Monthly Archives: September 2022

Microsoft held their annual conference, Inspire, on 19-20 July 2022.

Digital Imperatives

Microsoft will be moving from Digital Transformation to Five Digital Imperatives:
• Migrating to the cloud – by 2025, 95% of all IT workloads should be deployed in cloud-native environments.
• Empower fusion teams – currently there are over 20 million Power Platform developers building apps, and 90% of the Fortune 500 are using GitHub for their application development needs.
• Unify data and apply AI models – leveraging AI solutions for everything from chat bots to business analysis and intelligence. By 2025, it is expected that 10% of all data will be provided by generative AI.
• Business processes – 73% of workers want flexibility and remote work options, applications like Microsoft Teams are being increasingly improved.
• Rethink security protocols – Microsoft proactively focus on further solutions to detect and defeat cyber threats.

Power Platform

Microsoft’s Power Platform has transformed in 2022, further development will include:
• Power Platform will continue to be integrated into Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365.
• Through the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, business processes are being written by people and also driven by AI models to improve work/life balance.
• Collaboration has become a focal point of Microsoft Teams and Viva, with the employee experience capable of driving better working habits.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft announced several new Teams features:
• Excel Live allows users to collaborate on the same excel document via Teams in real time. Users can also filter data and customise views without disrupting the workflow of other people viewing the worksheet.
• The Collaborative Annotations feature in the Microsoft Whiteboard app, enabling people to “draw, type and react” to shared content in real-time.
• Teams Connect Shared Channels are now generally available.

Microsoft Viva

Viva has grown into a new offering, based on wellbeing and role-based productivity tools:
• Microsoft Viva Suite includes Viva Connections and Viva Engage, connecting employees wherever they are and allowing a space for expression.
• Viva Insights help employees and teams improve their productivity and wellbeing.
• Viva Goals provide goal-setting and objectives and key results (OKR) management.
• Viva Learning and Topics give people the information they need to thrive at work with knowledge and learning tools.

Security

This year Microsoft announced new products joining Microsoft Entra, the home for Azure Active directory, with two new products: Permissions Management and Verified ID:
• Permissions Management controls permissions across multi-cloud infrastructure with a cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) solution
• Verified ID is where users can create, issue and verify identity credentials to enable more secure interactions.

Azure

Microsoft announced:
• The launch of ten new datacentre regions in ten markets, which will span over four continents. These will come into play over the course of the year. Adding these ten will deliver faster access to services and further support.
• Azure confidential computing capabilities now include the ability to encrypt data whilst it’s in use without having to change your application.

This year, the majority of announcements were focused on Microsoft’s Azure platform, increasing security, and remote working tools such as Microsoft Teams. Data is becoming an ever-growing, crucial aspect to consider and protect. User wellbeing was also highlighted with the focus on Viva.

With sustainability being an important topic, Microsoft have also committed to re-use over 90% of cloud computing hardware by 2025.

You can view sessions from the event and more information on Microsoft’s Inspire page here: inspire.microsoft.com.

LastPass is one of the biggest password management companies in the world, used by over 33 million people and 100,000 businesses.

LastPass was recently breached, resulting in an exposure of the company’s sensitive data. The company released a security advisory last week confirming that it was compromised via a developer account, giving access to the company’s developer environment.

LastPass claim no customer data or encrypted password vaults were compromised, however the hackers did steal portions of their source code and proprietary LastPass technical information. LastPass’s system stores passwords in ‘encrypted vaults’ that can only be decrypted using the customer’s master password; this aspect was apparently not compromised in this cyberattack. Containment and mitigation measures have been deployed, and a leading cybersecurity and forensics third-party firm has been employed.

As LastPass is one of the largest password management companies, it is always a concern that it is vulnerable to attacks. It also suffered an attack last year, via credential stuffing – that allowed hackers to confirm a user’s master password.

This event highlights that it is vital to enable as much security as possible (e.g. multi-factor authentication) on all accounts – especially those storing credentials and sensitive data. We also advise not trusting a third-party provider, like LastPass, with your credentials unless you are very sure of their own security practices and reliability. There are other, more reliable and transparent solutions for password management – such as BitWarden (which is open source).

Contact us to assess and secure your organisation’s data, and to discuss implementing ultra secure passwords solutions, such as a self-hosted instance of BitWarden.