>> Live from Orlando, Florida,
It's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite.
Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage
of Microsoft Ignite, here in Orlando, Florida.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight,
along with my cohost Stu Miniman.
We're joined by two guests for this segment,
we have Jeff Mealiffe,
who is the principal program manager at Microsoft
and Scott Schnoll,
who is a senior program manager at Microsoft.
Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE.
>> Absolutely. >> Thanks.
>> Great to be here. >> For having us.
>> It's great having you, so, before the cameras were rolling
we were talking a little bit with you Jeff,
about this idea of helping customers connect to the cloud
and helping make product deployment easier,
increasing customer satisfaction,
do you want to walk our viewers through a little bit about,
sort of, your approach to that very large task?
>> Sure, absolutely.
So, one of the main things that my team does at Microsoft,
is work with Office365 and really, I guess more broadly,
Microsoft365 customers in their journey in,
kind of, onboarding to the cloud
and figuring out how to optimize
their conductivity to our cloud services.
It's a very different, sort of,
mentality when you think about how you may have deployed
on premises services in the past
and had to think about very different things
in terms of securing those on premises services
versus now having all of your users
egressing their traffic to the internet,
coming into Microsoft cloud
and how you're going to properly,
kind of categorize that traffic,
protect it in a way that actually makes sense
but also make sure that it gets to Microsoft
in an optimal way, so that we can provide a great
end user experience to our customers.
So, we're spending a lot of time thinking about guidance,
primarily, around how to classify all that traffic,
what all those different network streams are,
what all the end points are that you need to connect to
and building tools and documentation,
we do quite a bit of presentation at events like this,
we work with network partners
across the whole Microsoft ecosystem
to help them implement that guidance in their products
and hopefully provide a great experience to our customers.
>> And what are you hearing from customers?
What's really keeping them up at night?
>> Well, I think the shift that I described,
and sort of the change in mindset around,
the different things you need to consider
when you move from on premises into the cloud.
It's no longer this notion that all of your internet traffic
is, you know, untrusted,
and needs to be scanned in some super intrusive way
and that you need to protect things in the way that you do
when you're trying to prevent your users from looking
at cat videos or whatever they normally do on the internet.
(Rebecca laughs)
And it's now your, the crown jewels of your corporation.
It's all of your intellectual property that you have now
entrusted to Microsoft,
to store and process in our data centers.
You need to treat that traffic differently.
You should be treating that differently.
That's the big conversation.
>> Alright, so Scott, there's a word that I heard
from Jeff there, that's really important.
It's trust.
>> Yup.
>> So, Microsoft obviously, trusted out there.
One of the things I gave Microsoft kudos years ago is,
well, it used to be, you know,
I deploy this application on the server,
I wrapped it, I know it, it's complied it,
I tested it out and everything.
You know, the push to Office365 which Microsoft did,
from our standpoint, kind of aggressively was
getting customers used to doing things in a different way.
Can you talk about the security, the trust, the compliance?
How you help customers do that new thing,
which new companies are doing.
But even if I'm a 10-year-old or a 50-year-old
or a 100-year-old company, I want to be able to do things
as agily and as well as that brand new start-up
that can start from a clean slate.
>> Sure, yeah.
Well we have a saying that comes from our leader Satya
Microsoft runs on trust.
And how do you demonstrate trust?
Largely by being as transparent as possible.
So, what does that mean?
We're transparent about where your data is located
when you store it in our cloud services.
Who might have access to the data?
What subcontractors do we use?
What data protection mechanisms do we have in place
to protect it?
We also undergo regular and continuous, rigorous, auditing
of our data centers, of our software, of our processes.
And we publish all of that information
for all of our customers, prospective customers to see.
They can download any of our audit reports
from our service trust portal.
They can review information about government requests
for information and they can actually go to our transparency
hub and see a lot of other interesting information
about what happens when they do join our cloud services
and store their data in them.
>> I mean, its really interesting talking about this,
because trust in the technology industry today,
it's, not all companies are running as transparently.
Is that what, you started out by saying,
this is Satya Nadella's, Microsoft runs on trust.
Do you think of that as a competitive advantage?
>> Absolutely, absolutely.
In fact, I'm on the Office365 trust team
so I may be a little biased here
but I would like to think that some of the work we've done,
particularly with our service trust portal
where we're publishing all this information
and the new compliance manager tool that we've developed
that really takes it the next step.
so that customers can not only trust us
but they can actually walk through
both our internal control framework
and their own tenent settings
to figure out what they need to do to be compliant
with this particular standard, GDPR,
some regulation, etcetera, etcetera.
>> Jeff, I want to talk about the network some
because when I hear some of these changes,
we talk about security,
talk about enabling multi-cloud role.
The network can either be that bottleneck
or that boat anchor, that holds us back in the past
or it can be that enabler.
That was the promise of SDN was oh,
we're just going to make this software and services
that no matter where I can.
So, tell us how Microsoft fits into this.
How does this fit into the overall story
from your standpoint?
>> Sure, yeah.
Its probably important, also, to differentiate a little bit,
that in general, the work that my team does
is very much focused on Office365, Microsoft365.
And there's kind of two parallel stories here around
conductivity to Azure and consuming Azure information.
Sorry, infrastructures of service,
on the services that they're providing versus
the softwares a service side of Microsoft
that we're really providing guidance around.
But, yeah, you're absolutely right.
The interesting thing around the networking piece
is that you still very much have to consider
the physical logistics of getting the bits and the bites
out to, you know, out on the wire
and how you're going to do that in the most optimal way.
We're doing quite a bit of work with SD-WAN providers,
with secure web gateway vendors, cloud proxy vendors,
to try and figure out how we best, kind of, play together
and ensure that the path between the end user
and our cloud services is the most optimal.
We're doing a bunch of infrastructure work to, kind of,
move our cloud as close as possible to end users.
And we're very, Scott was talking about transparency.
We're being very transparent in what those architecture
investments are and how we're doing that.
With the idea that, if customers understand that,
and we're doing it in a way that's also consistent
with other SAS providers, then our customers,
as they rethink their network architecture,
begin to consume some of the advantages that we bring
to the table and that all cloud providers, you know,
Microsoft and non-Microsoft begin to bring to the table.
Just with this notion that everything is provided over
public end points on the internet.
Those become closer and closer to the end user
with routing technologies like Anycast.
Using geo-DNS to resolve end points close to the end user.
And over time, as we've pushed those end points closer,
as we've moved data centers closer,
and actually moved the location where data's stored
and being physically processed, closer to the end user,
it just gets better and better
and we move from where Office365 started
or where BPA started
with a very small number of data centers
initially in North America and then APEC and AMIA,
to having massive numbers of data centers
in all regions around the world
where we're just continuously
adding more and more go-locals.
Ideally, the experience and the features of functionality
just get better and you can take advantage of that.
>> When you talk about how, what you're learning about
how you can work best together with providers and partners,
and you said you're learning how
to best play with each other.
What are some of the best practices that have emerged?
In terms of how you go about it and what your mindset is
when you enter into those relationships.
>> We've kind of tried to boil our guidance down
into four key points.
The first being, egressing traffic locally for users
and you can think of this as like a
you know, a medium or large scale enterprise business
that has many locations,
as opposed to the old traditional method
where you might have a MPLS WAN,
you're doing all your internal conductivity over that
and then you're getting your traffic out
to your business partners
or the internet in one central location.
We really want people getting their traffic out
onto the internet in each one of those locations.
That particular piece of guidance, I think,
is driving a lot of the conversations with SD-WAN providers
around how we can help our customers deploy SD-WAN devices
at each one of those sites,
properly identify Office365 graphic
and get that out onto just the commodity internet circuit
while keeping your own internal corporate communications
on VPN conductivity, perhaps over the internet
or the traditional MPLS network
and its really that classification, I think, that helps.
We're doing a lot of work around building a, actually,
a new API that's just been released, Rest API web service
specifically for this purpose where we identify
both network ranges as well as end points, FDDNs,
that are associated with all of the Office365 traffic
and we categorize it for things
that you should be optimizing
and doing the least amount of processing possible.
Just getting it out there and things that are not so
important from a performance perspective.
That if you need to, you can absolutely
go SSL break and inspect.
Do whatever you need to,
to make you feel comfortable with that traffic.
>> Alright, well.
One of the things we're looking at this week is definitely
in Satya Nadella's reign.
It feels like there's a new Microsoft.
However, you know on the other hand,
when I look at people at Microsoft,
there's lots of some of the most tenured people
in the industry.
Other than like IBM, I think Microsoft's second.
Scott, I'm looking, you know,
you've got a session, I think,
that's been going on for 10 years here at the show.
Exchange Tips and Tricks, sounds like,
it's one of the things that people love coming to the show.
It's like ooh, great, this is the insider.
Where's the Easter eggs and the cool things?
You know, Microsoft's known for that.
We used to poke and learn from the experts.
So, give us a little insight as to how,
what's the same and what's different about Microsoft?
And yeah, tell us a little bit about your session.
>> That's a great question.
So I've been with the company, this is my 15th year now.
I spent the first 10 years in exchange engineering.
A few years in customer experience,
and now like I said, I'm on the trust team
where I'm doing regulatory compliance work.
I've seen this company change in some respects,
get mature in important areas,
financial responsibility,
the way we build products,
just the overall tone of the company if you will.
But then, some of us,
you know Jeff's been here longer,
people who've been here for a while,
they still have the same passion for the company.
So, I think what makes this successful is that
our drive and our desire isn't changing for Microsoft
and what we're trying to accomplish.
But, we're just getting better at being able to do it.
Collectively, we tend to share a lot of our experiences.
So, even though we may work on different teams,
on different things, we all try to stay networked
and connected and share what we're all doing.
And really work together to make things better overall.
In terms of the overall company,
I don't know that you could say that,
there's been too much of a radical change.
I know Satya does bring, sort of a, reboot mindset
along with him and there is a definite feeling of that
but for me it's still the same wonderful company
that I wanted to join years ago and finally did.
And will retire from it if I have my way.
(laughing)
>> Yeah, just to add a couple of quick thoughts on that.
So, I would agree that,
I don't know that I've seen a massive immediate shift
as Satya has come in.
There definitely is the feeling that you mentioned.
But I would actually argue that the bigger shift has come
from our move to cloud services
and away from packaged product and releasing every 3 years.
And I think one of the things that really excited me
to come to Microsoft and has kept me at Microsoft
is the ability to have such a large scale impact,
given the number of customers that we have,
the number of products that we have.
And with the move to cloud services, the rate of change,
the rate of being able to actually push that change
and push those positive impacts out to people,
has just gone up dramatically.
>> That's quality reach too. >> That's a lot of fun to see.
>> The quality reach, because we can be always up to date
in the cloud versus some on premises customers
who may not stay up to date very well at all.
And that can be a problem for them in the long run
if they don't maintain currentness.
Especially from a security perspective.
So, I think, definitely the move to the cloud
has changed things in that regard quite a bit.
>> Great, well thank you both so much.
It's been a pleasure having you on the show.
>> Absolutely. >> Thank you.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman,
we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage
of Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit.
(upbeat techno music)