Microsoft Ignite 2023 - Quorum's Key Takeaways

Colin Beveridge and Ross McLachlan in front of Microsoft sign

Microsoft Ignite 2023 – Our Key Takeaways

Ross McLachlan and Colin Beveridge represented Quorum at this year’s Microsoft Ignite Conference 2023 (#MSIgnite) in Seattle. The event provided a unique opportunity to connect with Microsoft’s foremost experts, AI aficionados, and technology enthusiasts from around the world.

This year’s conference was all about harnessing the power of AI, here we’ve rounded up some of the exciting announcements and their key highlights from this year’s event.

Microsoft AI & Copilot

Microsoft are fully invested in AI and are “now the Copilot company”. From innovation and investment in the underlying datacentres, advancements including development of their own AI chipset and AI large language models to advancements within Microsoft products themselves.

Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant and toolset is now aligned to most if not all of their products, which promises to be a game-changer for Quorum and our customers.

Initially, the proposition was around capabilities built into the Microsoft 365 product set to enhance productivity and uplevel skills across the traditional Microsoft office suite and data already grounded within your Microsoft 365 tenant.

But what makes this now particularly compelling is the introduction of extensibility for Microsoft 365 Copilot with plugins and data connectors, this brings a fantastic opportunity for organisations to bring in their own data from other sources and line-of-business applications. In addition to over 1100+ plugins built into Copilot Studio out of the box, there is an option for us to work with our customers to develop custom plugins to meet their own business needs.

Microsoft Fabric

In the AI driven world, analytics platforms are only as good as their data. With that in mind, it was fantastic to see that Microsoft Fabric has now reached General Availability.

Fabric combines the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory to create a single, unified software as a service (SaaS) platform with seven core workloads.

We were also excited to see the announcement of Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric. This provides a modern way of accessing and ingesting data continuously and seamlessly from any database or data warehouse into the Data Warehousing experience in Microsoft Fabric.

SharePoint Premium

Sometimes you go along to a session at a conference and think “this isn’t going to be particularly exciting”, which is what we thought when we went along to a SharePoint session – we were pleasantly blown away!

As the opportunities with AI and Copilot make content even more valuable to organisations, this means a comprehensive and innovative content management solution is more valuable than ever.

SharePoint is the world’s largest and most flexible cloud content management platform. The introduction of SharePoint Premium builds upon this by further enhancing the solution. SharePoint Premium brings additional AI, automation, and added security content experiences, processing, and governance.

SharePoint Premium delivers new ways to engage with your most critical content, managing and protecting it through its lifecycle. It also helps you maximise content value with security and structure – and of course prepare it for Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Ross McLachlan and Colin Beveridge MSFT Ignite 2023

Microsoft Defender XDR, Sentinel and Security Copilot

There is always a product name change and this year was no different. Microsoft have renamed Microsoft 365 Defender to Microsoft Defender XDR to align with their strategy around extending the protection beyond just the Microsoft 365 products.

They are working on integrating Defender for Cloud and Sentinel into the solution to provide a more streamline way of managing all your security alerts and incidents.

Microsoft Security Copilot will also integrate into Microsoft Defender XDR, Entra ID and Intune allowing the ability to use natural language to query logs or get further information on an incident.

Microsoft Defender XDR Deception

Microsoft Defender XDR has always allowed you to define a honeytoken account, which if an attacker interacted with it, would trigger an alert in the console. A new feature coming to Defender XDR is a deception capability. This capability will generate authentic looking hosts, accounts or lures which are not real but will look real to an attacker.

A particular demo I saw involved an attacker believing they had logged into a Domain Controller and exfiltrated the SAM Database. This was all authentic looking but completely false data, the attacker then went on to try and use those credentials on another machine which alerted Defender XDR with high severity alerts.

Microsoft Secure Access Edge

Microsoft have stepped up their efforts in this space with some recent announcements for two new products, Microsoft Entra Private Access and Microsoft Entra Internet Access.

Microsoft Entra Private Access lets you allow access to internal resources without the use of a traditional corporate VPN. This is part of their offerings around helping businesses progress through their Zero Trust journey. This solution also gives you control access to these resources using conditional access policies and builds on the previous solution, Entra ID App Proxy, which allowed you to publish web-based apps securely. The main difference being you can publish other resources which are not web based such as file shares but with all the added security you get from Entra ID.

This will be key in moving away from the traditional VPN which gives you access to everything and authenticates you once, to the model of giving you access to only what you need and constantly verifying.

Our Individual Key Takeaways

Colin Beveridge - Security Architect

I had a great time at Ignite in Seattle and it was a fantastic opportunity to meet with other partners and also the Microsoft product teams. Interactions like these are rare and it’s a good time to get your questions out on any issues you are having or what they see the future being of the product.

Microsoft have definitely ramped up their security product offerings and that coupled with the integration of AI through Copilot is going to make it a force to be reckoned with.

I went to a lot of demos of the capabilities and was impressed with what is likely to come. Integrating AI is going to massively help security teams in speeding up their ability to detect and deal with threats.

It was encouraging to see Microsoft also venture more into the Secure Access Edge area with enhanced products providing secure access to internal resources and public internet access but uniquely using both network, device and identity signals. This is building on the already popular conditional access policies you get in Entra ID which provide a great deal of control on how users and devices access corporate data. This is going to be very useful to companies who are serious about moving further and further towards a Zero Trust Model.

It was fantastic to return to an in-person Ignite conference, and dive deeper into not only what Microsoft are doing in the AI space but generally across their technology stack with 100+ new announcements across the week.

Much like Colin, it was a fantastic opportunity to network with other technology professionals and the Microsoft product teams. Ahead of the Ignite Conference itself, we were also given the opportunity to join Microsoft at their offices in nearby Bellevue to gain valuable insights and opinion from several of the Modern Management and Intune product team around the latest enhancements in that space and future product roadmaps.

I am looking forward to continuing to keep a close eye on what Microsoft are doing in the AI and Copilot space. Working with both our internal teams and our customers to prepare for an evolutionary shift in the way we all work.