RunAs Radio Richard Campbell

What is your approach to incident management? While at NDC London, Richard talks to Hila Fish about her work in incident management. Hila talks about understanding when you have an incident and trying to grasp the scope before acting - is it impacting customer value? The goal is to learn from an incident to stop them from happening, and often immediate mitigations, like rebooting, destroy information needed for later analysis. Making the dashboard lights turn green is not enough - you want to get to a place where they never turn red!

Ready to go passwordless? While at NDC in London, Richard chatted with Kyle Kotowick about the FIDO2 specification and how it is being implemented to provide more passwordless options for authentication. Kyle talks about how FIDO2 does not necessarily mean physical keys like the Yubikey - there are more options! The TPM chip in your PC or smartphone can act as the token generator when combined with a second authenticator, like fingerprint or facial recognition in Windows Hello. Ideally, this superior level of authentication is effortless - you use multifactor without even realizing you are!

Managing reliability means being available when things go wrong. But how do you make the on-call time productive? While at NDC in London, Richard talked to Lesley Cordero about her work with the New York Times on reliability management teams. Lesley talks about how putting regular sprint work into on-call time causes more problems than it solves - the quality of work suffers, and people get frustrated. Better to focus on preventative work, which is more contemplative. Even better to have an array of preventive efforts that can be worked on over time. The goal is to have fewer outages and more reliability, and that means being able to communicate reliability needs to leadership - document all the things!

Are you ready to move your organization to Windows 11? Richard talks to Michael Niehaus about the upcoming end of support for Windows 10 in 2025 and the pressure to get to Windows 11. Michael talks about how slow Windows 11 adoption has been, mainly because there hasn't been a significant reason to do so. But as of October 14, 2025, organizations will have to pay for long-term support - and it's cheaper to move to Windows 11. The conversation digs into how Microsoft seems to be updating Windows 11, deployment strategies, and the optimal ways to move your workforce to a new operating system.

How do you improve the security of your organization? Richard talks to Jess Dodson about the current security environment we're living in and what you can do to improve your security posture. Jess talks about how breaches happen and what you can do to detect them early before things get worse. The conversation dives into getting more resources - in most cases, improving security means having the time to work on preventative measures, like implementing multi-factor authentication, security information and event management, and setting up Just Enough Administration. And you need the time to review the activities in your network to let you stop a breach before it turns into something worse!

How about a free suite of over 500 tools for SQL Server best practices, administration, development, and migration? Richard talks to Rob Sewell about the ever-growing dbatools PowerShell module. While its origins are in migrating SQL Server databases from one environment (and version) to another, the range of capabilities is extensive. Rob talks about the power of repeatability when attempting to do these potentially complex tasks - which is best served by scripting. But why write the scripts when they already exist? The conversation also digs into learning as a DBA, including getting involved with conferences like SQLBits!