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Where have I been?

Busy with work mostly. After I last posted in 2019, I got very busy launching a proactive lateral movement risk assessment tool called “Impact” at Tanium. Then the pandemic hit, which put my public speaking adventures on pause, but didn’t make things any less busy. I, along with several colleagues, successfully launched Impact in June of 2020, and I transitioned from the Director of Product Management role I had at the time, to a Senior Director SME Lead role.

2020-2023

For the next couple years, I’d be responsible for as many as 6 products at once (Impact, Integrity Monitor, Reveal, Comply, and Risk), plus 4 shared services/components (Criticality, Directory Query, Index, and Recorder). As you can imagine, that much responsibility leaves little time for things like blogging.

Fast forward to November of 2022, a reorg changes my title to Director of Technical Product Management, and along with it my workload. Fewer products, but different responsibilities. For most of the next year, I’d manage only 2 products (File Integrity Monitor and Reveal), and 2 shared components (Index and Recorder).

2023-2025

In the 4th quarter of 2023, I, along with 3 other colleagues would finally be awarded a patent for Impact that was filed back in 2019 when we first started working on it (#brain4life). Another reorg brought yet another change in responsibilities. I helped launch Tanium’s newest product at the time, called “Investigate”, and became the Product Manager for Impact once again.

After another reorg in February of 2025, “Technical” was dropped from my title, changing it to just “Director of Product Management”. There was never any distinction between “TPM” and “PM” at the company anyway, everyone had to do the same work no matter which title you had.

Halloween morning, October 31st, 2025, brought the biggest change yet. After 7.5 years at Tanium, I was unexpectedly laid off. There’s a surprising number of things that have to get done after a layoff. It’s a busier time than you might expect.

Getting back online

A series of odd coincidences took my blog offline the first week of November. First there was a Cloudflare outage, then something happened with my ISP that prevented inbound traffic from reaching my network. After several weeks of back and forth trying to figure it out, the ISP issue was resolved, inbound traffic was finally hitting my router, but still not reaching my webserver.

After a little more troubleshooting, I discovered that a recent update to my Unifi Dream Machine Pro SE had migrated firewall policies to their new Zone Firewall feature. My webserver was connected to a Unifi Aggregation Pro switch (a Layer 3 switch) and set to use it as its router. Apparently, Ubiquiti didn’t think to support Zone assignments when using one of their Layer 3 switches as a router. After changing the network configuration to use the UDM Pro SE as the router, I was able to assign the network the webserver was on to a zone.

Goodbye LAMP, Hello Docker!

When I first started my blog way back in 2011, I built it on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) VM, based on CentOS 6 with Drupal. After an upgrade to CentOS 7, and the famous “Drupalgeddon” vulnerability, I moved it to WordPress.

The LAMP VM migrated between various different physical hosts and hypervisors over the years and underwent several upgrades. Even though I wasn’t actively posting, I was trying to keep it online and up to date, as it’s always had a steady flow of traffic. Its final iteration before containerization was a CentOS 9 running on TrueNAS SCALE 25.10.

While troubleshooting the series of coincidences that took the blog offline, I decided to migrate it to an “App” (Docker Container) on my TrueNAS SCALE server. This should greatly simplify maintenance. I also decided to update the look and feel.

Unfortunately, images failed to migrate, so some older posts may have broken image links. I still have the images and will manually fix them as time permits. However, because it mostly posts that don’t get a lot of traffic that have broken image links, I’m not in any rush.

What’s next?

Jobwise, I don’t know yet. As of the time of this post, I’m still unemployed, which is a strange new thing for me. I have some interviews in-progress, but between end of year financials and the holidays, it’s very slow going. I expect things to pick up after New Years. I’m also exploring the possibility of founding my own startup.

As far as the blog is concerned, expect to see more posts, but on a new variety of topics. I’ve been away from Exchange for quite some time, so there will be less of that. Instead, you can expect to see more on Cybersecurity, Product Management, Automation, and Artificial Intelligence, so stay tuned!

Josh Bryant

Cybersecurity Product Leader and internationally recognized Speaker at several Information Security conferences and events with over 26 years of experience as a proven leader in Cybersecurity, Product Management, Threat Hunting, Incident Response, IT Management, IT Architecture, IT Operations, IT Engineering, and Messaging Systems, on a global scale, across a diverse set of industries in both the Public and Private sectors.

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Microsoft's recent "Why Microsoft" campaign, which has been all over Twitter, has a website, and even a TechNet Blog, has got me thinking about this even more.  Why do companies choose Microsoft for some solutions, but not others?  To understand this, lets first take a moment to think about the most commonly chosen Microsoft products, and why they are chosen.

Operating Systems

What is Microsoft most known for?  Their Operating System, Windows.  If you know the history of Windows, you should know why it is the operating system of choice for most businesses out there.   There are a lot of people out there who love to hate Windows (or just Microsoft in general for that matter) for any number of reasons, but no matter how anti-Windows they are, they can't seem to get rid of it.   Even the most hard core Windows haters I've met still run Windows somewhere, because something they can't live without either for business or for pleasure, requires Windows to run.   While I've seen different Operating Systems used for different things on servers back in the Datacenter at many companies, I've never worked at a company that did NOT run Windows on the Desktop.

Directory/Domain Services

Sure there are alternatives to Active Directory, but if you're running Windows on all your Desktops, I dare you to try and find a good reason NOT to use Active Directory.  Every place I've worked has used Active Directory, in my early days, it was NT4 Domains that were eventually migrated to Active Directory.    The dominance of Windows on the desktop leads to the dominance of Active Directory in the Datacenter.

Office Suite

In the business world, Microsoft Office dominates the desktop much like Windows.  The "Why Microsoft?" website gives some good examples of why it is chosen over the competition, so I won't repeat what they say there.  I will however add, that in my own opinion, one of the biggest reasons I've seen Microsoft Office used on the desktop everywhere I've worked, is Outlook.   I've had to sit in several meetings where the company I was working for at the time wanted to discuss the possability of using something other than Microsoft Office.   The biggest reason to stick with Microsoft Office was always Outlook.   Alternative products often don't even include an e-mail clients.  I've yet to see an alternative e-mail client that can even come close to matching the power and features that the Outlook + Exchange combo provides.

E-mail

Exchange dominates when it comes to on-premises e-mail solutions.  If it didn't, this blog would have a different name, and I wouldn't have the job I have today.    It is very common to see companies moving from competing products too Exchange, but how often do you see it the other way around?  Not very.  Many places I've worked have been running Exchange since before it was called Exchange, remember Microsoft Mail?   Each new version just gets better.  Nothing else out there can really compare.

So those 4 areas are probably where you're most likely to see Microsoft products in use.  Now let's look into some areas where you're more likely to see another vendor's offering chosen over Microsoft's, and think about "why?".

First I've thought of a few reasons why someone might choose any alternative over a Microsoft product.   Some of these I've been guilty of myself.

1. Ignorance.   You may not even know Microsoft offers a solution that fits your needs.  If you don't know about it, how can you choose it? 
2. Misconceptions.  Maybe you've heard a particular Microsoft product isn't any good.  This can often be a misconception spread by that crowd that just loves to hate Microsoft, often for no real reason.  If you don't try it for yourself, how will know?
3. Cost.  A lot of cost concerns probably fall under #2 on this list.  A "Free" product isn't always free, and could end up costing you more in the long run.

Now let's look at a few of those other areas…

Virtualization

When someone says Virtualization, VMware is probably the 1st company that comes to mind.  You can't be blamed for thinking that, after all they did invent virtualization for the x86 platform, and they do currently dominate this market.   If you're like me, you may have been guilty of the miconception that those 2 facts make them the logical and/or best choice for virtualization.    A few years ago that may have been true, but Microsoft has come a very long way with Hyper-V.   Very soon Hyper-V will meet or exceed VMware's offerings in pretty much every area.   System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is the big vCenter killer.    A FREE bare metal hypervisor is available with Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and coming soon Hyper-V Server 8.

On the desktop side, Windows 8 will have Hyper-V on it, at no extra cost.   You probably noticed I use VMware Workstation 8 on Windows 7 right now.  As soon as Windows 8 comes out, I'll be making the switch to Hyper-V as part of my drive to "Do IT the MIcrosoft way".  Besides, why should I spend the money on Workstation when I'll now be able to run VMs at no extra cost with Windows 8's built in Hyper-V features?

Firewall/Proxy

Microsoft has had a Firewall & Proxy solution for a very long time now.  Originally known as Internet Security and Acceleration Server, now sold as Forefront Threat Management Gateway.   These are excellent products, and actually used by quite a few companies.   The strange thing I've seen here at places I've worked that did use ISA or now TMG, is that they often only used the Firewall feature of it, and used a 3rd party solution as a proxy.   This is one area where ignorance may be the main factor, people may just not realize this product has an excellent proxy built into it.

Another misconception that really hits this area hard, is the age old farce of "Windows isn't as secure."   People falsely think that if "Windows isn't secure, you'd have to be insane to protect your network with a Firewall that runs on Windows wouldn't you?"  All systems are only as secure as the people maintaining them.

Cost may be another reason in this area, but not so much in larger environments.  I personally chose pfSense for my home network, because it is free, has some nice features, and seems pretty powerful.  It doesn't make sense to buy an Enterprise class firewall for a home network.   Being an IT guy and an Information Security nut, I wanted something more than what you get from the Windows Firewall and the firewall on my consumer grade wireless router.  pfSense fit the bill, until now.    Now that I have access to Microsoft products for my own personal use at no cost to me, I've decided to replace my pfSense firewall with a Forefront TMG gateway.  In fact, I made the switch a few days ago, and I'm loving it.

Web Servers

Poor old IIS has gotten a bad rap.  Misconceptions that IIS isn't secure, or that isn't as good as an alternative.  Cost, while IIS is technically "free", Windows isn't.   Apache is "free" and can run on Linux (which is where you'll usually find it) which is also "free", but what about the cost to run it and maintain it?

I had my own misconception and a bit of ignorance here.  When I decided to start this website, I looked at several Content Management Systems, Durpal, Joomla, and WordPress, to name a few, before deciding to go with Drupal.  I've fallen in love with Drupal.   I thought in order to use it, I needed a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP) server.  I briefly considered a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySql, and PHP) server, but have had better luck going the LAMP route.  Notice that I didn't even give IIS consideration.  Why?  Because I wasn't sure PHP would even run on IIS, let alone Drupal.   I recently found out just how wrong I was.    I discovered WebMatrix, a great FREE tool from Microsoft.  All of the Content Management Systems I had looked at are available through WebMatrix.  Not only that, they are much easier to setup with WebMatrix vs building a LAMP server and trying to get it to run!

Databases

I'm sure you've heard of Microsoft SQL.  I'm not a database guy, but I've had to administer it off and on as far back as SQL 7.   I have noticed that SQL isn't used for everything.   Oracle of course is huge in this market, then you have others like IBM, Sybase, Postgre, MySQL, etc.   It seems pretty common to have a mix of databases.  In fact I can't think of one place I've worked that only used a single vendor for databases.

Going along with my LAMP story in the Web Server section above, I chose MySQL over SQL simply because I wrongly assumed I needed a LAMP server to run Drupal.   I will be migrating this site to a Windows with IIS and SQL in the near future, again as part of my drive to "Do IT the Microsoft way".

That's all the time I have for today.  I'll come back and add more to this article later. If this topic interest you, be sure to subscribe to it.  By subscribing to this article, you'll receive notifications whenever it is updated.  In the mean time, I hope you've started thinking more about not only "Why Microsoft" but "Why not Microsoft?" as well.    I'll be publishing several more articles demonstrating my switch from competing products to doing everything "the Microsoft way".

Josh Bryant

Cybersecurity Product Leader and internationally recognized Speaker at several Information Security conferences and events with over 26 years of experience as a proven leader in Cybersecurity, Product Management, Threat Hunting, Incident Response, IT Management, IT Architecture, IT Operations, IT Engineering, and Messaging Systems, on a global scale, across a diverse set of industries in both the Public and Private sectors.

192.168.2.21:30040

Check out the new features here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh529924.aspx

Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=28190

Or read the announcement from the Exchange Team here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/12/05/released-exchange-server-2010-sp2.aspx

Josh Bryant

Cybersecurity Product Leader and internationally recognized Speaker at several Information Security conferences and events with over 26 years of experience as a proven leader in Cybersecurity, Product Management, Threat Hunting, Incident Response, IT Management, IT Architecture, IT Operations, IT Engineering, and Messaging Systems, on a global scale, across a diverse set of industries in both the Public and Private sectors.

192.168.2.21:30040