Microsoft Tech Ed – Durban 2010

Microsoft Tech Ed Durban 2010

They say that when you are young, your brain is like a sponge – readily absorbing fact and detail as a sponge absorbs water.After attending Microsoft Tech Ed for 3 days last days, my brain felt more like a coconut – dry, husky and buoyant!And that’s not just due to the free beer at the closing party…We were all encouraged to ‘Immerse’ ourselves, and to ‘Learn’, ‘Connect’, ‘Evolve’ and ‘Explore’ Microsoft Tech Ed.

(note to self – not to immerse ourselves in the free drinks on offer, which is what some of the delegates chose to do, judging by the general appearance of the Tech Ed crew on Wednesday morning…eye drops and a razor anyone?)

But it’s not all just fun and games…

Tech Ed is a truly amazing experience for anyone that considers themselves an IT professional.Being surrounded by Microsoft’s top ‘propeller heads’ is an exciting and humbling experience to say the least.Some of these professionals are the IT equivalent of NASA’s astronauts – and require a satellite dish just to translate what they are transmitting!They remain circulating in some distant Exchange, Sharepoint and Forefront orbit around the world of IT systems as we know it.

 I have been made aware of many things over the last few days, here are just a few observations:

 1.       The days of IT technical engineers being a ‘jack of all trades but master of none’ is over!Today’s ‘Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals’ are a highly skilled, highly specialized breed of techheads.They are passionate and knowledgeable about their chosen field, and fiercely believe in the capabilities of their products – and with good reason!‘Jack of all trade’ engineers appear to be going the way of the dodo, the brontosaurus and the kwagga…

It’s Time to ‘Evolve’!

2.       Microsoft’s newest offerings are designed to meet business’s ever growing need for tighter security, greater scalability and fault tolerance, but also to be more easily accessible to the mobile worker.This would seem a contradiction in itself! How can you make something more secure and redundant, but ultimately more exposed at the same time?Surely that would be almost impossible…

Well – one thing Microsoft has always been good at is delivering comprehensive solutions by leveraging the capabilities of their individual offerings off of each other. Let me give you a few examples:

Want to access your Exchange email data from the web? Sure, you just need Microsoft Threat Management Gateway to publish it securely.

Want to secure your Sharepoint data when it’s out in the big bad internet world?Why you just need to run Windows Right Management Services to safeguard your data against unauthorized use.And so the list goes on…

As Microsoft’s offerings become highly specialized, they also become better and more tightly integrated.Now THAT’S how you sell software!

Time to ‘Connect’!

3.       Nowadays IT security concerns are not just about ‘hackers’ trying to penetrate your network to access your company’s data.There aren’t millions of Industrial Espionage spies out there trying to find open TCP or UDP ports or exploit vulnerabilities on your company firewalls.They have automated bots to do that for them, randomly scanning public IP addresses in an attempt to find a weakness and then exploit it, payloading Trojans and viruses inside your network to automatically open backdoors.But this doesn’t mean they are lazy either…

Right now ‘Dr No’ seems more concerned with granular level information gathering.And they have the tools to do this! Interrogating your web published .pdf files to gather information about your internal network, server names, user names etc.Using automated web searching software to compile contact information about people in your employ – e-mail addresses and contact numbers etc.The list goes on…

In the age of social networking, it appears one has to be more concerned with their info and presence on the internet than ever before.I’m not suggesting that you close your facebook account – BTW you need to request Facebook to do this for you – as your profile is the property of Facebook now!The same goes for all of your uploaded content, photos and videos.(Queue deranged evil genius laughter! Muahahahaha!)We all need to manage our company and personal information that’s out there on the ‘Big bad internet’ properly.

Time to ‘Learn!’

4.       It’s all about the cloud!

Cloud computing and service hosting is the next big thing.You cannot deny it or hide from it.If you are like me and enjoy the feeling of walking into a nice cold server room – hearing the reassuring hum of the servers , seeing all the lights blinking away like twinkling stars – you’re in for a rude awakening.The server room of the future will probably only have one or 2 physical servers to host your onsite applications and routers, the rest of your infrastructure will exist in a virtual universe, half a world away in a datacentre.The datacentres of this ‘futuristic’ IT landscape can be found in countries like Iceland, where it is much more cost effective to run them, and easier to keep them cool.

I know Iceland definitely isn’t the first place that springs to mind when you think of IT infrastructure, Data Centres and Microsoft – far from it!This may seem strange when the general population of Iceland probably consists of a number of Seal hunting Eskimo’s and a couple of random Eskimo hunting polar bears,but Iceland does have multi-terabit connectivity to America and Europe due to its prime location. (note to self – investigate Igloo real estate!)

This is why there are far more internet links connected to Iceland than places like South Africa, a definite sore point for some – As Microsoft closing key note speaker Miha Kralj remarked in frustration ‘It feels like the internet only comes to South Africa to die!’

The Data Centres of today do not require much physical human interaction, they are custom built and fully redundant. In any one container alone there can be up to 2500 blade servers, Microsoft reckon that they can afford to lose up to 400 of those blades in a single disaster without any serious issues. That’s 400 blade servers without blinking an eye.If they lose more than 400 blades in a single failure, they won’t even replace them – they just replace the container! Replacing the individual blades takes too much time…It’s difficult to picture, not caring about 400 failed blades, when most of us live in a world where even a single failure spells instant doom and sleepless nights.

Time to ‘Explore’ (Iceland)!

Last but not least, I have come to the realization that I am definitely not as smart as I hoped I was…45 minutes of ‘Exchange Server 2010 High availability Deep Dive’ was enough to reduce my brain to tapioca, and the last 15 minutes of the hour long session was like having my head drilled into by some deranged  dentist.

Deep Dive indeed!

Well… we all know coconuts can’t dive…

Until next year!

For now, I intend to ‘Immerse’ myself…

Cheers