Monday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 447-448

Data Protection, Collaboration, and User Engagement: Assisting Your Organization in Doing it All

With the ever-changing cloud landscape, organizations struggle to help their employees collaborate and be effective in their day-to-day responsibilities. Adding data protection and security could raise the difficulty even more, as the business needs to balance the ability to collaborate while keeping its information and users safe. Ensuring user engagement and adoption is fundamental to success.

In this workshop, David and Sarah will cover the design and implementation of Microsoft 365's collaboration tools, such as SharePoint, Teams, Viva Engage, and more, while ensuring the solution is safe, secure, and fully collaborative. They'll help you understand how you can work together to protect your organization's information and employees in a manner that encourages endorsement from those using the tools.

Tuesday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 343-344

Advanced Data Protection Strategies with SQL Server: A Hands-on Workshop

This workshop equips developers and database professionals with the practical skills needed to implement robust data protection in their SQL Server environments. It creates systems where sensitive information remains secure even from privileged users like database administrators.

Through structured, hands-on exercises, participants will:

Discover and Classify sensitive data using SQL Server's built-in tools—establishing the foundation for a comprehensive security strategy

Implement Column-Level Protection through Dynamic Data Masking and Always Encrypted, including advanced scenarios with secure enclaves that maintain query performance while protecting data confidentiality

Deploy Row-Level Security to enforce granular access controls based on user context, ensuring proper data isolation and visibility

Establish Audit Trails to monitor and track all interactions with classified data, supporting compliance requirements and enabling security incident investigations

Throughout the day, participants will progressively build a secured database and a .NET web application, integrating each security feature into a cohesive solution. By the session's end, attendees will have developed a proof-of-concept that demonstrates enterprise-grade data protection techniques that satisfy security requirements while maintaining application functionality.

Wednesday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 337-339

Master your Microsoft Environments: Manage, Secure and Recover to Reduce Complexity

As Microsoft environments continue to grow, so does the complexity of managing them. IT teams must oversee an expanding mix of users, endpoints, identities, cloud workloads and security controls across multiple dashboards and disconnected tools — all while defending against increasingly sophisticated and fast-moving cyber threats. Join this educational workshop to learn 8 winning strategies for simplifying your Microsoft operations, strengthening security and improving recovery. The session focuses on real operational challenges, common blind spots and actionable steps IT teams can take to make Microsoft environments easier to manage, harder to compromise and faster to recover. Attendees will discover how to: Centralize visibility across Microsoft users, devices, identities and cloud resources. Automate routine management and security tasks to improve efficiency and accelerate response. Connect email, identity, endpoint and cloud telemetry to detect and contain threats faster. Recover Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Azure and collaboration workloads quickly, after ransomware, accidental deletion or malicious changes. You'll leave this event with practical strategies to reduce operational silos, strengthen your security posture, automate key response workflows and accelerate recovery across your Microsoft environment.

Wednesday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 435-436

Operationalize Your Purview Security Alerts: Practical Strategies for Sustainable Security Operation

Many organizations deploy Microsoft Purview only to find themselves overwhelmed by alert volumes and they struggle with operational sustainability. This session tackles the real-world challenges of Microsoft Purview alert management, exploring common issues like false positive overload, limited staffing, and inefficient triage workflows. Alert review, management, and mitigation are crucial parts of a successful security strategy and Purview implementation, and this presentation provides the practical strategies needed to get there. We'll share proven approaches for tuning alert policies, establishing effective triage procedures, and building processes that scale with your team's capacity. Attendees will gain concrete guidance on transforming their alert management from a source of frustration into an effective security operation that delivers real value.

Thursday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 433-434

Top 10 Microsoft 365 Security Best Practices Every Organization Should Implement

In this fast-paced session, I'll take you through my top 10 security best practices when it comes to Microsoft 365. While Microsoft secures a portion of their cloud, there is still responsibility and configuration you need to do within your tenant. We'll take a look at everything from simply what they are to what licensing considerations might come into play to why you should implement them. You'll come away from this session with specific security improvements you can make in your organization's Microsoft 365 environment to improve the security of your tenant and the data contained within it!

Thursday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 345-346

Advanced Data Protection Strategies with Azure SQL

Organizations handle increasing amounts of growth with their sensitive data. Data engineers must protect their data from external attackers, application users, and even privileged employees like database administrators.

This session will teach you how to protect your data while maintaining functionality and performance. You will leave this session knowing how and why column-level encryption, row-level security, and auditing are keys to securing your data.

Thursday 11:40 AM - 12:50 PM · Room 433-434

AI Gone Wild? Purview and Defender to the Rescue!

In a world where AI is rapidly transforming business operations and enhancing productivity, organizations face the critical challenge of balancing the innovation that AI brings with the security risks it can impose. This session will illustrate how Microsoft Purview and Defender can be harnessed to protect against the risks associated with AI usage while still allowing users to leverage AI tools effectively.

Join your data protection experts as they provide an in-depth overview of Purview and Defender, focusing on the platform’s AI governance capabilities. Through real-world use cases, they will demonstrate how these platforms can be deployed and configured to mitigate specific risks without stifling AI innovation. Attendees will learn how to implement practical strategies to control AI-driven processes while maintaining operational efficiency.

Join us to discover how to make AI safe, secure, and sustainable without sacrificing its powerful potential!

Thursday 2:00 PM - 3:10 PM · Room 433-434

Locked Down, Leaking Out: Why Blocking External Sharing in Microsoft 365 Can Be More Dangerous

In today’s hybrid and hyper-connected workplace, collaboration rarely stops at the organization's borders. Employees work with external partners, vendors, contractors, and clients daily. Yet, in the name of security, many organizations take the drastic step of blocking external sharing in Microsoft 365 altogether. It seems safe on the surface. If you don’t let people share externally, your data stays inside, right? Not quite.

Friday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 433-434

Implementing Microsoft 365 Data Loss Prevention. A Real World Approach

As more and more organizations' content is stored in cloud locations, it can become further at risk for accidental or malicious misuse. Users make good use of cloud collaboration features to share documents with others. Information contained within documents or even the intended recipient of the files may not be properly considered before transmission. This can often lead to data loss and poses significant risks to the organization. To protect against the loss of data control, organizations are looking for solutions that protect the data when it is shared.

Join David as he takes a practical approach to understand data loss prevention techniques and capabilities available within Microsoft 365. David will also provide a real-world approach to implementing the technologies with a strong consideration of the balance of protection and user experience.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 433-434

Locking Down Microsoft 365 with Conditional Access!

In an era of increasing cyber threats and hybrid work, IT administrators play a pivotal role in securing access to organizational resources. With Microsoft 365, how you secure access to resources has changed. Microsoft 365’s Conditional Access is a cornerstone of modern identity and access management, enabling you to enforce policies to secure access to Microsoft 365 without compromising productivity.

This session is designed for admins looking to strengthen their Microsoft 365 security posture and dive headfirst into conditional access. In this demo-packed session, we’ll explore how to build and manage Conditional Access policies to protect against various scenarios.

Whether you're deploying Conditional Access for the first time or optimizing an existing setup, this session will give you the practical insights and tools you need to lock down Microsoft 365—smartly and securely.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 425

Roundtable Discussion - Data Security and Security for AI

Join us for an engaging and informal gathering where participants delve into topics that matter to them. Roundtable Discussions are a space for sharing ideas, perspectives, and experiences with other attendees. Pull up a chair, and let’s exchange insights!