Skip to main content
search
0
Category

Events

New Year, New OSes: Windows Server 2022 and Windows 11

By Events

It’s our last meeting of the year and Microsoft’s been saying “new year, new me” with Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022. Join Mirazon’s CTO Brent Earls and Mirazon’s Systems Engineer Dustin Lamkin as they walk us through the high level on changes and new features.

Brent will cover Windows Server 2022:

  • Versions
  • Security
  • Azure
  • Containers
  • Storage Migration Service new features
  • Storage Spaces Direct Improvements
  • Random improvements

Dustin will cover Windows 11:

  • Versions
  • Security
  • Hardware compatibility/requirements
  • New look/feel
  • “Under the hood” improvements

About the Presenters

Brent Earls

Mirazon

CTO

Brent Earls is the Chief Technical Officer at Mirazon, a Louisville-based IT consulting company. He has a bachelor’s in Computer Information Systems from the University of Louisville College of Business and a trail of other letters in his professional credentials, such as VCAP, MCSE and MCSA.
On any given day, Brent may be designing highly available storage area networks for a prominent university and then pivoting to helping a coworker troubleshoot a printer problem at a small local firm – a day in the life of a Mirazon engineer is varied. In his spare time, he enjoys woodworking, and he’s currently building out a full library in his home office, complete with track lighting and a murphy bed.

Dustin Lamkin

Mirazon

Systems Engineer

 

Dustin Lamkin started as a systems engineer at Mirazon in August of 2020. Dustin’s love for fixing things and helping people drew him to IT and he’s been in the industry for nearly two decades. He’s certified in a wide range of technologies, like Microsoft, CompTIA, AWS and Dell.

Dustin has two kids (a boy and a girl) and a spunky labradoodle. He has a ton of hobbies, including but not limited to: RC trucks, drones, 3D printing, mountain biking, and camping.

Intune: Microsoft Endpoint Manager’s Other White Meat

By Events

We’re meeting early this month to make way for Thanksgiving. But first, let’s talk about the other other white meat from Microsoft Endpoint Manager: Intune.

Bellarmine’s Principal Solutions Architect Tony Morrow will talk us through how they are embracing Intune and Microsoft’s other cloud-based tools to deploy software, configure settings, and secure devices (regardless of if they’re sitting on an office desk or traveling around the world).

For over two decades, Microsoft’s endpoint management solution has been Configuration Manager and is excellent for environments where devices are connected to the corporate network. However, the rise of mobile, BYOD, and remote workers has changed the management landscape, and with that, Microsoft introduced Intune. Intune is a cloud-based service that focuses on mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM). You control how your organization’s devices are used, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. You can also configure specific policies to control applications. On personal devices, Intune helps make sure your organization’s data stays protected and can isolate organization data from personal data.

About the Presenter

 

Tony Morrow

Bellarmine University

Principal Solutions Architect

Tony is the Principal Solutions Architect at Bellarmine University’s Information Technology Department. With 10 years of experience he is considered a jack-of-all-trades, assisting with managing the University’s network, security, and wireless infrastructure; server and virtual environment; and designs solutions using PowerShell whenever possible. Tony is an avid technology nerd and race car fan with more knowledge than any one person should have.

Detection and Response

By Events

Join us on Friday, October 29 at 11:30AM EST for BOOMUG, the Halloween version of our monthly meeting.

Wear a costume and display it on video during the meeting and get a second entry in our prize raffle!
Mirazon’s NOC/SOC Manager Tim Lewis will be talking about the mystery and intrigue around _DR products, like EDR, XDR, MDR and NDR.
We’ll cover…

The threat landscape and why this is necessary:

  • Some stats
  • The short-comings of traditional AV
  • “Detection & Response” as a concept and how it differs

The different kinds of “Detection & Response” offerings & what they do:

  • EDR (endpoint detection & response)
  • NDR (network detection & response)
  • XDR (extended detection & response)
  • MDR (managed detection & response)

What to look for when shopping:

  • Dependencies
  • What they will/will not do
  • Set up
  • SLAs

About the Presenter

Tim Lewis

Mirazon

NOC/SOC Manager

Tim Lewis has been an Information Technology consultant since 2003 and with Mirazon since 2007, working in the network, systems, storage, virtualization and security space. He currently manages Mirazon’s Network and Security Operation Centers. In his spare time he enjoys backpacking, fitness and movies.

Running Effective Teams Meetings

By Events
Does the Teams jingle make you cringe? Do you feel like you’re strapped to your chair all day, staring at pixelated faces and feeling your energy drain away?

Let’s discuss that!Join Daryl Hunter from Microsoft as we explore effective Teams meetings. Whether you’re still working from home, fully back to an office, or some mixture of both, this is for you.

A few topics we’ll cover are:

  • Mindful teamwork
  • Effective meeting lifecycles
  • Accessibility
  • Meeting fatigue
  • and some hardware goodies thrown in for good measure

About the Presenter

 

Daryl Hunter

Microsoft

Customer Success

Daryl Hunter is part of the Microsoft Customer Success Organization. His role in Modern Work Tech Strategy is focused on driving the best voice and meeting experiences for our customers. He has been a part of the Unified Communications ecosystem for 20+ years, loves talking about telephony, speaks native SIP, and is totally not a robot. Daryl is excited to return as a LouMUG speaker this year after washing off the rotten tomatoes thrown at him last time

HA: Laugh in the Face of Disaster

By Events

Laugh in the face of disaster and unplanned downtime with a solid HA and DR plan. Join us Friday, August 20 at 11:30 AM EST. We’ll be having our *first* hybrid meeting where Mirazon CTO Brent Earls will take us through high availability, disaster recovery and all that’s in between. In-person attendance is limited to 50 seats but virtual attendance will be unlimited!

Brent will cover:

  • Definitions​
  • Continuity​
  • Redundancy​
  • Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)
  • Recovery Time Objectives (RTO)
  • High Availability (HA)​
  • Disaster Recovery (DR)
  • How HA, backups and DR are a spectrum and each organization lands at a different place.
  • How to identify single points of failure in each, and how to mitigate them.
  • Extra-IT concerns​

About the Presenter

 

Brent Earls

Mirazon

CTO

Brent Earls is the Chief Technical Officer at Mirazon, a Louisville-based IT consulting company. He has a bachelor’s in Computer Information Systems from the University of Louisville College of Business and a trail of other letters in his professional credentials, such as VCAP, MCSE and MCSA.

On any given day, Brent may be designing highly available storage area networks for a prominent university and then pivoting to helping a coworker troubleshoot a printer problem at a small local firm – a day in the life of a Mirazon engineer is varied. In his spare time, he enjoys woodworking, and he’s currently building out a full library in his home office, complete with track lighting and a murphy bed.

Summer Social

By Events

We’ve missed seeing your smiling faces! Join us for a social mixer at 3rd Turn Oldham Gardens on July 29 from 4:30 until 7:00PM. We’ll have refreshments and appetizers provided, sponsored by our friends at RUCKUS. We will be hanging out on the back patio in the open air. Can’t wait to see everyone!

Let’s encrypt with Let’s Encrypt!

By Events

Over the past several years the cert industry has reduced the length a certificate can be issued from multi-year to just 13 months (thanks, Apple ☹). That’s lead to more work on our part in making sure certificates get replaced on a regular basis. One method to reducing the work is to automate the process. And if we’re automating the process, why not use the free certificates available from Let’s Encrypt instead of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to companies like IdenTrust, DigiCert or GoDaddy?

So join Bellarmine’s Principal Solutions Architect Tony Morrow for a brief overview of Let’s Encrypt, and show how to use PowerShell tools written by the community to request and deploy certificates to servers.

About the Presenter

 

Tony Morrow

Bellarmine University

Principal Solutions Architect

Tony is the Principal Solutions Architect at Bellarmine University’s Information Technology Department. With 10 years of experience he is considered a jack-of-all-trades, assisting with managing the University’s network, security, and wireless infrastructure; server and virtual environment; and designs solutions using PowerShell whenever possible. Tony is an avid technology nerd and race car fan with more knowledge than any one person should have.

Ransomware Proofing

By Events

Protecting Your Baby

Babyproofing your house involves locking up or padding a lot of stuff — probably more than you’d ever realize. As soon as they start crawling and walking, they get into EVERYTHING, and that’s not unlike ransomware.

Ransomware attacks are becoming more sophisticated every day, programmed to seek and destroy your backups, prod and find small holes to gain entry to even the most critical of systems, and install sneaky programs that can resist being erased and avoid detection.

So join Mirazon’s engineers Kyle Haas and Rance Reinhardt as we discuss what to protect and what to account for, so you can prevent ransomware from taking you down.

About the Presenters

Kyle Haas

Mirazon

System Engineer

Systems Engineer Kyle Haas has been with Mirazon for four years. After graduating from Bellarmine University and working as a food scientist, he realized his true passion was with technology. After consulting with small businesses independently for a few years, he joined the Mirazon team.

Now Kyle spends his days administering Windows and virtualization environments and on the odd and unfortunate occasion, slaying ransomware.

In his spare time, Kyle makes a mean fermented hot sauce (among other tasty adventures left over from his food scientist days). He also has a deep interest in the German language and culture and lived abroad there.

Rance Reinhardt

Mirazon

Network Engineer

Network Engineer Rance Reinhardt joined Mirazon six years ago, after a short stint with the US Army and a tour in Afghanistan. Technology had its hold on Rance for nearly his whole life, beginning with a Gateway 2000 and Windows 3.1. He detoured into audio engineering for a while, and still does that on the side with his musical side projects, but he really hit his stride with network engineering when he joined the military.

He has experience in SD-WAN implementation, planning and design through third parties like Velo or through direct configuration on Fortinet products. Rance spends most of his days troubleshooting and supporting multisite network design and implementations. He also is 8570.1 DoD Compliant IAT II & IAM I with DISA and TNSOC experience.

Rance has a 12-year-old daughter named Zoe and he loves to travel with her. They’re currently dreaming up a big trip to Japan.

Are You Down with AAD?

By Events

Azure AD is Amazing! Let’s Talk About Using It.

Microsoft 365 offers a ton of features and functionality with Azure AD. Join Microsoft Cloud Architect Josh Gatewood this month as he breaks down how to use it: creating users and dynamic groups, SAML and roles, myapplications, password management, ADFS vs Azure AD Connect and more!

About the Presenter

 

Josh Gatewood

Patriot Consulting Tech

Senior Microsoft Cloud Security Solutions Architect

Josh is a Senior Microsoft Cloud Security Solutions Architect at Patriot Consulting Tech. He works to help clients review and harden their cloud security posture and performs training for companies on products within the Microsoft stack.

Josh has over 15 years working complex enterprise IT administration and is passionate about how Azure is the best of all the clouds. Additionally, Josh has a Masters from Sullivan and is multi-cloud certified from both GCP and Azure. In his free time, you can find him running at Beckley or volunteering in the community. He goes to Adventure Christian church in Jeffersontown Kentucky and has a dog name Ellie.

SHAREpoint, not SCAREpoint!

By Events

If you cringe at the word “SharePoint” from on-premises nightmares past, get ready to experience a near-dreamlike ease with SharePoint in the cloud!

Microsoft 365 is a behemoth of a subscription with many applications and benefits, which for any one user can be too much to keep up with. Let’s clear up some of the more useful, basic functionalities: SharePoint and PowerAutomate. Join Mirazon’s dynamic duo, John and Billie Ross as they stand up some PowerAutomate functions and create a SharePoint site on the fly.

This will not be a technical presentation, so invite your business users! And if you cringe at the word “SharePoint” from on-premises nightmares past, get ready to experience a near-dreamlike ease with SharePoint in the cloud!

But wait! There’s more! For you techies, they will also be speaking for about 10 minutes on HOW SharePoint interplays with Teams, OneDrive, Office 365 Groups and portal pages. This will save you tons of time in the long run understanding what is going on under the cover.

About the Presenters

Billie Ross
Mirazon
Special Projects Coordinator

Billie Ross has been with Mirazon for over ten years, first working in office administration and project management. She is now Mirazon’s subject matter expert in Modern SharePoint.

Billie helps clients organize and lay out conversions to SharePoint sites as a means of internal information sharing, communication and collaboration, as well as builds custom intranet portals for the customer.

John Ross
Mirazon
Partner and Co-founder

John Ross is one of the founding owners of Mirazon. He enjoys technology, auto racing of all types and non-fiction books.

Lately, John’s been able to choose to work on a couple of things he wanted to do as opposed to things that have to be done. One of those things is planning out internal portal and Microsoft Teams infrastructures, and helping organizations begin automating some basic business processes.

Since John knows firsthand what it is like starting and then running a small business, the small things can make a huge difference in taming the chaos and helping the organization move forward.