exist within our competitors.

So that might be like, hey.

I'm in Azure storage, so that could be, like, AWS or GCP, Oracle with like OCI.

It could be just a generic more generic like cloud competitor like Wasabi, things like that that are out there.

So it's been really good for those kinds of things where I'm not always an expert in them, like and I'm still close enough to technology that, like, yeah, I could go out and do it, but I don't always have time to hop in and get, like, super deep and hands on with, like, the latest AWS feature, whereas I can point this to documentation, to YouTube transcripts, things like that, and have it come together.

So it's been super helpful there.

And then the last category I've seen folks using it for is to help them put together really good structured thinking around things like supportability and quality analysis within our within some of our products.

So I've got a couple of folks who have been able to wrangle Researcher into a thing where it's able actually able to help them rationalize, like, insights based on, like, customer support cases and things like that and drive us into areas that we can go improve our products.

Right?

Like, how do we improve supportability?

How do we improve quality?

All those kinds of things that are out there.

So I think just as a generic agent that's available out there to Microsoft three sixty five subscribers, super cool.

It was also recently announced, and I'll put a link in the show notes.

I'll grab one.

It was also recently announced that the capabilities of a researcher agent, so things like the internal reasoning and all that, are also being pulled into things like Azure AI Foundry.

So if you're an AI Foundry customer, you're gonna be able to go be able to go basically programmatically create your own researcher agents, which I think is a super cool and nifty thing as well.

Yeah.

I've been a fan of Researcher, and it uses a lot of like, if you've used the OpenAI Researcher, this is using or the DeepResearch.

This is using OpenAI's DeepResearch.

It also says that this is using, like, some special Microsoft three sixty five advanced orchestration and deep search capabilities.

The one thing that's always interesting about these and it makes sense.

Right?

Like, Copilot, you go in and chat, you get an answer back really quick.

Some of this research one, you go type it in, and you might have to wait, like, five or ten minutes for it to finish typing up all the details because it's really going out and scouring the Internet, looking at your Microsoft three sixty five data, looking at all the things.

Just like if you were gonna go in and do a bunch of research, it takes you a little longer than just a quick search.

So don't, like, expect researcher to pull you a bunch of data, like, two minutes before a meeting starts.

Plan ahead a little bit if you're gonna run a deep research or researcher query.

All things, it's kinda, like, only as good as the inputs you give it.

I've noticed this more and more that a lot of the examples for these things and even if you go, like, look at, like, the blog post that announces this, they're very simplistic in the nature of the prompts that are fed into these things, right?

They they're trying to give people, I think a little bit of a view that, like, oh, yeah, you can just type two sentences and get this really deep, meaningful thing out of it.

My experience is that, yeah, you can do the two sentence thing, and you'll get something that looks deep and meaningful, but the reality is it's just a bunch of AI slop.

You do still have to come in and put on your prompt engineering hat, provide all the context that you need, all the directions.

You you do have to go through the those iterations and machinations along the way.

Like like, to date, there's no way around that, but I think that's a good thing.

Right?

Because it still kinda grounds us as humans to go in there and perform some of that stuff ourselves, which I think is where, like, humans continue to have a bunch of the value too in, like, the chain of, like, how we use these AI tools is in the ability to see, like, the good patterns, the crappy patterns, the in between patterns, all the things that they spit out, and then be able to kinda, rationalize those and then refine them and continue to push them through.

So I'm excited to see, even outside of just Researcher, more agents that are kinda built in like this and ready to go.

And the directionality of, hey, agent structured agent x y zed shows up in m three sixty five chat, like Researcher, for example.

And then it also comes as more of an agentic workflow with a Researcher capability inside Copilot Studio, and then it also comes with a full programmatic capability inside of Azure AI Foundry.

So you eventually get to this, like, pretty cool three sixty view of the world where you can either meet your customers where they are if you're a company who's developing things on top of these tools, or your user base can just, like, use them out of the box, right, if you're an m three Copilot customer.

Yep.

You know what else I wanna see in agents, Scott?

We're not gonna dive into this teaser.

Future podcast episode, we'll talk more about these.

I wanna see MCPs in agents in Copilot.

That stuff is out there as well.

For another day.

Researchers out there.

The other one that's out there is analyst.

I don't know if you've had a chance to get hands on with analyst or I have not.

Find a use case for that one yet.

No.

I don't do a lot of like, this one points more towards data scientists feeding in a bunch of raw data.

This one's built on just going through some of the announcements here on OpenAI's o three mini reasoning model and really optimizing more for data or a data analyst type of job.

I don't have a lot of that.

I do have some data.

It would be interesting to see if I could get it in here and spit something out where I've generated, like, a whole bunch of data around sharing links to prep for Copilot and have it kinda analyze that.

But, no, in my day to day, I am doing a lot more research type stuff than analyst type stuff.

So this is when I had just it's just because it hasn't applied to what I do day to day, I haven't spent as much time playing with that one.

I think it is very specific to a role, right, like depending on how you get in there and what you use.

My roles and the folks on my team, we end up wearing a little bit of, I think, of a data science hat.

Like, I spend a lot of time in things like service telemetry, Kusto telemetry, trying to understand, like, feature usage.

Right?

Like, hey.

We just rolled out this new feature.

How many customers have it enabled?

How long have they had it enabled?

What's the churn?

All sorts of things within that.

So quite often the telemetry that I'm dealing with is, just really big numbers.

Right?

I could see hundreds of millions to billions to trillions of calls a day if I'm looking at something like transaction patterns.

It could be hundreds of millions of storage accounts, things like that.

So I've been trying to use this particularly when I build new reports or, like, new PBIs and things like that as we launch new things.

Like, I've had not so decent luck with, like, Copilot inside of Power BI and things like that to help me figure out, like, what's a new view, or what's a way that I could present this data in a meaningful way that helps me rationalize it or helps others?

Like, hey.

I'm me as a product manager.

I wanna see this.

What would maybe, like, one of my VPs wanna see kinda thing?

But analyst has been good for that.

So I can't pump in all the data that I have, but I've been able to find that I can pump in truncated datasets.

Okay.

And then because it's because it's integrated and it understands how to write Python and spit out things like use like pandas and Yep.

Pandas extensions, things like that, So you can spin in a smaller dataset, and you can have it kinda churn on it and figure it out.

But the things that it'll give you is it will give you, like, the Python code to then go and put that in, like, a Jupyter notebook or things like that and be able to run it on, like, a broader scale and a bigger dataset.

So it's been helpful for some of that stuff.

The other one that I've seen it's helpful for is because it's doing Python and it's doing Pandas extensions and things like that is if you're somebody who's maybe new to Python and Excel and you're trying to figure out some of like the visualization capabilities and things like that are available, it can be really good for just like leaning you really quick into out of the box Python functions that are available that are gonna help you visualize your data in different ways and kinda kinda take a new pivot and understand it.

So I think it's one that I still need to spend more time and get a little bit more hands on with to, like, really see where's the value and what goes on.

But I could see, like, a whole bunch of folks, particularly in organizations that maybe they're not like me where I'm coming in with, like, a massive dataset that's gigabytes and gigabytes of data coming out of a database, but just a spreadsheet.

Maybe I'm, like, tracking my POs in a spreadsheet.

I'm doing, like, logistics.

Like you said, hey.

I'm tracking this analysis of sharing links or things like that.

Like, if it's just sitting there in Excel, it's ultimately consumable by a tool like this, which makes it pretty turnkey.

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One of my questions was gonna be what you mentioned in terms of, like, how much data you can pump in.

It says you can pump in Excel spreadsheet.

You can pump in, like, CSVs or TSV files.

But I was curious, like, are we talking thousands of rows, hundreds of thousands of rows?

Have you found, like, where that breaking point is by doing truncated datasets?

I've just assumed that it's not gonna be able to deal with, like, tens of millions of rows or things like that.

So what I've been tending to doing is stick to a 100,000 rows or less, and that's been okay.

Like so if, like, if I'm writing a big SQL query to pull out what would be 20,000,000 rows a day for the past seven days, I'll write that query in a way where it's actually, hey, just give me 10,000 rows a day for the past seven days, but then help me go and put that in a spreadsheet.

And then, like I said, I use this, I think, as a little bit as the the starting point to help me wrap my brain around it and see, like, what kind of insights can be derived versus me just having to ultimately, like, go in and, like, stare at that data and just drag things around randomly, see, like, what's the right way to to present this because I'm not a full time data scientist, right?

Like arguably, I'm not a data scientist, and arguably, I'm overfunctioning by doing some of these things, and I'm probably doing my job.

That said, I still do them, and they're still a part of my role today.

So being that it's not one of my superpowers, this is one of those things that's a pretty good, a pretty good crotch slash enabler for me to be able to lean on.

You mean it's a good co pilot to help you lean on and assist you?

I could've just done that.

I could've just said, hey, it's that copilot thing.

Yeah.

It's I'm hoping, like I said, that beyond researcher and analyst and prompt coach and writing coach and some of these other things that are out there as baked in agents, I continue to hope that market grows as a direct first party offering from Microsoft.

And I think like where you really see like the rubber hit the road, like I said, is when these things grow out of like M365 Copilot, and and then they start to bleed in a Copilot studio, AI Foundry, and then customers can kinda pick them up from wherever they are in in in their life cycle of things.

But Researcher, by far, like, super cool, super super powerful.

Like, folks should definitely go take a look at that one if they have access to it.

Absolutely.

And if you are looking for it, we should mention that too.

Because I've had a few people that'd be like, not an app researcher yet.

Like you said, it is an agent.

So if you're in Teams, it's not gonna show up by default yet.

You should have, like, the agent panel up there where you can go click to get agents, and then you go click, get agents.

Researcher, analyst should both show up for you as available agents assuming you have that Microsoft three sixty five Copilot license, and then you can just go click to add that agent to Teams, and then it shows up as one of those available agents in your list of agents.

This goes back to an earlier conversation we had.

Right?

Like, that depends on your entry point to Copilot and how you get there.

So that's the team side.

If you're just going into, like, that new Copilot if you're going into the Copilot app or, like, the default landing page, hey, you go portal.office.com, get redirected over to blah blah blah .microsoft.cloud, whatever it is today.

Whatever that one is.

Yeah.

Whatever that one is.

You'll also see it there.

So agents appear above your chats, but they're in the same kinda chat section.

So so, yeah, the they just lead right up there.

Absolutely.

So if you don't have it, go look for it.

Try to install that agent.

Add that agent.

There are some other cool agents out there.

I haven't done as much with the other one.

Like, there's an idea coach and, the visual creator is an agent and some of those.

So go check out the agents.

Only as good as what you put in is what you get out.

Don't take the example prompts that you see in blog posts and things like that.

It's like that's, like, not the amount of effort you should be putting into these things.

You should be putting in more.

There's actually an agent out there which is a prompt coach.

I believe it's available to everybody.

Let me go look here.

But yeah.

We can take a look real quick.

Yeah.

Right there.

Prompt coach.

So you can use things like prompt coach to go and think about your prompts and what you're gonna put in there.

So like, hey, help me generate a prompt that I'm gonna use in Researcher to perform this research.

I I'm hoping for this expected outcome, this set of outputs, things like that, and it'll help you kind of along the way.

So if you're struggling with ideas there about, like, how to write a good prompt, prompt coach is another good one.

Yeah.

That was one other thing I was gonna say.

Researcher does help a little bit with that too, I've noticed.

Like, if I put in a super short researcher prompt, it will actually ask me for more details sometimes.

It'll be like, well, what do you want?

Do you want this or this?

Or it'll say, just tell me go ahead, and it'll make its best guess.

But researcher does do a little bit more to try to at least encourage you to write, I would say, more complete prompts versus just a single sentence.

So that be that.

Scott, are you ready for some noncopilot news?

Funny enough, we set out to do today.

I didn't think I was gonna spend time talking about being old and just about Researcher for that long, but, yeah, here we are once again.

Here we are.

It happens.

We do what we do.

This was an announcement I caught today.

I don't know when this one actually July 1.

Oh, man, Scott.

I'm old.

We're out I'm behind on my news.

This was, like, a week and a half ago for when I'm recording this, but this one, I found interesting.

So back November, so a couple years ago no.

A year and a half ago, Microsoft unified or not necessarily unified, but pulled Microsoft Sentinel into Defender XDR or the Defender portal, security.microsoft.com, so that you could go into Defender and add Sentinel in there.

You can manage Sentinel.

You can write your Sentinel queries.

Like, almost the full interaction with Sentinel, right in Defender.

Well, come 07/01/2025 now, Microsoft announced that they are moving to the next phase of the transition with a target to retire the Azure portal for Microsoft Sentinel by 07/01/2026.

So gave you twelve months where Sentinel's just gonna go away in Azure at least from the portal aspect.

Like, this is one that I wanna see where this goes.

Say customers not using the Defender portal should plan their transition accordingly.

I mean, I have a few thoughts here.

One, this makes sense.

Right?

Let's unify security in the security center.

Let's make one portal, security.microsoft.com, to do all the security stuff.

I mean, it's single pane of glass.

Right.

That's a good thing from an experience perspective, right, especially if you are Yes.

The folks who have to wrangle and manage these services.

Like, they they have been fairly disparate, and I think that does make it tough.

So, yeah, putting them all under the Defender umbrella makes sense.

It's probably more about the way the capabilities manifest within there, right, like, depending on how you interact with them and how they come across.

So It'll be interesting to see because Sentinel is really I don't wanna call it an add on, but it kind of is.

It's almost like an add on to log analytics.

Like, it sits on top of a log analytics workspace, Azure Monitor workspace, however you wanna describe it, to the point of, I've done this before, Scott.

I don't know if this is supported or not, so nobody do this and tell me that it's unsupported.

It may or may not be.

Where I've had to move Sentinel from one Azure subscription to the next because it is tied to a subscription or resource group, all of that, you can actually uninstall sent you can't move Sentinel from one subscription to another, but you can uninstall Sentinel from your log analytics workspace, move the log analytics workspace, then reinstall Sentinel on top of the log analytics workspace to move it.

But that leads to there's a lot of Azure y stuff yet involved in Sentinel from the log analytics workspace.

Sentinel is still a pay per use type of construct based on an Azure subscription.

And, like, are they gonna pull this in where it's gonna be similar to, like, the SharePoint I think it's still called Syntex, but it's essentially all the SharePoint PAYGo stuff where now you're still gonna have to, like, tie your security center to an Azure subscription so that you can do all the PAYGo stuff.

And there's also a few things yet within Sentinel.

I had it up here.

Where'd my Sentinel go?

Like, the workspace manager where you can manage multiple Sentinel workspaces within Sentinel.

And some of these, I would say, they're more intricacies of Sentinel that aren't there yet in Defender for now.

Again, my assumption is they're gonna bring all that stuff over.

They're gonna start migrating all the UI over, but it does still leave me with some questions on how some of that's gonna work a year from now.

Like all things, you see a little bit more of some of the stuff that's been pretty thematic lately where, like, with these SaaSy products or it's software as a service, and it's moving around and doing those kinds of things.

I imagine over time, it all gets incorporated in a similar way, hopefully, without too much, like, who moved my cheese kinda pain along the way.

Yeah.

And Microsoft's gonna start redirecting you.

So they say in here preparing for the retirement.

They're committed to supporting every single customer making that transition, Scott.

But beginning July 1, so twelve months from now, users are gonna start getting automatically redirected over the security center.

If you haven't done it now, like, I also encourage you if you haven't done this yet, you can already connect the two.

If you're using Sentinel, go into your security center and connect it all up because it does give you that single pane of glass, single place to go.

I'm also curious with this, Scott, how close behind Microsoft Defender for Cloud will be because that's going to be the remaining security construct.

So that was a question in the back of my head, right?

There's a whole ton of stuff under Defender for Cloud, which is 100% Azure only, like and doesn't manifest in any other way, at least I'm maybe a little close to home for me in storage land.

There's Microsoft Defender for storage, which is part of Defender for cloud, and that's Defender for Azure storage.

That's not Defender for for every other object storage provider that's out there kind of thing.

So I don't know, but I I one one would wonder because Defender for Cloud is, like, the whole other part of the issue that still hasn't dropped.

I would speculate.

I would dare to bet that we will see an announcement sometime in the next year.

Because in the next year, we've got Ignite coming up.

We have different events coming up.

We got another Ignite, a build.

Yeah.

Yep.

I would guess one of those, we're gonna see some type of announcement, not that Defender for Cloud is retiring, but that it starts getting pulled into Security Center.

To me, it makes sense.

It started.

I would say Defender I call it Security Center.

It's not even Security Center anymore.

Microsoft Defender started as security and compliance for Microsoft March.

But even as you look at it now, like, you have your vulnerability management for your endpoints on there.

You have Sentinel in there now.

You have different exposure management, Defender for cloud apps.

Security Center already has started transitioning, I would say or Defender.

I need to call it the right thing.

Microsoft Defender already has started transitioning to a broader this is your Microsoft cloud security portal for all things, for endpoints, for identities.

Because let's face it, we say Defender for Cloud is the whole Azure aspect of it, but you're still gonna have identities, which are already in Defender.

So it kinda makes sense that we would just see all of these Defender for Cloud, Sentinel, all the Microsoft three sixty five security stuff, like a single portal for all things Microsoft cloud security?

Yeah.

The single pane of glass isn't bad.

I'm not saying there's anything bad about it.

I do wonder sometimes about just the the spread of services that show up because I think in a lot of organizations, the folks who do security, it's one thing to say we have a security org, but I would bet within most security orgs you have the folks who work on identity, and you have the folks who work on endpoints, and you have the folks who work on your even your differentiated endpoints, maybe just like your virtual machines or your cloud hosted things.

So that still seems pretty prevalent.

And so so I do wonder how that manifests in a single pane of glass experience.

Right?

Like, does this thing eventually get our backed to the end of nothingness where you come in and, like, hey.

I log in, and I'm only an admin for Defender for cloud, and, specifically, like, all I can see is storage accounts.

Like, does now that home page just become a blank page and a blank view for me kinda thing?

So, yeah, I don't know.

We'll see how it manifests over time.

I'm sure there's somebody else who's getting paid way more money than you or I to think about it.

So I mean, I think it does.

You already have it somewhat.

Like, you can go in already to your security center and your permissions and look at roles for cloud apps.

Because this is another one that's kinda been rolled in over time as Microsoft Defender for cloud app or it used to be cloud app security, MCAS, Microsoft cloud app security, where you can now go in and set roles for, different cloud discovery, or there's security operator roles.

There's app instance roles.

Is that every global admin?

So I think you're right in that you start like, there's a whole section for endpoint roles and what roles you wanna assign people for endpoints and defender.

So I think you are gonna see that RBAC come into play where people are going to you could still limit people to just certain security roles in the Defender portal.

I think it's one of those things we'll have to watch over the next year, two years depending on if timeline shift, things like that?

This was an interesting one.

I'm actually kinda looking forward to this, keeping an eye on this, how it manifests itself over the coming months.

I think it's great for you, like, as a service provider.

Right?

Like, if you could hop into a customer's environment, get access, have that one stop shopping and that, like, great, like, top down view of everything that's out there.

Like, that that that's all goodness.

I think I'd wanna see the balance between, like, folks like you doing that kind of activity versus maybe far more granular, like, hey.

I'm down here, and this is, like, the one part of the sandbox that I play in.

I don't care about seeing cloud apps and email and collaboration and identities because to your point, all I'm worried about is endpoint or all I'm worried about, even within endpoint, is IoT security.

That's a thing as well in some big companies where people are just focused on security for IoT.

Yeah.

Makes sense.

Alright.

Turns out we made it through another one.

We did.

And we still had a topic or two to talk about that we'll have to maybe talk about later.

But I'm also excited to talk about MCPs, Scott.

I've been playing with these.

We started talking about this a week ago.

I've been planning for this episode, Scott.

I've got all kinds of thoughts.

Yeah.

Teaser.

Did I put something on your list that you're actually into?

Oh, yeah.

You absolutely put something on my list.

I should have been doing client work last night.

Instead, I was up from, like I don't know.

I put the kids to bed at nine.

I think I was playing with just different MCPs and playing around with some things from,

like, 09:00 until, like, 12:30 or one last night.

Perfect.

We'll have to talk about, like, how many ports are open for weird little MPM servers running on your local desktop.

But we'll leave that for we'll leave that for another episode.

Teaser for upcoming episodes, MCPs, or if you have questions.

So if you're still listening and you have questions about MCPs or thoughts about MCPs that you would like covered in a future episode, Let us know.

Reach out LinkedIn, contact form on the website, book a meeting with me now that you can do that on my website, and then I will send researcher after you to learn all about you.

However you would like to reach out via the social media or website, if there's anything you wanna know, we'll include questions, comments in our MCP episode when we record that one.

But until next time Sounds good.

I'm gonna go keep playing with MCP, so I got a whole bunch more to talk about.

Perfect.

Alright.

Thanks, Scott.

We'll talk to you next time.

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