Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast

Welcome to Episode 437 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Nick Burling, Chief Product Officer at Nasuni, joins Ben and Scott to talk about getting unstructured file data ready for AI. Nick digs into why 70 to 80 percent of enterprise data sits in file shares and object storage, how that data tends to end up ungoverned and risky to point AI at, and Nasuni’s PSYCHIC framework for making it proprietary, secure, current, indexed, hybrid, and continuous. The conversation covers Nasuni’s AI Activate, the MCP based service that enforces permissions before a query ever runs, and the recent DryvIQ acquisition, which adds content classification, redaction, and policy enforcement on top of that index.

They also get into where this overlaps with Purview and Copilot’s own indexing, how DriveIQ reads and respects Microsoft’s existing sensitivity labels, and why 97 percent of orgs are piloting AI agents while only 43 percent call those projects successful. Nick closes with practical advice for anyone evaluating a platform like this: pick one high value use case, define success metrics up front, and keep the initial scope small.

Discosure: This is a sponsor interview with Nasuni who is a sponsor of the podcast.

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Show Notes

https://www.nasuni.com/

Nasuni Research Finds 97% of Enterprises Are Adopting AI Agents, Yet Most Projects Fail to Meet Objectives

Nasuni Acquires DryvIQ, Enabling Organizations to Classify, Secure, and Activate Unstructured Data to Unlock AI Business Value

Nasuni Research Finds 97% of Enterprises Are Adopting AI Agents, Yet Most Projects Fail to Meet Objectives

Expanding Purview DLP and Information Protection to Foreign Platforms

Nasuni Resources

Nasuni News

AI Program Success

Related episodes:

Episode 431: Agent Governance Is the New App Governance

Episode 429: Getting started with LLM Wikis

About our guest

Nick Burling is Chief Product Officer at Nasuni, where he leads the company’s product strategy at the intersection of enterprise data management, cloud infrastructure, and AI. He is responsible for shaping Nasuni’s vision for how organizations manage, protect, and activate unstructured data for enterprise teams and AI at scale. This includes expanding the company’s capabilities for continuous cost optimization and protection, while empowering compounding workforce productivity through AI-optimized unstructured data.
An accomplished product executive and entrepreneur, Nick brings deep experience translating technology innovation and market shifts into clear strategic advantage. His career spans leadership roles at Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft and IBM, as well as early-stage ventures he has guided from launch through successful exit. At Nasuni, he leads the teams defining how enterprises will manage and act on unstructured data in an AI-driven world. Learn more about Nick at Forbes on their Technology Council Profile.

Sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 436 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott dive into Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance. Almost nobody runs one Microsoft Entra tenant. Mergers, divestitures, dev and test environments, regional partitioning, that one AI proof-of-concept somebody spun up on a credit card. Organizations accumulate tenants the way they accumulate SharePoint sites. The difference is that nobody ever built an inventory of the tenants, and central IT frequently cannot name them, let alone say whether they are configured safely.

Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance, now generally available, is Microsoft’s first-party answer. It is genuinely four products under one blade: it finds the tenants you did not know about, gives you a least-privilege way to administer them without local accounts, monitors their configuration for drift against a JSON baseline, and gates the creation of new ones so the next tenant is governed from birth.

Your support makes this show possible! Please consider becoming a premium member for access to live shows and more. Check out our membership options.

Show Notes

Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance is now generally available

What is Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance?

Deploy Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance end to end

Related tenants in Tenant Governance

Licensing for Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance

Sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 435 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott take a lap around what’s new in Power BI, starting with the two MCP servers now in preview, one local and one remote, that can clean up your data model, write DAX for you, and turn a messy pile of tables into an actual usable semantic model. Ben shares how it helped him tame a 44 table QuickBooks Online mess, and why he had way better luck with it than with Copilot in Power BI.

From there they get into PBIP, the newer Power BI project file format that breaks a report into files you can actually put in Git and collaborate on like real developers, branches, rollbacks, and all. It has been in preview since 2023 and still lacks solid guidance from Microsoft on wiring up CI/CD, but Ben and Scott dig into why it is worth adopting anyway, even if you are working solo.

Your support makes this show possible! Please consider becoming a premium member for access to live shows and more. Check out our membership options.

Show Notes

Overview of the Power BI MCP servers (Preview)

Power BI Desktop projects Git integration

Power BI Modeling MCP Server

Episode 90 – Power BI and Data Democratization with Alexander Arvidsson

Episode 287 – Power BI Field Parameters and Microsoft Entra

Optimize your semantic model for Copilot in Power BI

Power BI Desktop projects (PREVIEW)

Power BI Desktop projects Git integration

Power BI projects, Git, and Team Collaboration

Sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 434 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. Microsoft announced Project Perception on 2026-07-27 with a lot of “workforce of AI agents” language. In this episode, Ben and Scott discuss what Perception really is, what it needs from your tenant, what it costs, and what happens the first time an agent asks you to approve something. Six agents. Seven playbooks. Every one manually triggered. Each agent gets its own Entra Agent ID and a permission grant. There’s a lot to unpack.

Your support makes this show possible! Please consider becoming a premium member for access to live shows and more. Check out our membership options.

Show Notes

Save $200 at TechCon365 with code Ben200: https://www.techcon365.com/Seattle/

What is Project Perception?

How Nationwide stays ahead of attackers with Project Perception

Key concepts in Project Perception

Agent categories in Project Perception

Microsoft Security Copilot Security Compute Units and capacity

Work with playbooks in Project Perception

Prior podcast context

Ep 431: Agent Governance Is the New App Governance

Ep 419: Security and AI 

Ep 416 and Ep 412 

Ep 406: Agents of Insight 

Ep 377: Microsoft Copilot for Security 

Sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 433 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott discuss how Microsoft 365 authentication is moving from “make passwords safer with MFA” to “remove phishable authentication wherever possible.” The practical conversation for IT pros is no longer just whether MFA is enabled. It is which methods are allowed, which users are still on SMS or voice, how passkeys change the user experience, and how to balance security, accessibility, recovery, and support load.

Your support makes this show possible! Please consider becoming a premium member for access to live shows and more. Check out our membership options.

Show Notes

Passkeys were supposed to replace passwords, but they’re failing for the most predictable reason

Microsoft Entra authentication overview

Passkeys by default and retirement of Microsoft-provided SMS and voice authentication

Plan a phishing-resistant passwordless authentication deployment in Microsoft Entra ID

Run a registration campaign to set up a passkey or Microsoft Authenticator

Practical Protection: Understanding Entra ID and Passkeys

Important Change Coming for Entra ID Passkeys in November 2025

Microsoft to Stop Providing Telephony-Based Authentication Methods for MFA in February 2027

How to enable passkeys (FIDO2) in Microsoft Entra ID

Sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!