Here’s What Happened at the Microsoft Ignite Roadshow

Posted on 29 January 2020

After another brilliant flagship event in Florida, Microsoft’s Ignite has taken to the road, delivering expert insights and a look into the future for 2020. Our team were lucky enough to attend the Ignite Roadshow, so here are a few key take-aways from the experience.

 

As a Gold Partner, we like to keep on top of the latest Microsoft announcements, and it’s safe to say we were more than a little bit excited to attend Microsoft Ignite last November. Naturally, when the MSIgnite Tour kicked off, we made sure to send some of our team to check out the London convention – and we were highly impressed with the insights they brought back.

 

 

Stacey Dixon, Client Relationship Manager, was one of our team members on the ground for the event; here’s what she had to say about all the insights, surprises, and reveals at the Ignite Roadshow:

“Ignite London was key to our organisation, not just to meet up with our contacts and learn about what’s coming next from Microsoft but also for our opportunity to upskill. Sessions and workshops during the event are broken down into learning paths which was great for us to plan out what sessions to attend and take away valuable knowledge.

The insights we took away from the day allow us to support our customers who are undergoing digital transformation and ensure we keep them ahead of the curve when it comes to securing our customers’ business applications, identities, devices, and data. Microsoft really demonstrated just how much their solutions are geared towards the customer pain points we work with every single day.”

 

Risk Management

Of the many workshops and talks held on the day, Risk Management was a very interesting one. As cyber security experts, we are well aware of the threat that external attacks pose, but Microsoft wanted to highlight that users within an organisation can also compromise the business in various different ways.

Keeping both external and internal threats at bay is the key to achieving better compliance, something that’s high on most organisations’ agendas. For forward-thinking businesses are undergoing digital transformations, moving more and more into the cloud, Microsoft is offering tools and guidance to manage insider risk.

 

New Tools for Teams

We’ve long sung the praises of Microsoft Teams, due to its clear benefits both for office and remote workers. Now, there is a whole other section of a company’s employees that can massively benefit from Teams implementation: first line workers.

Before now, a lot of customer-facing and warehouse team members were using unsanctioned social media apps to communicate – organising shift work, checking attendance, notifying managers of absence, etc. In order to facilitate secure communication, Microsoft now offers secure solutions especially for these frontline workers.

The future of Microsoft Identity is cloud-based, and one nifty cloud-based solution that was highlighted at the Ignite Roadshow is Walkie Talkie. This product is designed for warehouse or shop floor workers to communicate with each other using a secure connection on their phones. The Walkie Talkie Teams feature allows for push talk comms, with security built in, and voice recording options too, ensuring you never miss a message. With news of devices such as physical walkie talkies being hacked by nefarious parties, this solution is right on the money.

 

Productivity Boost via Tasks

Tasks is another interesting development that came out of the Ignite Roadshow. Some major organisations are trialling it out currently, and the results are looking good. Tasks is all about driving productivity, ensuring everyone has access to what’s happening in store and when. It gives users the ability to prioritise, report on, and scale up tasks, ensuring that the execution of a store’s operations are achievable. We’re definitely excited to find out what else is happening with Microsoft’s workforce management integrations.

 

Passwordless Push

For quite some time now, Microsoft has been committed to a passwordless future, so this subject was sure to come up at the Ignite Tour. SMS sign in – a secure authentication method that can be utilised using something you own/know, in this case a phone – was a key topic at the Roadshow. SMS sign in offers users a Single Sign-On experience, and you don’t need a Teams licence to implement it.

 

Overall, the Ignite Tour shows Microsoft’s continued commitment to innovation. Microsoft is truly an industry leader, offering security, identity, and communication solutions for all aspects of businesses, from the office, to the first line. The high standard of Florida’s Ignite event has held strong with this Roadshow, so if the event comes to a city near you, be sure to check it out.

For more information about Florida’s MS Ignite event, click here.

 

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we work with Microsoft solutions to enable organisations to migrate to the cloud securely. If you’d like to know more about our security, identity, and access solutions, please contact a member of our team.

 

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