Last year I had the honor of speaking at Microsoft Ignite for the first time, it was also my first Ignite conference. 😀 This year with the world in the state that it is, Microsoft turned the Ignite conference into a virtual event, which was disappointing in terms of missing out on meeting up with old friends and making new friends in person, however with the event turning into a virtual one it meant that more people could enjoy the event. 😀

This year I had the honor of interviewing four guests during interview slots during the event and also co presenting a session with Thomas Maurer. I had a really good mix of sessions in terms of topics.

Interviews

Reinventing the electricity grid

I got the chance to interview Brian Janous, the General Manager of Energy & Sustainability at Microsoft and we had the chance to speak about the projects we are undertaking for our Azure datacentres and we also touched on Project Natick.

Microsoft Defender for Identity Mythbusting

This was a great opportunity for me to interview Ricky Simpson, who is part of the product team for Microsoft Defender for Identity, as he is based in Scotland, so we had a good representation of our little office here in Scotland on show at Ignite. We also cleared up some of common misconceptions of Microsoft Defender for Identity. 😉

Cloud Migration and how Azure Migrate can assist

This interview saw me speak to someone from the Azure Migrate product team about Azure Migrate and how it can assist datacentre migrations. This is a subject and a product close to my heart, so it was a great opportunity and I really enjoyed it.

Kristian Nese

I've long followed Kristian on social media and it was nice to get the chance to meet him (albeit virtually) and also get a chance to chat about how enterprise scale landing zones can really help organisations drive their Azure adoption.

My Session

Thomas and I got the chance to deliver a session called IT Operations in a Cloud World live during the event, our colleagues in different time zones also got the same opportunity. This was a session we all designed and was designed to help share the journey that we have all been on in our careers which has seen us transition from on prem engineers to Cloud engineers or Hybrid Cloud engineers. 😀