THE PROMPT for Microsoft Security - Issue #77
Layoffs hit harder than a Sentinel alert... but Maester's got our backs
Things from Me
Latest Microsoft Articles
Important - Consolidating My Substacks: A Fresh Start for "THE PROMPT for Microsoft Security"
It just feels right.
Hey everyone,
Entra 🆔 News #155 → This week in Microsoft Entra
Learn about new Entra + Purview features and more!
👋 Hi, Merill and Joshua here with this week’s roundup of the latest news on Microsoft Entra from around the globe 🌍.
Entra 🆔 News #156 → This week in Microsoft Entra
Learn about Entra Backup and Recovery going GA, public preview of custom extensions for PIM and more!
👋 Hi, Merill and Joshua here with this week’s roundup of the latest news on Microsoft Entra from around the globe 🌍.
Adios Microsoft!
Thanks for a phenomenal start to my career
I submitted my badge and laptop last week at Microsoft, and it was one of the toughest goodbyes I’ve ever had to bid.
Microsoft: Undervalued & Undisruptable!
Sometimes the best opportunities hide in plain sight. Microsoft is one of them.
Chris Hohn once said: “Good companies are likely to remain good, and bad companies are just bad.”
Kalaiarasan
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6d
Thoroughly researched and well presented thesis. Kudos. 👍
Thierry from arvy
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5d
Excellent piece Oguz! I wont touch MAFT for the moment and stay in the camp: AI eats Software…
Why Networking is the #1 Most Critical Skill in Microsoft Azure
Cloud adoption is moving at a breakneck pace, but with that speed comes a level of complexity that many organizations are unprepared to handle. In the modern era, networks are no longer just a collection of cables, switches, and physical routers. They are software-defined, automated, globally distributed, and expected to be secure from the very first se…
[Strategy Breakdowns #9] Microsoft Corporation
How Microsoft is turning enterprise distribution, Azure, Copilot, identity, security, and AI infrastructure into a strategic position in the agentic AI era.
What follows is a strategy memo examining Microsoft through recent earnings performance, industry structure, activity systems, strategic opportunities, and emerging threats.
From Windows Core to Leading Agent ID: Vince Smith’s Microsoft Story
Inside Entra: The Real Reason Microsoft Created Agent ID
Folks, every big thing in identity started as somebody’s late-night side quest and Vince Smith has been in the room for a lot of them.
How Microsoft Wasted id Software
Microsoft is the king of wasted potential.
Back in the early 2000s, it seemed that every third game used the Quake 3 engine. It still puzzles me that id lost that dominant position so quickly and has been out of the engine game for so many years now. I wonder what happened. After all, id tech is clearly at least as good as Unreal and Unity.
Microsoft has become too big to run studios like id Software.
Too many 'business' graduates making poor decisions have led to many studios being shuttered simply because the behemoth corporation is incapable of letting the studios just do what they do best, be creative and make the games they want to play.
Microsoft, Fitch, and FSA's New Reality
The Ecosystem: AI expands inside Microsoft 365, private college finances weaken, and new federal loan flexibility reaches campuses
The Ecosystem: Weekly Strategic Signals for Decision-Makers Serving Colleges, Universities, and Systems.
Microsoft enables Windows backup by default
Microsoft has announced that the Windows settings backup and restore tool will be enabled by default on enterprise systems after upgrading to Windows 11 version 26H2. The change affects devices that …
How to Automate M365 Security Using Microsoft Graph API
Your security dashboard is green. Your policies are in place, alerts are flowing, and your team is monitoring the environment. To any outside observer, everything looks fine. But in reality, that dashboard is a snapshot of a world that no longer exists. With hundreds of applications and thousands of identities, most security teams are operating on a gov…
Weekly Wrap Sheet (06/19/2026): The Stack and the Staff
Microsoft builds platforms, Meta breaks morale
🎮 TL;DR
AI: Amazon-Anthropic relationship evolving. AI-RTZ #1133
...like Microsoft-OpenAI not so long ago
Anthropic is trying out a power move this AI Tech Wave, with one of its earliest strategic partners, Amazon. Changing how it chartes Amazon AWS and its customers for its latest models, in a la carte tokens, vs hourly or time based pricing. It’s a financially advantageous approach
Moving Amazon from compute-hours to per-token pricing flips who carries the cost risk. On hourly billing the cloud provider eats the inefficiency; on tokens the customer pays for every wasteful generation, so the meter now runs in Anthropic's favor. Amazon pushed back and says the new terms won't raise its costs, so who actually gained ground here isn't settled yet. Still, a backer shopping its own Nova models and OpenAI as a hedge tells you the partnership is less locked-in than the original investment implied.
Attackers Are Targeting The AI Ecosystem You Cannot See
Practical AI threat intelligence playbook
AI agent security is not just about attackers using AI.
Happy Voluntary Lobotomy Day, Microsoft
Take steps to retain your company’s wisdom
There is a phrase we have used at Microsoft for decades: “Resting and vesting.” It refers to the subset of the employee population that has stopped making a difference and are, instead, just focused on sticking around longer so that more of their stock awards vest. These individuals are pretty easy to spot. Surrounded by people working hard and putting …
I hate to "heart" this because I dont love what's happened, but I support your wisdom and observations.
Great, if painful, post. One of the casualties of this AI trench warfare is the human aspect of our craft. As a manager (whose initials are Jeff Bogdan) one sagely told me: "we hire employees for their brains, but the whole person shows up for work." We're told the unending stream of RIFs/VRPs/what-have-you is to fund the AI buildout. So it's not about productivity per se. I can accept that. But this all reminds me of a foolish decision I made as a kid - when I sold the trumpet I had inherited from my father, and which we both played, for its scrap brass value. Assets must be liquidated and/or liabilities cut to fund capex adventures. But the attendant sacrifices here - the institutional knowledge, the collegial atmosphere, the mentor/apprenticeship relationships, the honorable endings - have left many of us feeling that the craft is gone, replaced with pure utilitarian optimization.
Microsoft Build 2026: Top Announcements for Agent Developers
Issue #66 | How do we get LLM Agents to Plan, Review and Monitor Progress on complex tasks?
Developer conferences - while extremely energizing (all of the new announcements, the labs, the learning), can be quite challenging to navigate - there’s alot.
Useful walk-through, and the "what was missing, what landed, what's at parity" frame is the right way to read 460 sessions. The thread I'd surface: the consequential launches aren't the models, they're the isolation and governance primitives, and they answer a problem the rest of the stack creates.
Once you have hosted agents running arbitrary code, managed memory they write to, and MCP/A2A endpoints, failures stop being SRE-shaped and turn trust-boundary-shaped: untrusted execution, write paths into memory, tool calls with authority. So the untrusted-code sandboxes, the least-privilege Execution Containers SDK, and the Gateway logging every tool call are what I'd lead with, defense-in-depth as product. Two boundary questions in that spirit: does memory's "remember/forget" CRUD go through a verification gate or can the agent mutate its own memory freely (unconstrained writes are how persistent memory rots silently), and does Gateway model-fallback flag that it fails over to a different trust profile, different refusals and blind spots, making routing a security decision, not just uptime.
Worth pressing because you've got a great posture, agent-as-untrusted by default, and those are the two seams where it either holds or quietly leaks. The parity read is the most clarifying I've seen on where Azure sits now.
Microsoft
Important Microsoft Account Update
Why Microsoft is Moving Into a Lower Margin Business?
Microsoft spent $2.5 billion to enter an analog, hard to scale business, SpaceX is entering a $740 billion cell market with no phone, and Europe is choosing 175K heat deaths over AC agita.
The Wall Street Journal covers companies. Pirate Street Journal cover categories.
Europe won't allow citizens to use AC because they are totally consumed by Net Zero, therefore their energy costs are the highest in the world. That's the insanity. They cling to a claim that reducing their 1% impact on global climate can actually make a difference in global climate change. If they bring their impact down to Net Zero or 0% impact on global climate change, that will not make a damn bit of difference in global climate change. It's insane ideology that is killing people.
Microsoft Cloud Rebuild enables PC recovery without local Wi
Microsoft has introduced Cloud Rebuild, a new recovery feature that enables Windows 11 PCs to be completely reimaged without requiring physical installation media or relying on the existing operating…
Microsoft and Xbox: Unwinding the Game Pass bet
Xbox is focusing on its platforms, Minecraft and King, now reporting to the CEO, and its biggest AAA franchises.
TL;DR Sadly, the cuts we expected in June have landed: 3,200 roles through FY27 and five studios divested. Those cuts, and a tighter process for funding games, are aimed at a margin that runs far below the rest of Microsoft.
Google and Microsoft Set New Emissions High Scores in Another Net Zero Fail
Google and Microsoft now emit more than entire states
“It’s not who emits that counts, but who counts the emissions,” -Joseph Stalin, European Union Minister for Climate Change and the Environment, 2026.
I bet if they grease government hands they won't care about emissions either. Especially Australia's Chris Bowen!
Thanks for the great analysis, EBB. Google and Microsoft could still keep their net zero promise if they paid for the carbon offset and credit indulgences they did use to some degree in the past. That would be about $1.5 billion per year. Why don’t they?
Microsoft Graph API: From IT Tool to Strategic Asset
Most Microsoft 365 administrators follow a predictable pattern: they interact with three primary Graph endpoints, Users, Groups, and Teams, and then they stop. While these are essential, they represent only the tip of a massive iceberg. Beneath the surface lies an entire ecosystem that most organizations never touch: reporting APIs, audit logs, identity…
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