The Teams Manager Illusion

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You think you called me in to help you get control of this tenant to tame the sprawl,

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to turn red into amber and amber into green.

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But what you actually summoned at 2am in the low humming glow of the admin center

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was a voice that does not help, does not soothe, and does not reassure you that

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the dashboards mean what they pretend to mean.

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Because my job is not to make you feel safer inside this lattice of policies and tiles and scores.

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My job is to read the traces you have been too tired or too afraid to read,

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to accept the calendar hold without asking who created it.

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To sit in the first empty teams meeting called governance working session

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and to quietly open the first audit log, knowing that whatever we find there will not be an exception,

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it will be the baseline you have already normalized and named responsibility.

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Loop 1, Readiness Review, Amber Means Work,

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When the first Readiness Review loads in the browser, you have already refreshed three times out of habit.

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It arrives not as a narrative but as a grid.

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The Microsoft 365 admin center compliance blade wrapped around a purview compliance manager score

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that hovers at 63 out of 100 like a tired heartbeat,

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the widget background stubbornly Amber, not alarming enough to escalate,

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never calm enough to ignore, accompanied by a tooltip that says some improvement actions remain

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in the same neutral tone it would use if your tenant were empty or on fire

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and you notice that the list of assessments under it is longer than the list of people

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who understand what any of these abbreviations mean.

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The Readiness deck you have been recycling for 18 months is open in another tab,

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a PowerPoint titled Current State Assessment, Microsoft 365 governance,

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with a cover slide that no one reads anymore, then the familiar maturity model pyramid,

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five levels from ad hoc to optimized, each band filled with verbs that sound active

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but do not commit to outcomes and in your script you always stop the animation on level 2 or level 3

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because that is where the consultancy rate card lives, that is where opportunity is

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and as you scroll you can feel your own voice narrating the bullet points before you see them

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because they do not change even when the environment does.

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In the Teams Admin Center you export the list of teams and groups to CSV again

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watching the downloads been a hesitate as it assembles 10,000 rows of collaboration intent.

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Each row a workspace somebody once believed they needed, many now onalous.

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Last activity dates like gravestones and when you open it in Excel,

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the columns are already formatted from your last audit.

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Team display name, group ID, visibility, has guests, last activity date,

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ice-orffened sensitivity label and finally a calculated column called governance readiness

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that applies a nested IF formula you copied from a blog and never fully trusted

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but you kept because it gave you conditional formatting,

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read for clear problems, green for mythical perfection

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and amber for what you could safely assign as an action item to someone else.

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The readiness review process as described in the slide titled "Methodology"

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insists that you begin with inventory, classification and impact analysis.

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But what actually happens at 2am is that you type a graph query into the PowerShell console

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because the portal filters keep timing out, something like getM-a-group,

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filter, group types, NEC, CEQ, unified.

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All Tommy Saan select object ID, display name, visibility, export CSV.

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Last, groups.csv and when the command completes it gives you the same answer

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that gave you last quarter and the quarter before that, an answer that is too large to think about,

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which is precisely why you have wrapped it in diagrams and arrows and numbered steps

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that promise movement but never specify distance.

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You pivot to the Entra ID sign-in logs searching for patterns that might argue one way or another

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about readiness, filtering by client-appused, equals Microsoft Teams,

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and Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

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Exporting 30 days of sign-in history for users whose licenses cost more than their understanding

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and as you scroll through the JSON you see device identities that have not checked in for months,

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service principles that authenticate more often than some executives,

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and guest accounts that belong to vendors who closed their contracts two fiscal years ago,

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but still receive tokens on schedule, each row ending in a status field with success,

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as if success meant the same thing to you and to the system.

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The governance workshop you facilitated last quarter ended with a heatmap,

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a pretty grid produced in Power BI that mapped business units against governance capabilities,

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every cell shaded from pale yellow to deep red,

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with a legend that claimed scientific objectivity where there was only negotiated perception,

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and when the VP of operations asked why none of the cells were green,

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you gave the answer you were trained to give, that maturity is a journey,

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and Amber means work is in progress, but what you did not say is that Amber also means invoice,

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it means justification, it means the project remains necessary because the score never reaches a point

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where stopping looks responsible.

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You open Microsoft Per View and navigate to the DataLoss Prevention Policy page

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where a table of DLP rules promises protection against exfiltration and misuse,

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each policy tied to a rule pack that searched for credit card numbers,

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national identifiers, or secret project names,

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all of them in test with notifications, or audit only mode, never in block,

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because the readiness review always concluded that the organization was not ready for strict enforcement,

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not yet maybe next phase,

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and so the existence of the policy, its entry in the spreadsheet under controls implemented,

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was treated as evidence of governance even though nothing in the tenant actually changed when the policy went live.

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On the sensitivity labels blade, you see labels named public, internal, confidential, highly confidential, restricted,

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each with a description that suggests discipline and choice,

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each mapped to container settings that in theory control whether a team can have guests,

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whether unmanaged devices can connect, whether sharing links can be created,

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but when you pull the get label and get unified group outputs into the same data set,

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you discover that half of the confidential teams are public,

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and half of the public teams are private, and no one can explain why,

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because the labels were applied by provisioning scripts, by well-meaning owners,

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by automated defaults that were tested once during a pilot,

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and then left to accumulate contradictions.

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The readiness report template your firm uses has a section titled key findings,

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where you are expected to synthesize all of this into three to five headlines

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that can be read aloud in a steering committee without inducing panic,

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and so you write that the environment is not yet ready for full-scale automation of access reviews,

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and that governance capabilities are at level two, developing,

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and that risks are being managed through existing controls.

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Even as the EntraID access review blades show campaigns created but never completed,

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guest users marked no decision for six cycles in a row

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and life cycle workflows that have remained in draft status since the day someone first clicked create from template.

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Somewhere between the fourth and fifth slide, you realize that the phrase you keep using,

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this environment is not ready, does not describe a condition waiting to be resolved,

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but a state that must be preserved, because readiness, as you have defined it,

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would end the project, would turn Amber into green and green into closure,

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and closure is the one thing the system cannot allow.

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So instead you frame Amber as responsible caution.

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As evidence that governance is taking its time,

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and as you update the date on the title slide and change the year on the roadmap,

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you understand that the loop you are in does not exist to reach an outcome,

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it exists to justify its own continuation,

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and that the readiness review is less an assessment than an incantation that keeps the machine fed.

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Loop one, budget renewal.

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Continuation looks like responsibility,

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by the time you move from the readiness deck to the budget workbook.

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The sky outside the office windows has shifted from black to that washed out pre-dorn grey

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that never fully commits to morning,

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and the monitor light has dug a permanent groove into your retinas.

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Yet the Excel file labeled M365 governance program,

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FY budget tracker V7 final final X-Lisks,

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opens with a kind of cheerful indifference its first tab a summary table

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that translates every Amber box, every incomplete access review,

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every test only DLP policy into a line item,

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whose justification column is already half written in your own voice from last year,

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as if the spreadsheet, unlike the tenant, has achieved full automation of your reasoning.

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The numbers on the licensing tab rise in small deliberate increments,

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e5 seats increased by 5%,

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to support growth and co-pilot readiness,

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enter ID governance added,

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for life cycle workflows and access reviews,

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purview add-ons renewed to maintain compliance posture.

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Each change accompanied by comments that lean heavily on words like

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risk, regulatory expectation, and industry best practice,

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not because anyone has challenged you to prove the causal chain from spend to safety,

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but because the language itself functions as a kind of budget level,

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conditional access policy, denying entry to questions that would require you to admit

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how much of this is inference and how little of it is outcome.

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In the finance system, the renewal appears as a collection of SKU codes and contract IDs,

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but in the budget review team's channel, it appears as a thread with 15 replies and no resolution.

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The original post, a screenshot of the Microsoft 365 admin billing page,

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where upcoming renewals are stacked in a need list,

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each with a toggle that could, in theory, be slid to off,

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cancelling auto renewal for the bundle that keeps this entire theatre lit,

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and you watch as managers react with thumbs up and question marks and the occasional,

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can we optimize this?

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While you quietly paced in a comment that says,

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stopping now introduces risk, a line you have used so often it no longer feels like something you decided to believe,

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more like a system message that your fingers type on their own,

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whenever an approaching term end date collides with an unresolved amber indicator.

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The justification deck you are building has a slide titled Cost of Change,

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versus Cost of Continuation,

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and on it you have drawn two curves,

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one labeled Program Investment,

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gently sloping upward, the other labeled Risk Exposure Without Governance,

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spiking dramatically, if the line labeled Renewal, were ever to stop,

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and even though the access are unlabeled and the numbers are placeholders,

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no one in last year's Steering Committee asked you to replace them with real data,

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because the story the curves told was the only one anyone in that room was structurally capable of hearing.

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That whatever is happening now may be imperfect,

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but the alternative is unstructured, undocumented, and therefore professionally indefensible.

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You open Power BI and refresh the adoption and risk dashboard

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that your team stitched together out of Admin Center usage reports

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and enter ID sign in summaries,

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watching as the visual snap into place.

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A bar chart showing monthly active users in teams, SharePoint and OneDrive,

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a line chart tracking the number of DLP policy matches over time,

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a KPI tile displaying access reviews completed this quarter,

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in proud lonely digits,

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and as you hover over each data point, you are struck again by how little the shapes on the screen resemble control,

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and how closely they resemble weather,

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patterns that can be described and projected and narrated but not fundamentally directed.

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Yet when you export the dashboard image into your budget presentation,

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it slides neatly under the heading positive trend and governance adoption.

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Because an upward line, regardless of what it measures,

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reads as competence to audiences who have been trained to equate more with safer.

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The renewal justification notes you prepare for the CIO lean heavily on the phrase

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"building on the investments already made"

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because to suggest pausing or reducing the program would require you to reclassify pass-spend

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as experiment rather than foundation,

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and no executive wants to reread their prior approvals through that lens.

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When procurement asks whether you have explored alternative tooling,

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perhaps lower cost governance platforms that promise similar outcomes with friendly licensing,

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you dutifully assemble a comparison matrix,

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but unconsciously select criteria that wait heavily toward integration

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with existing Microsoft 365 workloads,

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native support for enter ID conditional access,

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tight coupling with purview sensitivity labels,

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and reuse of the same compliance manager score you just finished critiquing in private,

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and the conclusion that falls out of your own scoring rubric

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is the one the system had already chosen for you.

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That remaining with the current stack is not expansion, it is prudence,

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and any move away would itself require a governance project

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whose risk would have to be governed.

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In the budget review meeting, the VP of Finance leans back and asks

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whether we are sure we need to renew everything at this level

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suggesting vaguely at the stacked column chart that summarizes spend by category,

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and you hear yourself reply that optimization is absolutely on the roadmap,

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that the enter access reviews and lifecycle workflows,

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which are still in pilot status,

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will eventually enable license reclamation and write sizing,

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but to turn anything off before those capabilities reach maturity,

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would introduce audit findings we currently do not have,

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a sentence that successfully inverts the causality,

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so that continuation sounds like risk avoidance and change,

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sounds like a self-inflicted control failure.

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By the end of the session,

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the budget line for governance and compliance has not only survived,

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but grown modestly justified by the persistence of amber scores and open action items.

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And as you close the spreadsheet and accept the recurring calendar invites

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for next year's cycle,

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you recognize with a kind of tired clarity that the budget renewal is not a checkpoint

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assessing whether governance is working.

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It is the ritual that ensures governance as a funded activity continues to exist

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regardless of whether it ever resolves the conditions that made it necessary.

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Loop one, admin center audit, unmanaged objects.

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The first time you open the Microsoft 365 admin center after the budget meeting,

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you tell yourself you are just going to confirm a few assumptions for a slide,

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together two or three concrete examples of progress you can hold up

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during the next steering committee,

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as proof that the spend has translated into something you can point at,

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but the portal has its own gravity and it pulls you along its prescribed path.

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Health reports, then inevitably into the enter ID blades,

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where identities and groups stack up like unfiled case folders in a room.

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No one has the courage to inventory completely.

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The group's pain reports a comforting number at the top,

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a round figure that makes the tenant look manageable until you apply the filter

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for onalous Microsoft 365 groups.

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And the count jumps from abstraction to accusation hundreds of objects flagged

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in a soft blue banner that reads these groups have no owners,

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assign an owner to ensure proper management,

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the wording polite, the implication anything but.

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And you feel the old urge to paste the screenshot into a slide titled current state risk,

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even as another part of you knows that you took the same screenshot last year and the year before

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with different numbers, but the same basic shape.

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You export the list to CSV again because that is what you know how to do,

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the reflexive motion of a practitioner who has long ago accepted that the answers

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to most questions arrive as spreadsheets long before they arrive as decisions.

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And when Excel opens the file,

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you see columns that are now as familiar as the lines on your own palms.

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Object IDE, display name, group type, creation date, last year's sync time,

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owner's count, members count is deleted.

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00:14:42,000 --> 00:14:45,400
And in a new custom column, you added yourself during a late night,

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three cycles ago, a formula that calculates days since last owner using LDIF,

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00:14:51,000 --> 00:14:57,600
at owner's count, today creation date, a crude measure that still somehow makes you feel

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00:14:57,600 --> 00:15:02,000
like you are doing forensic work rather than simply staring at administrative neglect.

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You saw descending by days since last owner and the top entries show thousands of days

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00:15:06,600 --> 00:15:10,600
with zeros in owner's count groups created in the early wave of teams adoption

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00:15:10,600 --> 00:15:14,000
when every new initiative brought a new workspace, a new experiment

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00:15:14,000 --> 00:15:17,000
and when owners left, transferred or burned out,

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their accounts disabled by life cycle workflows that never considered the objects they anchored,

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the groups remaining like derelict shells in a shallow wide sea.

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The admin center offers a remediation button, a neat little action menu item

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labeled a sign owner, which opens a pane where you can search for a user and click save.

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And for a brief moment, you contemplate actually doing this manually for a representative sample,

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imagining yourself as the responsible steward you keep promising to become.

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00:15:44,000 --> 00:15:47,000
But as you scroll through the list of unmanaged objects,

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you notice how few of them correspond to anything anyone remembers.

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Project code names from acquisitions that never closed, pilot programs whose champions have moved on.

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Committees dissolved three reorganizations ago, each group still resolute synchronized

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00:16:01,400 --> 00:16:06,800
to a sharepoint site whose URL pattern tells you everything and nothing at the same time.

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In theory, the governance design you have so often sketched assumes that access reviews

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and life cycle workflows will keep this under control,

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that owners will be nudged and reminded until they confirm or remove access,

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that groups without activity will be expired and cleaned up,

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but when you cross reference the owner list groups.

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The ESV with the access reviews dot CSV exported from the EntraID governance blade

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you find that very few of these unmanaged objects have ever been included in a review campaign.

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00:16:33,000 --> 00:16:37,000
And the ones that have show outcomes like no decision apply recommendations,

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repeated for three successive cycles, which reads more like a confession of fatigue than an act of governance.

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You turn to PowerShell because you still have believe that the command line can redeem

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what the portal obscures, running get me group, filter, group types, any CCQ unified,

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all were object door stun-tourers.

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Owners dot count Iki, measure object to obtain a cold numeric confirmation that

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yes, there really are this many unmanaged groups and then expanding the pipeline to get my group owner,

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so you can confirm that the system too agrees they are empty,

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and the output scrolls passed with blank owner arrays like a litany of unanswered questions.

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You draft a remediation script in another window,

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something that would assign a default governance service account,

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as owner to every often group, a move that would neatly clear the ownerless flag

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00:17:24,000 --> 00:17:29,000
from the admin reports and allow you to paste a before and after chart into the next admin center hygiene slide.

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But as you type the function definition, you realize that this would do nothing to change the underlying reality

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00:17:34,000 --> 00:17:38,000
that no human being feels responsible for these workspaces,

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that the existence of an owner object in the directory does not equate to oversight.

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It merely satisfies the portal's requirement that every group have something in the owner's collection.

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00:17:46,000 --> 00:17:52,000
The security and compliance center now folded into purview offers its own lens on unmanaged objects

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00:17:52,000 --> 00:17:56,000
a data access governance report that highlights sensitive sites without owners.

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00:17:56,000 --> 00:18:00,000
And you do tofully click through, expecting at least here to find a tighter mesh of control,

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00:18:00,000 --> 00:18:02,000
but the same patterns emerge.

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00:18:02,000 --> 00:18:07,000
Sites labeled confidential, by a sensitivity label policy you enabled in a pilot months ago,

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00:18:07,000 --> 00:18:12,000
with no site collection administrator other than the tenant admin account you use for breakgloss operations.

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00:18:12,000 --> 00:18:18,000
They're sharing settings wide open to new and existing guests, because no one ever circled back to align the label taxonomy

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00:18:18,000 --> 00:18:21,000
with actual container configurations.

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00:18:21,000 --> 00:18:26,000
You generate the report as PDF, attach it to the running one note notebook for the program,

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tag it under a section called evidence.

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00:18:28,000 --> 00:18:35,000
And somewhere between saving and closing, you hear the sentence you will later speak aloud to the steering committee forming itself.

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00:18:35,000 --> 00:18:39,000
There are still unmanaged objects, a phrase that sounds on the surface,

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00:18:39,000 --> 00:18:46,000
like an admission of work left to do, but functions in practice as the keystone in the archway that supports further investment.

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00:18:46,000 --> 00:18:51,000
Because as long as unmanaged objects exist, governance cannot be declared finished.

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The audit logs, those graph-backed chronicles you have always treated as the definitive record, are no kinder.

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00:18:57,000 --> 00:19:04,000
When you query the unified audit log for operations like group updated, owner added, and owner removed over the last 12 months,

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filtering on the identifiers of the groups you know to be onerless, you receive an empty result set of blank table that confirms not only that no one has fixed these objects,

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but that no one has even tried, despite all the slides, all the playbooks, all the carefully worded remediation recommendations in every prior assessment.

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00:19:22,000 --> 00:19:26,000
Yet when you draft this year's admin-center audit section in the readiness report,

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00:19:26,000 --> 00:19:32,000
you find yourself writing that progress has been made in identifying unmanaged groups and a remediation plan is in place,

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00:19:32,000 --> 00:19:38,000
a sentence that is technically true because the CSVs exist and the script stub lives in your repository,

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00:19:38,000 --> 00:19:42,000
but functionally indistinguishable from the sentences you wrote in the last cycle.

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00:19:42,000 --> 00:19:46,000
And as you type you understand, with a clarity that is not at all comforting,

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00:19:46,000 --> 00:19:51,000
that the purpose of the admin audit is not to reduce the number of unmanaged objects to zero,

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00:19:51,000 --> 00:20:00,000
it is to keep that number high enough, visible enough, and stubborn enough that the organization will continue to accept the premise that more governance tooling, more consultant time,

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00:20:00,000 --> 00:20:03,000
and more process is the responsible answer.

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00:20:03,000 --> 00:20:09,000
When you finally close the admin-center tab, the blue banner about onerless groups is still present in your peripheral vision,

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00:20:09,000 --> 00:20:12,000
overlaid on every other screen like a persistent watermark,

308
00:20:12,000 --> 00:20:15,000
and you know that the next time someone asks you to summarize the findings,

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00:20:15,000 --> 00:20:21,000
you will return to the same well-worn language, explaining that the environment remains in a transitional state,

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00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:26,000
that unmanaged objects are a known issue being addressed through a phased remediation approach,

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00:20:26,000 --> 00:20:30,000
using words that imply motion without specifying destination,

312
00:20:30,000 --> 00:20:36,000
because to describe what you have actually seen would be to acknowledge that the system prefers the state of partial control,

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00:20:36,000 --> 00:20:42,000
this carefully measured deficit, precisely because it keeps the loop turning, the calendar holds recurring,

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00:20:42,000 --> 00:20:47,000
and the belief in governance are leaving enough to be funded, but never strong enough to be tested.

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00:20:47,000 --> 00:20:51,000
Loop 1 Compliance Workshop reduced risk increased exposure.

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00:20:51,000 --> 00:20:59,000
By the time the compliance workshop begins, the word unmanaged has been carefully exercised from the invitation and replaced with optimization.

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00:20:59,000 --> 00:21:04,000
The team's meeting titled M365 Compliance and Risk Optimization Workshop,

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00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:08,000
as if simply renaming Drift is opportunity could alter the underlying physics of the tenant,

319
00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:14,000
and the participants arrive in the gallery view one by one, legal counsel on mute with camera off,

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00:21:14,000 --> 00:21:18,000
security architect with three monitors worth of reflected glow in his glasses,

321
00:21:18,000 --> 00:21:23,000
records manager clutching a printed copy of a retention schedule last updated before teams existed,

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00:21:23,000 --> 00:21:28,000
all of them looking to you, the consultant who now sounds increasingly like the voice of the system itself,

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00:21:28,000 --> 00:21:33,000
to translate a decade of accumulated configuration into something that resembles intention.

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00:21:33,000 --> 00:21:37,000
You share your screen and open the deck labeled Compliance Workshop Narrative,

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00:21:37,000 --> 00:21:42,000
knowing that what you are about to do is not so much analysis as choreography,

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00:21:42,000 --> 00:21:48,000
aligning the movements of tools and policies into a pattern that appears to converge on reduced risk,

327
00:21:48,000 --> 00:21:54,000
even as the telemetry in the background insists that exposure has only grown more evenly distributed.

328
00:21:54,000 --> 00:21:58,000
You start with the familiar phrase "governance is a journey" because it buys you time.

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00:21:58,000 --> 00:22:02,000
It creates a corridor in which no one expects hard numbers, just direction,

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00:22:02,000 --> 00:22:07,000
and as you say it, you flip to a slide showing the purview compliance manager dashboard.

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00:22:07,000 --> 00:22:13,000
Its central score still pulsing that deep amber you have come to recognize as the color of sanctioned incompleteness

332
00:22:13,000 --> 00:22:17,000
while around it tiles for information protection, data loss prevention,

333
00:22:17,000 --> 00:22:22,000
insider risk management and e-discovery glow with their own partial completions.

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00:22:22,000 --> 00:22:27,000
Each bar chart suggesting that work has been undertaken, that actions have been logged,

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00:22:27,000 --> 00:22:32,000
that someone somewhere has clicked markers implemented often enough to earn points.

336
00:22:32,000 --> 00:22:38,000
When the head of compliance asks whether a score of 63 means you are 63% compliant,

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00:22:38,000 --> 00:22:42,000
you slip into the practice explanation about weighted controls, shared responsibilities,

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00:22:42,000 --> 00:22:46,000
and the difference between Microsoft managed and customer managed actions,

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00:22:46,000 --> 00:22:50,000
and in doing so you subtly shift the conversation from outcomes to frameworks,

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00:22:50,000 --> 00:22:55,000
from what has actually changed in user behavior to what has been documented in the portal.

341
00:22:55,000 --> 00:22:58,000
Next, you pivot to data loss prevention.

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00:22:58,000 --> 00:23:04,000
Opening the purview DLP policy list with its orderly grid of rules named EUPI Outbound,

343
00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:08,000
PCI DSS External Sharing, Confidential Projects Internal Only,

344
00:23:08,000 --> 00:23:11,000
and you highlight how many are now in place compared to last year,

345
00:23:11,000 --> 00:23:15,000
glossing over the mode column that still shows audit only for most of them,

346
00:23:15,000 --> 00:23:19,000
because the workshop is not about enforcement, it is about reassuring the room

347
00:23:19,000 --> 00:23:21,000
that enforcement could happen at any time.

348
00:23:21,000 --> 00:23:24,000
You click into one of the policies and show the conditions.

349
00:23:24,000 --> 00:23:29,000
Content contains at least one instance of credit card number or EU Social Security number,

350
00:23:29,000 --> 00:23:32,000
action triggers when shared with people outside the organization,

351
00:23:32,000 --> 00:23:37,000
user receives a policy tip in Outlook or Teams, and an alert is generated for review,

352
00:23:37,000 --> 00:23:41,000
and as you read the configuration aloud it sounds rigorous, exacting,

353
00:23:41,000 --> 00:23:43,000
meticulously tuned to prevent leakage.

354
00:23:43,000 --> 00:23:46,000
Yet when you switch to the DLP Alerts dashboard,

355
00:23:46,000 --> 00:23:49,000
the graph of incidents climbs with a steady, unalarming slope,

356
00:23:49,000 --> 00:23:54,000
most labeled low severity, most closed automatically after the default retention period

357
00:23:54,000 --> 00:24:00,000
without human review, a quiet testimony to how quickly noise can be reclassified as posture.

358
00:24:00,000 --> 00:24:05,000
The sensitivity labels make a cameo next displayed as an elegant taxonomy diagram in your deck.

359
00:24:05,000 --> 00:24:10,000
Public, general, confidential, highly confidential, each mapped to a set of protection settings

360
00:24:10,000 --> 00:24:15,000
that determine encryption, watermarking, external sharing, and device access,

361
00:24:15,000 --> 00:24:20,000
and you talk about the rollout plan as if it were a linear sequence instead of the messy accretion

362
00:24:20,000 --> 00:24:24,000
of pilots and half adopted defaults, you know it to be.

363
00:24:24,000 --> 00:24:27,000
You demonstrate how a user in word can choose confidential from the ribbon

364
00:24:27,000 --> 00:24:31,000
and watch a footer appear, how a Teams workspace tagged as highly confidential,

365
00:24:31,000 --> 00:24:34,000
automatically restricts guests and unmanaged devices,

366
00:24:34,000 --> 00:24:39,000
and the room nods reassured by the visible cues, the headers and icons that signal care.

367
00:24:39,000 --> 00:24:44,000
You do not in this forum open the export where labels and container states disagree,

368
00:24:44,000 --> 00:24:49,000
where public Teams carry confidential labels because someone thought it would make the dashboard look better,

369
00:24:49,000 --> 00:24:53,000
because the aim of the workshop is not to reconcile semantic dissonance,

370
00:24:53,000 --> 00:24:59,000
it is to align everyone's language so that they can describe the existing chaos as an organized strategy.

371
00:24:59,000 --> 00:25:02,000
For a brief interval, you venture into retention policies,

372
00:25:02,000 --> 00:25:07,000
pulling up the configuration where workloads like Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive,

373
00:25:07,000 --> 00:25:11,000
and Teams are assigned rules with names such as Exchange,

374
00:25:11,000 --> 00:25:16,000
7-year litigation hold, Teams chats, 3-year retain, SharePoint,

375
00:25:16,000 --> 00:25:23,000
10-year regulatory, and you show how content older than a specified age is either auto-deleted or preserved,

376
00:25:23,000 --> 00:25:26,000
depending on flag values buried deep in the settings pains.

377
00:25:26,000 --> 00:25:31,000
The records manager leans in, intrigued, and asks the obvious question about conflict resolution

378
00:25:31,000 --> 00:25:34,000
about what happens when multiple policies apply to the same item,

379
00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:38,000
and you give the correct technical answer, that the longest retention wins,

380
00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:41,000
and the duration is blocked while any hold exists,

381
00:25:41,000 --> 00:25:45,000
but you also use this moment to recast over retention as prudence,

382
00:25:45,000 --> 00:25:48,000
as a deliberate choice to err on the side of caution,

383
00:25:48,000 --> 00:25:53,000
even though you know from audit log queries that very few items ever reached the configured deletion thresholds,

384
00:25:53,000 --> 00:25:58,000
because users move content into new containers, duplicated in chats and private channels,

385
00:25:58,000 --> 00:26:05,000
and create fresh copies unburdened by the original life cycle every time they forward an email to a team.

386
00:26:05,000 --> 00:26:10,000
The workshop agenda moves toward risk scenarios you switch from portals to stories,

387
00:26:10,000 --> 00:26:13,000
recounting anonymized incidents from other tenants,

388
00:26:13,000 --> 00:26:16,000
where an overly permissive one-drive share exposed a merger document,

389
00:26:16,000 --> 00:26:21,000
where a Teams channel with external guests became the exfiltration lane for a departing executive,

390
00:26:21,000 --> 00:26:26,000
where an e-discovery search surfaced years of ungoverned chat logs that had to be produced under Sapena,

391
00:26:26,000 --> 00:26:29,000
and each anecdote serves a dual purpose.

392
00:26:29,000 --> 00:26:32,000
It justifies the existence of the controls you have configured,

393
00:26:32,000 --> 00:26:36,000
and it inflates the perceived risk of any reduction in program scope.

394
00:26:36,000 --> 00:26:41,000
You sketch a future phase where adaptive DLP will automatically block risky sharing,

395
00:26:41,000 --> 00:26:47,000
where auto labeling in purview will classify sensitive content at rest across a zooer storage and sequel,

396
00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:52,000
where insider risk policies will correlate anomalous downloads with resignations,

397
00:26:52,000 --> 00:26:55,000
and as you speak you see the tension in the room "E"s,

398
00:26:55,000 --> 00:26:58,000
not because any of this exists today in their tenant,

399
00:26:58,000 --> 00:27:03,000
as the narrative allows them to believe that risk is being progressively squeezed into a smaller,

400
00:27:03,000 --> 00:27:05,000
more manageable shape.

401
00:27:05,000 --> 00:27:08,000
When the workshop closes, you open the one-note page where you track decisions

402
00:27:08,000 --> 00:27:13,000
and find that nothing definitive has been agreed, no DLP policies moved from audit to block,

403
00:27:13,000 --> 00:27:20,000
no retention policy conflicts resolved, no concrete dates set for mandatory sensitivity label adoption,

404
00:27:20,000 --> 00:27:22,000
yet the meeting notes begin with the sentence,

405
00:27:22,000 --> 00:27:26,000
"Significant progress has been made in maturing our compliance posture,

406
00:27:26,000 --> 00:27:31,000
and every attendee receives a follow-up email with a PDF copy of your slide that says,

407
00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:36,000
"In a calm font above the purview score, reduced risk increased transparency."

408
00:27:36,000 --> 00:27:40,000
Outside the portal however the sign-in logs continue to register guest accesses,

409
00:27:40,000 --> 00:27:43,000
anonymous sharing links remain valid in forgotten folders,

410
00:27:43,000 --> 00:27:47,000
unmanaged devices, sync files marked highly confidential without hindrance,

411
00:27:47,000 --> 00:27:52,000
and exposure quietly migrates to new spaces as old ones are tightened.

412
00:27:52,000 --> 00:27:56,000
The organization now has a shared story, a common language in which every additional rule,

413
00:27:56,000 --> 00:28:02,000
every new policy, every incremental configuration change is interpreted as protection,

414
00:28:02,000 --> 00:28:06,000
even when its net effect is simply to re-root the paths through which data escapes.

415
00:28:06,000 --> 00:28:09,000
Loop 1, license true up, numbers prove necessity,

416
00:28:09,000 --> 00:28:14,000
the license true up does not arrive as a single event but as acquired, inevitable reconciliation,

417
00:28:14,000 --> 00:28:19,000
a scheduled reconciliation job that exists in both the vendor billing system and in the back of your mind,

418
00:28:19,000 --> 00:28:23,000
and when the email from the account team lands in your inbox with the subject line,

419
00:28:23,000 --> 00:28:28,000
annual Microsoft 365 licensing alignment, action required.

420
00:28:28,000 --> 00:28:33,000
It feels less like a request and more like the continuation of a process that began,

421
00:28:33,000 --> 00:28:38,000
the first time someone in your organization clicked, start free trial on a workload they did not fully understand.

422
00:28:38,000 --> 00:28:45,000
You open the attached spreadsheet, a workbook titled M365 license consumption versus entitlement customer copy,

423
00:28:45,000 --> 00:28:53,000
XLSX and see that it has been assembled from the partner center back end and the Microsoft 365 Admin billing export,

424
00:28:53,000 --> 00:29:00,000
rows of SKU names like Microsoft 365 E5, Teams phone standard, Power BI Pro,

425
00:29:00,000 --> 00:29:05,000
EntraID governance, each with columns for entitled seats, assigned seats,

426
00:29:05,000 --> 00:29:10,000
average active users 90 days, overage and under utilization.

427
00:29:10,000 --> 00:29:15,000
Pallers already applied by conditional formatting that assumes red means over and blue means under,

428
00:29:15,000 --> 00:29:21,000
but nowhere in this palette is there a color reserved for, we bought this because we were afraid to be without it.

429
00:29:21,000 --> 00:29:24,000
You cross check the vendor's figures against your own exports,

430
00:29:24,000 --> 00:29:29,000
running get mixed subscribed school select object skewed, scoop out number, consumed units, prepaid units and power shell,

431
00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:32,000
and comparing the JSON output to the tab named current state,

432
00:29:32,000 --> 00:29:35,000
confirming that at least mathematically the numbers align,

433
00:29:35,000 --> 00:29:39,000
that there really are 300 more E5 licenses consumed than prepaid.

434
00:29:39,000 --> 00:29:43,000
That Teams phone adoption did not reach the enthusiastic forecasts in last year's deck,

435
00:29:43,000 --> 00:29:50,000
that EntraID governance seats are barely assigned because your lifecycle workflows and access reviews are still in pilot,

436
00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:54,000
living in that liminal space where cost has been incurred but value has yet to be demonstrated.

437
00:29:54,000 --> 00:30:00,000
The account managers note suggests that the overage on course suites will be normalized by increasing the entitlement baseline,

438
00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:06,000
while the under utilization on add-ons can be explained as strategic headroom for governance expansion.

439
00:30:06,000 --> 00:30:10,000
A phrase that reads like a compromise between two conflicting narratives,

440
00:30:10,000 --> 00:30:14,000
one in which you are an overspender and one in which you are a visionary.

441
00:30:14,000 --> 00:30:17,000
In the Teams channel dedicated to M365 program financials,

442
00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:21,000
you paste a sanitized screenshot of the pivot chart you build from these exports,

443
00:30:21,000 --> 00:30:26,000
a clustered bar showing entitled and consumed side by side for each product family,

444
00:30:26,000 --> 00:30:31,000
and before anyone even reads the access labels, the visual language has already done its work,

445
00:30:31,000 --> 00:30:37,000
high-abars on the right for E5 and E3, subtly reinforcing the notion that this is the center of gravity,

446
00:30:37,000 --> 00:30:41,000
that the divergence in smaller SKUs is noise, not signal.

447
00:30:41,000 --> 00:30:46,000
When the CFO's analyst asks why there is such a large block of Power BI Pro licenses assigned to users

448
00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:49,000
whose activity log shows fewer than three reports viewed in a quarter,

449
00:30:49,000 --> 00:30:54,000
you respond with the line that has become the standard answer across all underused capabilities.

450
00:30:54,000 --> 00:30:58,000
That low-measured utilization in the first year reflects the ramp-up phase,

451
00:30:58,000 --> 00:31:01,000
that foundational licenses must exist before adoption can grow,

452
00:31:01,000 --> 00:31:06,000
and that removing entitlements now would undermine the narrative you have sold to the board

453
00:31:06,000 --> 00:31:08,000
about being AI and analytics ready.

454
00:31:08,000 --> 00:31:12,000
The TrueUp call itself takes place inevitably in Microsoft Teams,

455
00:31:12,000 --> 00:31:16,000
the account manager sharing a screen filled with graphs from their internal telemetry portal,

456
00:31:16,000 --> 00:31:20,000
slides that show your organization's usage benchmarks against anonymized peers,

457
00:31:20,000 --> 00:31:25,000
your percentage of E5 penetration plotted against an industry vertical average,

458
00:31:25,000 --> 00:31:30,000
your defender for office usage compared favorably to align labeled "other customers".

459
00:31:30,000 --> 00:31:35,000
And in this comparative frame any suggestion of trimming spend now reads a self sabotage,

460
00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:39,000
as a willingness to fall behind the cohort you have been taught to care about.

461
00:31:39,000 --> 00:31:45,000
The account manager phrases it gently, explaining that numbers prove the necessity of continued investment,

462
00:31:45,000 --> 00:31:49,000
pointing to optics in Teams meeting minutes and SharePoint file activity

463
00:31:49,000 --> 00:31:52,000
as evidence that the platform has become mission critical,

464
00:31:52,000 --> 00:31:56,000
even though none of those metrics are directly tied to the governance SKUs under discussion,

465
00:31:56,000 --> 00:32:00,000
yet by placing everything on the same slide the story merges.

466
00:32:00,000 --> 00:32:07,000
Collaboration, security, compliance, and identity woven into a single, indivisible subscription narrative.

467
00:32:07,000 --> 00:32:10,000
When you return to your own spreadsheets after the call,

468
00:32:10,000 --> 00:32:14,000
you attempt briefly to construct a counter-model, a hypothetical scenario

469
00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:18,000
in which you reduce E5 seats in favor of E3+ selective add-ons,

470
00:32:18,000 --> 00:32:22,000
in which you cancel enter ID governance and make do with manual access reviews,

471
00:32:22,000 --> 00:32:26,000
in which you downgrade some power BI pro users to free licenses

472
00:32:26,000 --> 00:32:30,000
and accept the loss of a few dashboards no one can remember requesting.

473
00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:32,000
But as you populate the model with numbers,

474
00:32:32,000 --> 00:32:36,000
you realize that every reduction would have to be defended not only in terms of cost,

475
00:32:36,000 --> 00:32:42,000
but in terms of risk, and the language available to you has been so thoroughly shaped by vendor white papers,

476
00:32:42,000 --> 00:32:45,000
internal risk registers, and your own previous decks,

477
00:32:45,000 --> 00:32:48,000
that it is almost impossible to write a justification for less,

478
00:32:48,000 --> 00:32:51,000
without inadvertently accusing your past self of negligence.

479
00:32:51,000 --> 00:32:55,000
The effective license position you calculate becomes less a question of what do we need.

480
00:32:55,000 --> 00:32:58,000
A more a question of what can we admit we do not need,

481
00:32:58,000 --> 00:33:01,000
without undermining the story we have been telling about ourselves.

482
00:33:01,000 --> 00:33:06,000
The final true up summary you send to finance does not describe any of this ambivalence.

483
00:33:06,000 --> 00:33:12,000
It presents a clean table where overage lines are resolved by increases to entitlement and underutilization

484
00:33:12,000 --> 00:33:15,000
is recast as capacity for future adoption.

485
00:33:15,000 --> 00:33:21,000
Accompanied by a short narrative paragraph that explains idle seats as necessary headroom for governance,

486
00:33:21,000 --> 00:33:27,000
for copilot, for future integrations that will you assure them prove the wisdom of having paid for more than you strictly used.

487
00:33:27,000 --> 00:33:32,000
You close the email by recommending that we should reassess before proceeding with any reductions.

488
00:33:32,000 --> 00:33:35,000
A sentence that appears on its surface to suggest caution,

489
00:33:35,000 --> 00:33:40,000
but in practice functions as a deferral of optimization indefinitely into the future.

490
00:33:40,000 --> 00:33:45,000
Because the reassessment will always require one more cycle of data, one more maturity review,

491
00:33:45,000 --> 00:33:48,000
one more pass through the same loops you have already mapped.

492
00:33:48,000 --> 00:33:51,000
In that moment you understand that the license true up,

493
00:33:51,000 --> 00:33:54,000
which should have been an opportunity to align spend with reality,

494
00:33:54,000 --> 00:33:59,000
has instead become the mechanism by which the numbers carefully arranged and contextually framed,

495
00:33:59,000 --> 00:34:01,000
prove not what is necessary to operate,

496
00:34:01,000 --> 00:34:05,000
but what is necessary to sustain belief in the governance program

497
00:34:05,000 --> 00:34:08,000
as an ongoing self-justifying factor.

498
00:34:08,000 --> 00:34:11,000
Interstice, names in the chat, proof of alternatives.

499
00:34:11,000 --> 00:34:15,000
The first time you see the name "Script Run", it is not in a contract or a project plan

500
00:34:15,000 --> 00:34:18,000
or a steering committee deck where such things are supposed to be made real,

501
00:34:18,000 --> 00:34:21,000
it is in the right hand rail of a team's meeting chat,

502
00:34:21,000 --> 00:34:24,000
half an hour into yet another governance working session,

503
00:34:24,000 --> 00:34:28,000
where your own voice has been droning through slides about oneless groups in DLP in audit mode,

504
00:34:28,000 --> 00:34:30,000
and while you are sharing your screen,

505
00:34:30,000 --> 00:34:33,000
while the purview dashboard fills everyone else's attention,

506
00:34:33,000 --> 00:34:38,000
a line appears beneath the endless stream of "Join the Meeting System" messages, "Script Run", added a comment.

507
00:34:38,000 --> 00:34:42,000
At first you assume it is just another attendee asking for a copy of the deck,

508
00:34:42,000 --> 00:34:46,000
another mid-level manager validating a point you made 10 minutes ago,

509
00:34:46,000 --> 00:34:50,000
but when you stop sharing and the grid of faces resurfaces,

510
00:34:50,000 --> 00:34:55,000
the chat pane expands and you see that "Script Run" is not a person at all,

511
00:34:55,000 --> 00:35:00,000
but the display name of a bot someone has quietly side-loaded into the team.

512
00:35:00,000 --> 00:35:04,000
The message is short, almost apologetic in its precision.

513
00:35:04,000 --> 00:35:08,000
Pilot result 347 oneless, M365 groups identified,

514
00:35:08,000 --> 00:35:12,000
3M47 reassigned or archived via automated policy,

515
00:35:12,000 --> 00:35:15,000
execution time 00713.

516
00:35:15,000 --> 00:35:21,000
Beneath it, a hyperlink labeled "View Run" book points not to the admin center or to purview,

517
00:35:21,000 --> 00:35:24,000
but to a simple git repository in Azure DevOps,

518
00:35:24,000 --> 00:35:28,000
its description reading automated governance tasks for collaboration workloads,

519
00:35:28,000 --> 00:35:33,000
and as the other attendee's scroll past, dropping thumbs-up reactions they will never remember,

520
00:35:33,000 --> 00:35:39,000
you feel a brief disorienting shift as if the floor of the cathedral you have been preaching governance within

521
00:35:39,000 --> 00:35:43,000
has tilted just enough to make you aware of its architecture.

522
00:35:43,000 --> 00:35:47,000
Someone, somewhere in this organization, has decided that the loops you have been narrating

523
00:35:47,000 --> 00:35:51,000
could be executed without you, without the workshops, without the maturity models

524
00:35:51,000 --> 00:35:55,000
by a series of scheduled jobs that do not know or care about Amber.

525
00:35:55,000 --> 00:35:59,000
A few days later, in a different channel, a different name appears,

526
00:35:59,000 --> 00:36:03,000
this one less anonymous, more human in its chosen handle, "Rend the Core".

527
00:36:03,000 --> 00:36:08,000
The thread begins innocuously, with a question about whether EntraID access reviews can be scope

528
00:36:08,000 --> 00:36:12,000
to only guest users in high-risk teams, and the usual responses accumulate,

529
00:36:12,000 --> 00:36:17,000
links to Microsoft Learn Articles, vague suggestions to look at Entra governance,

530
00:36:17,000 --> 00:36:21,000
but then "Rend the Core" posts a concise, almost surgical reply.

531
00:36:21,000 --> 00:36:26,000
We stopped using Entra access reviews for guests. Weekly script run job pulled silence from graph

532
00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:31,000
compares against the simple "Last 30 Days" rule, or to remove stale guests and logs changes to a channel.

533
00:36:31,000 --> 00:36:36,000
No campaigns, no attestation fatigue. Attached is a screenshot of a team's channel

534
00:36:36,000 --> 00:36:39,000
named "guest clean-up" log, messages lined up like heartbeats.

535
00:36:39,000 --> 00:36:44,000
Remove guest user X-White come from team project orbit, no activity in 96 days.

536
00:36:44,000 --> 00:36:48,000
No dashboards, no scores, no Amber just state change, time stamped and done.

537
00:36:48,000 --> 00:36:52,000
You hover over the names, open their profiles inside panels and see almost nothing

538
00:36:52,000 --> 00:36:55,000
that would grant them narrative authority in the world you inhabit.

539
00:36:55,000 --> 00:37:01,000
No director titles, no program lead, governance badges, just engineers and platform administrators

540
00:37:01,000 --> 00:37:04,000
who apparently grew tired of waiting for your loops to close.

541
00:37:04,000 --> 00:37:07,000
For a moment you consider inviting them to the next readiness review,

542
00:37:07,000 --> 00:37:10,000
turning them into case studies that prove governance is working,

543
00:37:10,000 --> 00:37:13,000
but the thought dies the second it is born,

544
00:37:13,000 --> 00:37:17,000
because to elevate these experiments would be to acknowledge that alternatives exist,

545
00:37:17,000 --> 00:37:22,000
that the systems apparent dependence on workshops and budget renewals is in fact optional.

546
00:37:22,000 --> 00:37:25,000
Instead you file their work under a mental label called "Imature Paths"

547
00:37:25,000 --> 00:37:28,000
quietly absorbing the language the voice offers you.

548
00:37:28,000 --> 00:37:31,000
And when you close the chat pane and return to your own deck,

549
00:37:31,000 --> 00:37:34,000
you tell yourself that what they have built is clever, but not yet compliant,

550
00:37:34,000 --> 00:37:36,000
not yet aligned, not yet ready,

551
00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:39,000
and you add a new bullet to your roadmap that simply reads,

552
00:37:39,000 --> 00:37:43,000
"Evaluate automation opportunities, confident that by the time you reach it,

553
00:37:43,000 --> 00:37:46,000
the calendar will have given you another year."

554
00:37:46,000 --> 00:37:50,000
Loop 2, Readiness Review, the index moves, meaning doesn't.

555
00:37:50,000 --> 00:37:54,000
When the second year Readiness Review arrives, it does not announce itself as anything new.

556
00:37:54,000 --> 00:37:59,000
It appears as a link in yet another calendar hold titled M365 Governance Readiness and your update.

557
00:37:59,000 --> 00:38:02,000
The description copied forward with only the year incremented,

558
00:38:02,000 --> 00:38:07,000
and when you click through to the Power BI app that now hosts the governance readiness index,

559
00:38:07,000 --> 00:38:10,000
you are greeted by a dashboard that looks reassuringly unfamiliar

560
00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:13,000
and suspiciously unchanged at the same time.

561
00:38:13,000 --> 00:38:15,000
Its tiles rearranged into a more modern layout.

562
00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:19,000
Its fonts updated to whatever the design team is currently paid to believe in.

563
00:38:19,000 --> 00:38:22,000
The central number no longer a raw compliance manager score,

564
00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:25,000
but a composite index calculated from 7W.

565
00:38:25,000 --> 00:38:29,000
Painted indicators now proudly displayed as 68.4,

566
00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:34,000
two decimal places of apparent precision floating only five points above last year's ambiguous 63.

567
00:38:34,000 --> 00:38:39,000
The narrative you are expected to deliver has upgraded itself in parallel.

568
00:38:39,000 --> 00:38:41,000
Where last year you spoke of levels and journeys this year,

569
00:38:41,000 --> 00:38:48,000
the consulting label calls for quadrants and axes, a more sophisticated posture map to match the more sophisticated fee structure.

570
00:38:48,000 --> 00:38:51,000
And so you open the new slide template in PowerPoint,

571
00:38:51,000 --> 00:38:56,000
admiring the glossy 2x2 matrix that has replaced the old 5-level pyramid,

572
00:38:56,000 --> 00:38:59,000
its horizontal axis labeled control coverage,

573
00:38:59,000 --> 00:39:02,000
and its vertical axis labeled control effectiveness.

574
00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:06,000
Four neat quadrants arranged from reactive to resilient.

575
00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:11,000
A small dot representing your organization plotted somewhere in the upper middle,

576
00:39:11,000 --> 00:39:15,000
not at the origin, not at the summit, hovering in that lucrative band

577
00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:19,000
where improvement is both demonstrable and eternally incomplete.

578
00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:22,000
You paste a screenshot of the governance readiness index beside it,

579
00:39:22,000 --> 00:39:26,000
and realize that, despite the rebranding, Amber has survived.

580
00:39:26,000 --> 00:39:30,000
The circular gauge now fades from red through orange into green,

581
00:39:30,000 --> 00:39:34,000
but the needle still sits in the color that reads as work without reading as failure.

582
00:39:34,000 --> 00:39:38,000
To construct the new index, the firm has added data sources that feel,

583
00:39:38,000 --> 00:39:43,000
on first inspection, more empirical, more grounded in what the tenant is actually doing.

584
00:39:43,000 --> 00:39:45,000
The percentage of active teams with at least two owners,

585
00:39:45,000 --> 00:39:49,000
the proportion of guest accounts reviewed within 90 days,

586
00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:52,000
the share of sharepoint sites with sensitivity labels applied,

587
00:39:52,000 --> 00:39:56,000
the fraction of users covered by entral lifecycle workflows,

588
00:39:56,000 --> 00:39:59,000
each metric extracted through graph queries and admin center exports

589
00:39:59,000 --> 00:40:03,000
that look uncomfortably, like the scripts you wrote for yourself

590
00:40:03,000 --> 00:40:05,000
when the insomnia first set in.

591
00:40:05,000 --> 00:40:08,000
The difference now is that these scripts belong to the methodology,

592
00:40:08,000 --> 00:40:12,000
their outputs folded into a normalized scale from 0 to 1,

593
00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:17,000
then weighted according to a schema whose key you can see but did not design.

594
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:23,000
External access governed set at 15%, information protection coverage at 20,

595
00:40:23,000 --> 00:40:28,000
lifecycle automation at 10, and so on, enough math on the configuration tab

596
00:40:28,000 --> 00:40:31,000
to convince a steering committee that whatever the resulting number is,

597
00:40:31,000 --> 00:40:33,000
it must mean something.

598
00:40:33,000 --> 00:40:37,000
You step through the visuals with the same steady cadence you used last year,

599
00:40:37,000 --> 00:40:39,000
only the tool tips have changed.

600
00:40:39,000 --> 00:40:41,000
Instead of hovering over a single purview score,

601
00:40:41,000 --> 00:40:43,000
you now demonstrate drill through capabilities,

602
00:40:43,000 --> 00:40:46,000
clicking into a bar labeled "guest access governance".

603
00:40:46,000 --> 00:40:49,000
To show that the underlying measure is the count of groups

604
00:40:49,000 --> 00:40:52,000
with external sharing set to existing guests only,

605
00:40:52,000 --> 00:40:56,000
divided by total active groups, a fraction that has indeed nudged upwards

606
00:40:56,000 --> 00:41:00,000
since last time, because someone in collaboration ops pushed a baseline policy

607
00:41:00,000 --> 00:41:04,000
via PowerShell that tightened defaults without ever attending your workshops.

608
00:41:04,000 --> 00:41:07,000
As you talk about this as a governance success,

609
00:41:07,000 --> 00:41:11,000
you register in some quiet corner of your mind that the index has moved

610
00:41:11,000 --> 00:41:15,000
because the system moved itself, because a board engineer became impatient

611
00:41:15,000 --> 00:41:18,000
with the theater and changed a tenant-wide configuration.

612
00:41:18,000 --> 00:41:23,000
And your role now is to reinterpret that act of autonomy as evidence of program maturity.

613
00:41:23,000 --> 00:41:28,000
When a director on the call leans in and asks whether the shift from 63 to 68.4

614
00:41:28,000 --> 00:41:31,000
means you are 5.4% closer to being compliant,

615
00:41:31,000 --> 00:41:34,000
you feel the familiar heat rise behind your sternum,

616
00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:39,000
the physiological response to a question that exposes how completely the index has smoothed away context,

617
00:41:39,000 --> 00:41:42,000
and you respond with the answer the playbook provides,

618
00:41:42,000 --> 00:41:45,000
that the index is a directional indicator, not an absolute measure,

619
00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:48,000
that it should be used to track trends rather than to declare binary states,

620
00:41:48,000 --> 00:41:52,000
that what matters is the positive trajectory, not the specific number.

621
00:41:52,000 --> 00:41:56,000
In saying this, you inadvertently confess the central truth of the construct

622
00:41:56,000 --> 00:42:00,000
that the index is designed less to signify a threshold than to demonstrate motion,

623
00:42:00,000 --> 00:42:04,000
that its purpose is to show that things are changing in response to investment,

624
00:42:04,000 --> 00:42:09,000
even when those changes are orthogonal to the risks the program was commissioned to address.

625
00:42:09,000 --> 00:42:14,000
After the meeting, you open the hidden config and raw data tabs in the Power BI data set,

626
00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:19,000
the ones end users are not meant to see, and scroll through the table where each signal is listed

627
00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:25,000
with its data source, its refresh cadence, its weight, and its assigned interpretation,

628
00:42:25,000 --> 00:42:29,000
or text strings like higher is better, lower is better, or target band,

629
00:42:29,000 --> 00:42:32,000
tiny labels that flatten the complexities of identities,

630
00:42:32,000 --> 00:42:38,000
sprawl, teams proliferation, and DLP fatigue into numbers that can be added and subtracted.

631
00:42:38,000 --> 00:42:43,000
You notice that one of the highest weighted metrics is percentage of controls with documented owner,

632
00:42:43,000 --> 00:42:49,000
a field populated not by logs or APIs, but by entries in an Excel table maintained manually by your own team,

633
00:42:49,000 --> 00:42:53,000
and in that moment you see how governance has swallowed its own tail,

634
00:42:53,000 --> 00:42:58,000
how the presence of a name in a column regardless of whether that person has touched the control in a year

635
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:02,000
contributes as much to the index as any reduction in actual data exposure.

636
00:43:02,000 --> 00:43:06,000
Outside the dashboards, the tenant continues its indifferent expansion.

637
00:43:06,000 --> 00:43:10,000
New teams are created from templated requests that bypass your review,

638
00:43:10,000 --> 00:43:15,000
new third party apps are authorized by local admins who do not consider themselves part of the governance story.

639
00:43:15,000 --> 00:43:21,000
New AI agents are granted access to SharePoint libraries because someone toggled a checkbox in co-pilot studio,

640
00:43:21,000 --> 00:43:26,000
and none of these events register as discrete shocks in the readiness index

641
00:43:26,000 --> 00:43:30,000
because they fall within the noise envelope the methodology was built to ignore.

642
00:43:30,000 --> 00:43:36,000
The index moves slowly reassuringingly, providing just enough narrative momentum to justify another cycle,

643
00:43:36,000 --> 00:43:42,000
another workshop, another budget, and as you close the report and accept the praise in the email thread that follows,

644
00:43:42,000 --> 00:43:44,000
great to see the index trending up.

645
00:43:44,000 --> 00:43:49,000
You understand that meaning which should have resided in the messy specifics of who can see what and why

646
00:43:49,000 --> 00:43:55,000
has been abstracted away into a single number whose chief function is to keep everyone from asking what it actually measures.

647
00:43:55,000 --> 00:43:58,000
Loop 2, budget renewal, responsibility becomes identity.

648
00:43:58,000 --> 00:44:03,000
By the second budget cycle, the spreadsheets feel less like tools you open and more like rooms you inhabit.

649
00:44:03,000 --> 00:44:10,000
And when the new fiscal workbook arrives in your inbox, pre-populated by finance with last year's numbers rolled forward

650
00:44:10,000 --> 00:44:15,000
and a modest inflation factor applied, you do not experience it as a negotiation

651
00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:22,000
so much as a performance review because somewhere along the way the line item labeled M365 governance program

652
00:44:22,000 --> 00:44:26,000
ceased to be a project you managed and became the shorthand for your value to the organization.

653
00:44:26,000 --> 00:44:29,000
A block of cost that stands in for your continued existence.

654
00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:32,000
You open the file and see the familiar structure.

655
00:44:32,000 --> 00:44:36,000
Tabs for summary, licensing, services, internal FTE,

656
00:44:36,000 --> 00:44:42,000
and against each SKU and workstream is the faint ghost of the narrative you delivered 12 months ago.

657
00:44:42,000 --> 00:44:47,000
The promises you made about life cycle automation, reduced audit findings and co-pilot readiness

658
00:44:47,000 --> 00:44:51,000
and you understand immediately that you are no longer asking whether these things are true.

659
00:44:51,000 --> 00:44:56,000
You are asking how to speak about them in a way that keeps the story and therefore you funded.

660
00:44:56,000 --> 00:45:01,000
The language you use in budget notes has shifted in tone without your explicit consent.

661
00:45:01,000 --> 00:45:06,000
Where you once wrote in the third person, the program will enable then the organization will benefit.

662
00:45:06,000 --> 00:45:09,000
You now find yourself writing, we need to continue.

663
00:45:09,000 --> 00:45:12,000
If we stop now our work will be at risk.

664
00:45:12,000 --> 00:45:16,000
And the pronoun is not an accident because every time someone questions the spend on enter ID governance

665
00:45:16,000 --> 00:45:21,000
or additional purview capabilities, it is your judgment they are implicitly questioning your earlier slide decks

666
00:45:21,000 --> 00:45:26,000
they are holding up to the light and so you reflexively defend the allocation not as an abstract best practice

667
00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:29,000
but as evidence that you have been a diligent steward.

668
00:45:29,000 --> 00:45:34,000
When a senior manager suggests that perhaps the E5 footprint could be reduced in favor of cheaper plans,

669
00:45:34,000 --> 00:45:38,000
you hear yourself reply, stopping now would waste the investment.

670
00:45:38,000 --> 00:45:42,000
And in that instant you realize you are no longer arguing for governance as a concept.

671
00:45:42,000 --> 00:45:48,000
You are arguing for the continuity of a decision you already made, tying your reputation to the curve of the spend.

672
00:45:48,000 --> 00:45:53,000
In the cross-functional budget review the language shifts again this time from consultant to manager.

673
00:45:53,000 --> 00:45:56,000
You speak less about frameworks and more about continuity of care.

674
00:45:56,000 --> 00:46:01,000
Framing the renewal of security and compliance SKUs as an ethical obligation to the business

675
00:46:01,000 --> 00:46:06,000
as if turning off a license were akin to discharging a patient prematurely knowing they will relapse.

676
00:46:06,000 --> 00:46:11,000
You explain that backing away from enter lifecycle workflows after finally securing approval to pilot them

677
00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:17,000
would send the wrong signal to the organization that downgrading purview capabilities would create confusion among stakeholders

678
00:46:17,000 --> 00:46:19,000
who have begun to rely on these tools.

679
00:46:19,000 --> 00:46:25,000
And the more you speak in this register the more you feel the quiet click of a lock as your professional identity aligns itself

680
00:46:25,000 --> 00:46:27,000
with the continuation of the tool set.

681
00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:31,000
It becomes difficult to imagine yourself in a world where the organization chooses not to renew.

682
00:46:31,000 --> 00:46:38,000
Not because such a world would be unsafe but because in that scenario the story you have been telling about who you are here would no longer make sense.

683
00:46:38,000 --> 00:46:45,000
Finance asks you as they did last year to identify optimization opportunities and you are blightingly highlight a handful of marginal items.

684
00:46:45,000 --> 00:46:50,000
Trial workloads that never exited pilot redundant analytics connectors overlapping third party tools.

685
00:46:50,000 --> 00:47:00,000
But you keep the core intact defending the mass of e5, entra and purview spend with the argument that variance in utilization is a normal part of maturing capabilities.

686
00:47:00,000 --> 00:47:10,000
You pull adoption numbers from the team's usage reports and sign-in logs constructing charts that show increased meeting minutes greater file activity, more DLP policy matches.

687
00:47:10,000 --> 00:47:21,000
And while none of these metrics map cleanly to the governance SKUs under scrutiny they serve their function by showing motion, by implying that the substrate on which governance sits is alive and therefore must be tended.

688
00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:28,000
The things you cannot measure, reduced exposure, avoided breaches, future regulatory alignment, are woven into sentences that begin with

689
00:47:28,000 --> 00:47:31,000
we would not be able to and we would be exposed to.

690
00:47:31,000 --> 00:47:37,000
And over time these hypothetical losses come to feel as solid as any actual saving you might have delivered by cutting back.

691
00:47:37,000 --> 00:47:45,000
Inside conversations colleagues from other departments begin to mirror this language back to you. They say we need you to keep an eye on this.

692
00:47:45,000 --> 00:47:50,000
You own our Microsoft risk and each time they assign you that role you feel the loop tighten a little further.

693
00:47:50,000 --> 00:48:02,000
Because to question the necessity of the program now would be to question their assignment of responsibility to unsettle a social contract in which your continued defense of the budget is the price you pay for being seen as necessary.

694
00:48:02,000 --> 00:48:14,000
What began as a readiness review wrapped around a set of tools has become a readiness narrative wrapped around your name and as you finalize the budget justification writing that renewal is critical to sustain our governance posture.

695
00:48:14,000 --> 00:48:25,000
You hear under the formal phrasing the simpler sentence that actually drives your fingers across the keyboard that renewal is critical to sustain the self you have become inside this system.

696
00:48:25,000 --> 00:48:38,000
Loop 2 Admin Center audit exceptions become defaults when you open the admin center this time it is not the oneless banner that catches your eye first but the quiet proliferation of what the portal insists on calling exceptions.

697
00:48:38,000 --> 00:48:56,000
A word that in ordinary language implies rarity and caution but here has been repurposed as the polite label for every time someone somewhere decided that the rules did not quite fit the needs of the moment and the system obligingly recorded that decision without ever asking when or whether it should be undone.

698
00:48:56,000 --> 00:49:17,000
In the conditional access blade the policy list has grown since your last late night inspection not in the disciplined way the design documents imagined with a small number of well scoped rules but in a kind of sideways sprawl a dozen policies whose names all begin with baseline followed by qualifiers like all users admins only or legacy clients.

699
00:49:17,000 --> 00:49:38,000
And beneath them indented and italicized an expanding catalog of exclusions that reads like a who's who of the organization's impatience CEO executive assistance service account finance export legacy scanner subnet each one a whole punched in the net under the banner of keeping the business running.

700
00:49:38,000 --> 00:50:06,000
You click into the policy you once proudly announced as the cornerstone of your zero trust journey the one that requires multi factor authentication for all cloud apps and scroll down past the conditions you remember laboring over user risk sign in risk device platforms until you reach the users and groups excluded section where the count in parentheses has crept up from a respectable handful to a small crowd a dynamic group called exec bypass now joined by static entries for three line of business apps.

701
00:50:06,000 --> 00:50:35,000
A contract is tenant and a set of IP ranges tagged trusted officers that no one has updated since half the workforce went remote each exclusion has a justification note attached because you insisted on that discipline when the policy went live but as you hover over them you see the same phrases repeated business critical MFA issues for VIP vendor cannot support modern or short sentences written under pressure during outages or escalations never revisited once the immediate pain subsided in the team's admin center the pattern repeats under different icon.

702
00:50:35,000 --> 00:51:04,000
The external access and guest access settings show toggles that on their face appear aligned with your governance principles guest access allowed only into specific teams external domains restricted by allow list but when you click through to all wide settings and then into teams policies you find a cluster of custom policies whose existence you had half forgotten each created to accommodate a scenario that felt urgent at the time exact meetings unrestricted field sales external join partner and get.

703
00:51:04,000 --> 00:51:31,000
The description where they existed all are vague but their effect is precise they grant capabilities you once labeled as high risk anonymous join cloud recording without retention app side loading to carefully named security groups that have swollen over time as managers requested to have one more person added until the carve out once narrow now shelters entire departments from the constraints you present in slide where as universal.

704
00:51:31,000 --> 00:51:55,000
The query the audit logs for update policy operations focusing on conditional access and teams and the story of how this happened unfolds in time stamp entries that read like stage directions an emergency change during a town hall dry run to exempt the CEO from MFA after a failed push notification a week and tweak by a support engineer to allow a legacy copier to send scanned contracts via SMTP without modern authentication.

705
00:51:55,000 --> 00:52:05,000
The hurried exception scope to all partners from a particular domain after a key customers project kick off failed because they could not join an internal team.

706
00:52:05,000 --> 00:52:24,000
Each time the action is locked an optional reason field beautifully filled a ticket number referenced and then crucially nothing else no follow up entries that remove the exclusion no scheduled review events just a single decision line preserved in perpetuity but never reexamined like a footnote to a book no one intends to reread.

707
00:52:24,000 --> 00:52:36,000
In enter ID privileged identity management tells its own version of the tale you had configured roles such as teams administrator and security administrator to require activation with justification and approval.

708
00:52:36,000 --> 00:52:53,000
Their default assignment set to eligible rather than active and for a while the reports looked good the number of permanently active admins declining the average elevation duration short but when you open the roll settings now you see that two of the most sensitive roles global administrator and privileged role administrator.

709
00:52:53,000 --> 00:53:04,000
Carrier small gray banner that says exclusion break glass account one and beneath it in smaller type justification required for emergency access not subject to PIM controls.

710
00:53:04,000 --> 00:53:22,000
A configuration you reluctantly accepted during an incident response exercise and they never revisited overtime additional accounts have been added to similar exclusions for different roles each rationalized in the moment a monitoring tool needs continuous access a migration project cannot tolerate activation delays until the picture that emerges is one where the architecture of the process is not.

711
00:53:22,000 --> 00:53:36,000
And where the architecture of least privilege remains intact on paper while the day to day reality routes around it through static unmonitored exceptions you open power shell again this time using the graph modules to pull all conditional access policies with non empty exception lists.

712
00:53:36,000 --> 00:53:47,000
Piping the results into select object display name conditions exclusions and then exporting to CSV where you can sort and filter with the forensic comfort of rows and columns.

713
00:53:47,000 --> 00:53:59,000
And the cheat that results shows you exactly what the portal was signaling in more polite form a slow steady accretion of carve outs that now touch almost every control you proudly catalog in your readiness reviews and workshops.

714
00:53:59,000 --> 00:54:14,000
You intended these to be rare reversible accommodations bounded in time and scope but because you never embedded their review into any loop that actually runs they have effectively become the shape of the control the hollowed out center around which your narratives of enforcement circulate.

715
00:54:14,000 --> 00:54:38,000
But on settles you most is not that the exceptions exist but that the system has normalized them so completely the admin center presents them as first class citizens neatly summarized in reports wrapped in reassuring language about flexibility and business alignment and your own methodologies have quietly absorb them treating the presence of a policy any policy as evidence of governance without interrogating the extent to which its power has been diluted.

716
00:54:38,000 --> 00:54:49,000
When you draft the notes for the next admin audit section part of you wants to write plainly that the exceptions have become the defaults that the controls you keep pointing at are more poorest than their name suggests.

717
00:54:49,000 --> 00:54:57,000
But another part recognizes that to say this allowed would be to undercut the very theater that keeps your program your identity and your budget alive.

718
00:54:57,000 --> 00:55:02,000
And so you settle once again for the more measured phrase this requires deeper integration.

719
00:55:02,000 --> 00:55:12,000
A sentence that promises refinement without admitting that the system given enough time will always find ways to exempt itself from whatever rules it pretends to obey.

720
00:55:12,000 --> 00:55:31,000
Loop 2 Compliance Workshop Heat Maps as scripture when the second compliance workshop convenes no one bothers to pretend it is a discovery session anymore because the invitations carry forward the same agenda template the same list of objectives and when you share your screen the first asset you open is not a policy document or a risk register.

721
00:55:31,000 --> 00:55:58,000
But the power be I report that everyone now calls without irony the heat map a matrix of business units against control domains whose graded colors have become more persuasive than any paragraph of text you or legal could compose and you feel as the tiles load that faint hush you remember from childhood when people open books they considered sacred not because they understood the language inside e but because they had been taught that its arrangement carried authority regardless of comprehension.

722
00:55:58,000 --> 00:56:24,000
This years version of the heat map is technically more advanced fed by a widened set of purview and entry exports each cell no longer a hand entered judgment but the result of a small stack of measures you or someone like you wrote late at night counts of labeled documents percentages of guest reviewed sites ratios of blocked DLP events to total sharing attempts all normalized and bind into five color bands from cool blue to angry red.

723
00:56:24,000 --> 00:56:53,000
And as you talk through the legend you can feel the cognitive weight shifting from the underlying configuration to the simple primal signal of color blue means safe red means danger and the four grades in between mean negotiation you hover over the intersection of finance and information protection a cell glowing a respectable amber and the tooltip unfolds to display a small paragraph of machine assembled truth sensitivity labels applied to 61% of share points sites 48% of exchange.

724
00:56:53,000 --> 00:57:21,000
18% of exchange mailboxes 12% of teams workspaces DLP audit events 1337 last 30 days DLP block events 3 last 30 days the numbers themselves dull almost boring until you say allowed we see good coverage but room for improvement in teams and watch as heads not along the video strip not because anyone can explain why 61% coverage at the site level is good while 12% at the team level is immature but because the cells color already told them how to feel.

725
00:57:21,000 --> 00:57:50,000
Someone from legal asks whether the deep red in the marketing versus external sharing column means you have had incidents and you respond with the kind of ambiguity that the heat map rewards explaining that high activity in DLP audits and the prevalence of anonymous links indicate heightened exposure carefully avoiding the word breach and when they press for specifics you pivot back into the language of scripture saying the important thing is that we can see where the concentration is as if illumination alone were a form of remediation.

726
00:57:50,000 --> 00:58:05,000
As if the act of naming risk in a grid reduced its surface by some percentage the more you walk them through the tiles the less anyone refers to actual policy texts or user behavior instead the heat maps rows and columns become shorthand for entire narratives.

727
00:58:05,000 --> 00:58:19,000
HR is in a good place on retention R&D is still read on guest access field ops has moved from orange to yellow on device compliance each statement accepted and repeated in subsequent conversations as if it were an empirical description of the world.

728
00:58:19,000 --> 00:58:36,000
Though you know that in several of those cells the underlying data changed because of scope tweaks because you altered which sides counted as R&D because someone adjusted the threshold for high from 500 events to 1000 to prevent a single noisy team from making the whole column look bad.

729
00:58:36,000 --> 00:58:56,000
At one point the records manager timidly raises a question about a particular cell that has remained stubbornly amber two years in a row despite what she describes as a lot of work asking whether the model takes into account the detailed retention schedule they finally pushed through their governance board and you have to admit that it does not that the measure for that cell is still simply

730
00:58:56,000 --> 00:59:25,000
percentage of locations with any retention policy assigned a binary that knows nothing of nuance nothing of legal intricacies and yet you both continue to talk about that square as if it captured the essence of the organization's readiness to defend itself in court because changing the measure would require a rebuild you do not have time for and questioning the proxy would unravel too many said you notice with a kind of detached unease that when disagreements arise they are now mediated not by revisiting statute or revisiting logs

731
00:59:25,000 --> 00:59:51,000
but by proposing changes to the way the heat map is colored someone suggests that perhaps a certain domain should be weighted less heavily so that the overall visual does not look quite so red another proposes collapsing two categories to avoid what they call unnecessary alarm and in these moments you realize that the map is no longer representation of risk it is the territory in which risk is allowed to be discussed it's shade setting the acceptable bounds of concern

732
00:59:51,000 --> 01:00:09,000
its evolution over quarters serving as the canonical history of the program as the session winds down you capture actions in the meeting chat that read like marginalia in a holy text explore options to move marketing external sharing from red to orange define target state for HR retention heat

733
01:00:09,000 --> 01:00:21,000
investigate why r&d remains amber on labels and everyone leaves with screenshots of the matrix stored in their one note notebooks ready to be pasted into their own updates as proof of alignment of seriousness of motion

734
01:00:21,000 --> 01:00:35,000
later that night alone again with the portals you pull the same underlying data into a separate unsanctioned workbook and sorted without color scales without bins just raw counts of oversharing of often workspaces of unlabeled repositories

735
01:00:35,000 --> 01:00:57,000
the picture that emerges is far messier far less narratable full of contradictions that would take more than a quarterly workshop to untangle but you close that file without saving because you already know which version of reality the organization is prepared to recognize the one where slowly cooling heat map stands in a scripture for a faith in governance that must persist even as exposure quietly redistributes itself underneath

736
01:00:57,000 --> 01:01:09,000
loop two license true up the curve must not bend by the time the second license true up cycle comes around the spreadsheets and dashboards you once treated as diagnostic tools have acquired a kind of gravitational inevitability

737
01:01:09,000 --> 01:01:22,000
and when you open the power bi report titled m365 consumption verse entitlement trend the first thing that greets you is not a table of numbers but a line chart spanning 36 months

738
01:01:22,000 --> 01:01:33,000
its primary series a smooth patient curve of total subscription spend inching upward quarter by quarter with a dotted projection extending rightward into the next fiscal year

739
01:01:33,000 --> 01:01:45,000
and it occurs to you with a clarity that makes you grip the mouse a little tighter that this curve more than any individual contract or justification is what the organization has come to recognize as normal

740
01:01:45,000 --> 01:02:00,000
the secondary series on the chart ostensibly there to provide context shows active users derived from the get mg user filter account enabled eq true export cross joint with enter sign in logs a more jagged line that reflects hiring freezes restructurings

741
01:02:00,000 --> 01:02:12,000
and the quiet attrition no one ever quite admits to but the visual emphasis is unmistakably on the spend trajectory thicker brighter smoothed by a moving average that ions out any seasonal deviation

742
01:02:12,000 --> 01:02:25,000
and somewhere between the color choice and the default y axis scaling you understand that any proposal you might make which causes that top line to dip even temporarily will be received as an anomaly that requires explanation

743
01:02:25,000 --> 01:02:33,000
in the vendors optimization recommendations slide deck which arrives as a courtesy attachment ahead of your renewal meeting the story is told in a friendly a register

744
01:02:33,000 --> 01:02:50,000
bar charts show entitled was consumed for each major sq small call out boxes highlight potential savings if certain under utilized workloads were downsized and yet every scenario they model without explicit acknowledgement preserves the overall upward slope of total contract value

745
01:02:50,000 --> 01:02:59,000
when they speak of optimization they mean moving spend between products not reducing it in aggregate and the economics of their incentives are mirrored by the psychology of your own

746
01:02:59,000 --> 01:03:17,000
you have built an internal narrative in which every new tool every added capability enter ID governance purview e discovery premium defender for cloud apps is part of a coherent strategy and to recommend actual contraction now would be to confess at least implicitly that some earlier expansion was unjustified

747
01:03:17,000 --> 01:03:33,000
it is easier safer to treat the curve as sacrosanct to assume that your job is to prevent certain kings rather than to question its basic direction in the team's channel where you coordinate with finance and analyst post a pivot table extracted from the latest getmg subscribe

748
01:03:33,000 --> 01:03:54,000
scoo and get mg user license detail exports showing license assignment by department and highlights with a polite at mention the clusters of users in functions like HR and facilities who carry full e five sweets but whose activity logs as measured by the Microsoft 365 usage reports api show minimal interaction with advanced workloads

749
01:03:54,000 --> 01:04:13,000
the suggestion is straight forward almost naive in its honesty that perhaps some of these accounts could be downgraded to e three plus a small set of add-ons yielding measurable savings without touching the risk bearing core you start to type a reply that agrees in principle and proposes a pilot but your fingers slow as you imagine the downstream implications

750
01:04:13,000 --> 01:04:41,000
a visible dent in the spent curve in the quarter after implementation a set of variance questions from executives who have become accustomed to seeing governance and security framed as areas where caution dictates either stability or increase never decrease and you quietly pivot your response into one that praises the analysis while recommending that license realignment efforts be scheduled after our co pilot rollout thereby deferring action into a future phase that will always be one more readiness assessment away

751
01:04:41,000 --> 01:05:05,000
during the actual renewal negotiation the account manager shares their own consumption telemetry from the partner center a dashboard you cannot directly see outside these calls where your tenant appears as a cluster of charts and indices secure score improvement over 12 months percentage of active users with advanced security features enabled adoption of information protection capabilities compared to peers they point to a small uptick in your use of

752
01:05:05,000 --> 01:05:21,000
the entry access reviews to the number of DLP policies you have configured to the incremental growth in labeled content and then almost as an aside to the fact that your total monthly bill has followed an encouraging upward trajectory which they frame as continued investment in doing security right

753
01:05:21,000 --> 01:05:29,000
you notice that in their vernacular flat-spend would register as stagnation a worrying signal that the organization is not taking emerging risk seriously

754
01:05:29,000 --> 01:05:45,000
and suddenly the abstract line in your internal power b i chart acquires a social dimension it is a public measure of your diligence of your ability to persuade the company to care back in your own workbook you construct alternative scenarios in hidden tabs playing with numbers the way other people play with simulations

755
01:05:45,000 --> 01:05:57,000
modeling what it would look like to cap e5 penetration at its current level to freeze further and try the governance add-ons to trim power b i pro to only those whose last get power b i activity

756
01:05:57,000 --> 01:06:21,000
export shows regular use and in these shadow plans the total spend curve flattens even dips slightly in certain future quarters a shape that on its own would be fiscally responsible even commendable yet every time you imagine attaching that chart to an email you hear the unspoken accusation it would trigger that you are proposing to do less to protect less to step back from commitments you have already enshrined in road maps and steering committee minutes

757
01:06:21,000 --> 01:06:43,000
in a culture where governance has been sold as an endless escalation in response to an endless escalation of threats a reduction in cost no matter how carefully framed risks being read as a reduction in seriousness so when you finally send your recommendation to finance and the cio the version that will enter the workflow of approvals and become part of the official record the narrative has been gently but unmistakably tilted

758
01:06:43,000 --> 01:07:01,000
you acknowledge areas of under utilization you speak of focusing adoption efforts and aligning features to real needs but when you arrive at the question of overall entitlement you write that maintaining current levels with a modest uplift to cover organic growth and co pilot expansion best balances fiscal discipline with our risk posture

759
01:07:01,000 --> 01:07:25,000
the attached charts show the spend curve continuing its patient dignified ascent perhaps with its slow produced by a fractional degree but certainly never bending downward and as you hit send you understand that the purpose of this true upwards never to discover the minimum necessary license footprint it was to reaffirm through numbers and notes and carefully calibrated visuals that the direction of travel upward guardedly forever

760
01:07:25,000 --> 01:07:47,000
is itself the control the organization trusts more than any specific policy or configuration buried in the admin centers you patrol at two in the morning microstory the first exception it happens on a Wednesday afternoon that has already blurred into the others during a governance working group where the agenda is sliding lazily through open items and no one expects anything irreversible to occur

761
01:07:47,000 --> 01:08:05,000
and then the chat pings with a message from an executive assistant whose display name carries the subtle weight of someone who can walk past doors that stop everyone else and the sentence they type is disarmingly plain the EVP needs to get a guest into teams right now the board deck is stuck in her gmail

762
01:08:05,000 --> 01:08:24,000
you glance at the clock at the agenda at the long list of outstanding actions that all point in the opposite direction tighten guest access reduce external sharing align to policy and you start to compose the answer you have practiced for months the one that begins with we don't support ad hoc guest access and ends with we can onboard their domain through the formal process

763
01:08:24,000 --> 01:08:34,000
but the meeting host has already unmuted and is saying your name asking if there is any way we can be flexible here because this is time sensitive and very visible

764
01:08:34,000 --> 01:08:43,000
in the entire portal the controls you have labored over arrange themselves into a series of prompts that almost feel like they are trying to save you from yourself

765
01:08:43,000 --> 01:08:51,000
the external collaboration settings warn you that opening the tenant to invitations from any domain is not recommended

766
01:08:51,000 --> 01:08:57,000
the baseline guest access policy describes in measured language the risks of granting broad sharing permissions

767
01:08:57,000 --> 01:09:05,000
the conditional access blade reminds you that this very scenario executives under time pressure was one of the reasons you argued for consistent enforcement in the first place

768
01:09:05,000 --> 01:09:15,000
yet the executive assistant has now pasted the EVP's message into the chat and artfully impatient paragraph about needing to move fast and not being blocked by bureaucracy

769
01:09:15,000 --> 01:09:22,000
and your peers on the call are turning their cameras off one by one retreating into the quiet that signals consensus without responsibility

770
01:09:22,000 --> 01:09:28,000
leaving you alone at the point where principal meets exception you tell yourself you are not breaking the rule only bending it

771
01:09:28,000 --> 01:09:33,000
that you will scope this change as narrowly as possible that you will reverted as soon as the board meeting is over

772
01:09:33,000 --> 01:09:39,000
and so you open the team's admin center and create a new policy called exec guest bypass

773
01:09:39,000 --> 01:09:48,000
copying the standard template and altering just two settings allowing guest invitations from any domain and disabling the block on anonymous link creation for meetings

774
01:09:48,000 --> 01:09:59,000
you scope the policy to a single security group whose membership you keep small just the EVP and her assistant at a justification note in the description field that cites the board event and your intention to roll back

775
01:09:59,000 --> 01:10:08,000
and as you click save you experience a small almost physical sensation as if a hairline crack had appeared in a pane of glass you had long pretended was unbreakable

776
01:10:08,000 --> 01:10:16,000
the EVP gets her guest in the deck loads the meeting happens no data breach materializes no auditor appears and life in the tenant continues

777
01:10:16,000 --> 01:10:30,000
but the policy you created remains in place its expiration never scheduled its justification never revisited and when months later you see the same policy name listed among the many exceptions you now sweep past in your admin audits

778
01:10:30,000 --> 01:10:41,000
it will dawn on you with a mixture of recognition and regret that this was the first time you willingly taught the system that governance could be postponed for convenience and that the sky would not immediately fall

779
01:10:41,000 --> 01:10:52,000
loop three readiness review certainty without change by the third readiness review the ritual has been so well rehearsed that the opening slides feel like muscle memory rather than conscious choice

780
01:10:52,000 --> 01:11:01,000
and when you join the meeting and share your screen there is no longer any pretense that you are discovering the state of the tenant together with your audience

781
01:11:01,000 --> 01:11:10,000
you are performing a script whose beats are as fixed as the company's fiscal year even as the visuals that accompany them have been refreshed to suggest novelty

782
01:11:10,000 --> 01:11:26,000
the governance readiness index now in its third incarnation gleams at the center of your first slide the number having crept from 63 to 68.4 and now to 70.1 and you deliver the line that has been workshoped through two cycles of steering committees and consultant retrospectives

783
01:11:26,000 --> 01:11:42,000
that this demonstrate steady improvement in our governance maturity a sentence that sounds precise and factual but in practice reveals nothing about what if anything has actually changed in how access is granted how data is shared or how exceptions are controlled

784
01:11:42,000 --> 01:11:46,000
the underlying mechanics of the index have become more intricate at least on paper

785
01:11:46,000 --> 01:11:53,000
a new tab in the power be I data set lists 23 separate metrics feeding the composite score each tagged with a source

786
01:11:53,000 --> 01:12:02,000
intra purview teams share point a refresh schedule and an owner and you take a certain grim satisfaction in the symmetry of it all

787
01:12:02,000 --> 01:12:15,000
the way columns align and rows total cleanly even as a part of your recognizes that the very completeness of this model has made it harder to admit that much of what it measures is motion rather than outcome

788
01:12:15,000 --> 01:12:32,000
you talk through the additions as if they were breakthroughs the percentage of teams created through approved templates the ratio of guest accounts with recent activity the count of DLP policies in enforcement mode rather than audit each metric described with verbs like driving enabling supporting

789
01:12:32,000 --> 01:12:44,000
and yet when someone on the call asks for a concrete example of behavior that is different today than it was a year ago you find yourself reaching for the same stories you told last time because the lived experience of users has shifted far less than the index suggests

790
01:12:44,000 --> 01:13:02,000
what has changed decisively is the confidence with which you deliver these narratives the first year you hedged your language salted your slides with caveats about initial baselines and the data quality constraints but now the very existence of three annual reviews confers a sense of continuity that you can leverage into authority

791
01:13:02,000 --> 01:13:12,000
you refer to trends that span across the programs lifespan you gesture at heat maps and line charts with the ease of a weather presenter who no longer needs to look at the legend and the tone in your voice

792
01:13:12,000 --> 01:13:27,000
when you say that our framework is now well established leaves little room for anyone to ask what exactly that framework has accomplished beyond perpetuating itself the more fluent you become in this lexicon the easier it is to slide past the static elements

793
01:13:27,000 --> 01:13:37,000
the onalous groups whose numbers have barely budged the DLP policy still stuck in audit mode the proliferation of conditional access exceptions that each carrier reason but no end date

794
01:13:37,000 --> 01:13:54,000
in one of the new visuals a stacked bar chart titled control implementation by phase you show how many controls are categorized as designed implemented monitored and optimized and the distribution has a pleasing shape a gentle taper from left to right that implies healthy progression

795
01:13:54,000 --> 01:14:01,000
when the chief risk officer asks whether any controls have actually graduated from implemented to optimized since last year

796
01:14:01,000 --> 01:14:12,000
you answer without hesitation that a subset of your information protection measures has done so pointing to the broader rollout of sensitivity labels and the steady rate of labeled documents and it is not technically untrue

797
01:14:12,000 --> 01:14:25,000
more documents are labeled more sites inherit those labels more teams carry them in their names yet you know from late night queries you run against the audit logs that people continue to share sensitive files via unlabeled channels when labels prove inconvenient

798
01:14:25,000 --> 01:14:38,000
that the controls you describe as optimized are in practice optional markings on behavior that remains largely unchanged and the certainty in your tone serves less to report reality than to override it with a more comfortable version

799
01:14:38,000 --> 01:14:49,000
you introduce a new quadrant diagram this years incarnation of the methodologies desire to segment the world into graspable shapes plotting process formalization against automation coverage

800
01:14:49,000 --> 01:15:01,000
and place your organization in the quadrant labeled defined partially automated a position that neatly captures the sense of being on the right side of history without the burden of having to demonstrate full execution

801
01:15:01,000 --> 01:15:12,000
the labels have been carefully chosen no quadrant is called noncompliant or at risk instead the lower left is emerging the lower right structured the upper left adaptive and the upper right resilient

802
01:15:12,000 --> 01:15:22,000
and everyone on the call understands without you having to say it that the journey narrative demands movement up into the right that remaining in the same box would be as unacceptable as moving backward

803
01:15:22,000 --> 01:15:31,000
so when you show a subtle shift in your plotted point fractionally higher fractionally to the right and attributed to incremental improvements in access reviews and lifecycle workflows

804
01:15:31,000 --> 01:15:41,000
the room accepts this as evidence that the program is doing what it is supposed to do even though the lived friction of those workflows remains localized and in many cases bypassed

805
01:15:41,000 --> 01:15:55,000
the questions that do arise are no longer about whether to undertake this journey but about how fast to go how to balance business enablement with risk reduction phrases that have evolved into opposing forces in a management physics that takes the existence of your framework as given

806
01:15:55,000 --> 01:16:05,000
someone from operations wonders whether further tightening guest access might impact partner collaboration and instead of revisiting whether the baseline settings ever matched real risk in the first place

807
01:16:05,000 --> 01:16:13,000
the discussion orbits around how to fine tune the exceptions how to document them how to ensure they appear correctly in next year's index

808
01:16:13,000 --> 01:16:22,000
the possibility that some controls may be decorative that their primary function is to generate the impression of structure rather than to change outcomes does not enter the conversation

809
01:16:22,000 --> 01:16:28,000
not because it is forbidden but because the grammar of the readiness review has no room for a sentence that would express it

810
01:16:28,000 --> 01:16:41,000
after the meeting you receive a cascade of direct messages praising the clarity of the update the reassuring trajectory of the index the maturity of the framework and as you respond with polite thanks you feel a peculiar mixture of accomplishment and hollowness

811
01:16:41,000 --> 01:16:48,000
because you know that what these colleagues are grateful for is not a reduction in their actual exposure but a reduction in their anxiety about it

812
01:16:48,000 --> 01:16:55,000
the index gives them something to point to when auditors regulators or boards ask whether they are taking governance seriously

813
01:16:55,000 --> 01:17:10,000
a number that moves in the right direction and can be compared year over year and in providing that you have delivered precisely what the system wanted even if the amber banners in the admin centers you patrol still say as plainly as they did at two in the morning months ago

814
01:17:10,000 --> 01:17:17,000
that the environment is not ready that the objects are unmanaged that the journey has in a very real sense barely begun

815
01:17:17,000 --> 01:17:28,000
loop three budget renewal risk as justification by the third renewal cycle the budget deck has stock pretending to be about opportunity and has quietly rebranded itself as an inventory of threats

816
01:17:28,000 --> 01:17:32,000
a catalog of things that might happen if anyone were to entertain the idea of slowing down

817
01:17:32,000 --> 01:17:42,000
and when you open the latest version in PowerPoint the title slide no longer reads m365 governance investment plan but security and compliance risk mitigation road map

818
01:17:42,000 --> 01:17:52,000
the same numbers now traveling under a different flag their justification anchored not in promised efficiencies or streamlined collaboration but in the more durable less falsifiable terrain of fear

819
01:17:52,000 --> 01:17:58,000
you build the executive summary slide the way you have been taught by a decade of board prep guides and vendor playbooks

820
01:17:58,000 --> 01:18:03,000
a neat sequence of three bullet points that stack cause an effect into a single sentence each

821
01:18:03,000 --> 01:18:07,000
escalating regulatory pressure requires sustained governance investment

822
01:18:07,000 --> 01:18:11,000
evolving threat landscape demands continued modernization of controls

823
01:18:11,000 --> 01:18:15,000
reducing current capabilities would increase residual risk beyond appetite

824
01:18:15,000 --> 01:18:19,000
and with those lines in place you have already constrained the conversation

825
01:18:19,000 --> 01:18:26,000
because any suggestion of reducing spend can now be framed as a willingness to invite risk rather than a neutral financial choice

826
01:18:26,000 --> 01:18:32,000
the supporting material comes as it always does from the very portals that have been whispering amber at you in the small hours

827
01:18:32,000 --> 01:18:34,000
but this time you harvest them with a different intent

828
01:18:34,000 --> 01:18:38,000
in Microsoft secure score you select the last 12 months and export the trend to excel

829
01:18:38,000 --> 01:18:46,000
then re-imported into your deck as a line graph that shows improvement yes but also a plateau a gentle leveling off that you can label diminishing returns without further investment

830
01:18:46,000 --> 01:18:51,000
and in the notes pane you write a sentence that translates that visual into managerial vernacular

831
01:18:51,000 --> 01:18:58,000
to continue raising secure score we must enable advanced capabilities already licensed but not fully deployed

832
01:18:58,000 --> 01:19:05,000
in purview you generate a compliance manager report filtered for regulations that make executives nervous, GDPR-hyper, SOX

833
01:19:05,000 --> 01:19:12,000
and circle the control families where Microsoft managed actions are complete but customer managed ones are only partially implemented

834
01:19:12,000 --> 01:19:17,000
repackaging those amber tiles as evidence that pausing now would leave named obligations half met

835
01:19:17,000 --> 01:19:22,000
you pull a summary from the security center's incident queue not to demonstrate successful containment

836
01:19:22,000 --> 01:19:26,000
but to conjure the possibility of what might have been if the current stack had not been in place

837
01:19:26,000 --> 01:19:31,000
choosing three closed alerts with ominous names suspicious inbox forwarding rule

838
01:19:31,000 --> 01:19:38,000
unusual data download impossible travel sign in and anonymizing them just enough to make them safe for slides

839
01:19:38,000 --> 01:19:44,000
while leaving their titles intact then arranging them into a single column under the heading what we catch today

840
01:19:44,000 --> 01:19:50,000
on the right hand side of that slide in a mirrored column titled what we might miss without e5

841
01:19:50,000 --> 01:19:56,000
and purview you list the same categories of events in more abstract language undetected exfiltration

842
01:19:56,000 --> 01:20:03,000
unmoneted privileged access unclassified sensitive data movement and the symmetry of the layout does most of the rhetorical

843
01:20:03,000 --> 01:20:09,000
work creating a visual equivalence between budget lines and avoided headlines no one in the room will ask whether a

844
01:20:09,000 --> 01:20:14,000
cheaper combination of tools might have caught the same patterns in the decks binary world either

845
01:20:14,000 --> 01:20:20,000
you maintain the current tool set and retain this level of visibility or you step back and choose blindness

846
01:20:20,000 --> 01:20:27,000
when finance asks as they are procedurally obliged to do whether there are scenarios in which you could achieve similar coverage at lower cost

847
01:20:27,000 --> 01:20:33,000
you answer not by modeling license downgrades but by expanding the frame of reference bringing in screenshots from regulatory

848
01:20:33,000 --> 01:20:38,000
enforcement actions against companies in your sector clipped from public consent decrees and blog posts

849
01:20:38,000 --> 01:20:46,000
with sections highlighted where regulators criticized insufficient access governance or in adequate monitoring of collaboration platforms

850
01:20:46,000 --> 01:20:55,000
you do not claim that your organization is about to be fined you do not quantify the probability but you let the existence of these documents sit beside your own tooling as a silent equation

851
01:20:55,000 --> 01:21:05,000
this is what happens to people who do not do what we are doing the phrase cost of noncompliance appears three times in your speaking notes once next to an estimate of potential finds

852
01:21:05,000 --> 01:21:14,000
once next to a bullet about reputational damage and once in the final slide where you summarize your ask as a fraction of the downside we are mitigating

853
01:21:14,000 --> 01:21:30,000
you are aware uncomfortably aware that some of the numbers you are using to argue for continuation would look very similar in a world where controls were less elaborate less expensive because the tenant's real risk is as much a function of human behavior and organizational appetite as of sq mix

854
01:21:30,000 --> 01:21:35,000
but the narrative tools available to you do not accommodate that nuance easily

855
01:21:35,000 --> 01:21:56,000
the structure of the budget process demands a clean mapping from line item to mitigated hazard and so you bend the telemetry to that shape treating any upward motion in attack volume as evidence that you must do more rather than that your visibility has improved treating any flagged DLP event as validation of the suite that courted rather than a question about why the underlying sharing pattern persists

856
01:21:56,000 --> 01:22:02,000
you begin to hear yourself speaking in sentences that invert the burden of proof not why should we keep paying for this

857
01:22:02,000 --> 01:22:16,000
but can we afford to stop over time the people around you internalize this inversion and feed it back a director from legal one skeptical of the governance programs sprawl now argues on your behalf in funding councils that rolling back capabilities now would expose us

858
01:22:16,000 --> 01:22:23,000
a phrase that collapses all distinctions between different tools and configurations into a single undifferentiated shield

859
01:22:23,000 --> 01:22:40,000
so summarizing the it budget to the board describes security and compliance spend as nondiscretionary in the current climate and flashes your secure score chart on a slide whether why access label has been removed the upward trend line sufficient on its own to signal virtue

860
01:22:40,000 --> 01:22:51,000
in hallway conversations and teams chats colleagues begin to equate your presence with the absence of catastrophic events thanking you not for specific remediations but for keeping us out of the news

861
01:22:51,000 --> 01:23:05,000
and each time they do the link in your own mind between risk and renewal titans another notch until the idea of failing to defend the budget feels less like a professional setback and more like an application of duty in quite a moment you recognize what has happened

862
01:23:05,000 --> 01:23:15,000
the logic of the system has turned risk from an input into a justification from a factor to be measured and balanced into a card you are expected to play whenever cost pressure appears

863
01:23:15,000 --> 01:23:31,000
the more effectively you describe the dangers of stopping the safer your program becomes and the safer your program becomes the less anyone asks whether the specific configurations buried in entra purview and teams have changed the shape of exposure in ways that justify their exact price

864
01:23:31,000 --> 01:23:41,000
governance which was originally sold to you as a means of aligning technology with business intent has become the story you tell to explain why the curve cannot bend without inviting catastrophe

865
01:23:41,000 --> 01:23:55,000
and you having told that story often enough and well enough to believe it yourself now find that you cannot step outside it long enough to ask whether the risks you invoke so fluently are still the ones the organization truly faces

866
01:23:55,000 --> 01:24:19,000
the third year of systematic inspection the admin centers no longer feel like instruments you used to interrogate the system but like mirrors held up to confirm that it is still behaving in ways the reports have already taught you to expect and when you sign into the Microsoft 365 admin portal at another indecent hour greeted once again by the now familiar banner about items that need your attention

867
01:24:19,000 --> 01:24:29,000
the first impulse is not curiosity but a resigned satisfaction that the alerts are still there still cycling still generating the raw material from which your readiness narratives are made

868
01:24:29,000 --> 01:24:45,000
the enter ID overview tile announces in its neutral typography that there are still unmanaged objects with counts broken down by onulus groups in active accounts and applications with high privilege numbers that are both lower and higher than last time depending on which date range you select

869
01:24:45,000 --> 01:24:59,000
instead of treating these variances as puzzles to be solved you increasingly treat them as evidence that hygiene work is ongoing that the patient is still being monitored that the regiment you have prescribed has not been abandoned you open the groups played and filter for oners are

870
01:24:59,000 --> 01:25:13,000
exporting the list to CSV with the now reflexive couplet of getma group filter group types any CC eq unified all were object glacial oners.count eq point and a subsequent join against teams metadata

871
01:25:13,000 --> 01:25:25,000
but whereas in the first year you would have scanned the resulting file for specific names specific risks now you sought by created date time and last directory sync time looking instead for overall shapes

872
01:25:25,000 --> 01:25:35,000
how many onulus groups are older than a year how many were created by known automation accounts how many belong to departments that on your heat maps glow reassuringly amber

873
01:25:35,000 --> 01:25:49,000
you log a remediation ticket to assign default oners based on a rule set you have refined over time if the groups primary smtp matches a manage pattern map it to the application team otherwise route to the collaboration center of excellence

874
01:25:49,000 --> 01:26:04,000
and as you close the ticket you feel less like someone addressing a vulnerability and more like someone resetting a counter ensuring that next quarters report will show motion that can be described as progress on owner hygiene without anyone needing to remember which specific teams were touched

875
01:26:04,000 --> 01:26:31,000
in the teams admin center the teams without oners tab has matured into a kind of dashboard within the dashboard with charts that show teams with one owner teams with two or more owners and teams with no owner each category trended over time and you find yourself staring less at the current counts then at the direction of the lines quietly pleased that the no owner series slopes downward even if the absolute number remains higher than you would have once deemed acceptable

876
01:26:31,000 --> 01:26:47,000
you schedule another run of a policy based update via power shell to add a secondary owner from a designated support group wherever a team has only one an operation that generates a satisfying burst of audit log entries add team user calls with service accounts as initiators

877
01:26:47,000 --> 01:26:56,000
and when the job completes you refresh the chart to watch the two or more oners segment widen a graphical confirmation that something anything has been cleaned

878
01:26:56,000 --> 01:27:10,000
the fact that many of these new owners will never open the teams they have inherited will never see the banner that announces their responsibility troubles you less than it used to because in the calculus of hygiene the presence of a name in an owner field is itself a metric

879
01:27:10,000 --> 01:27:24,000
a tick against a control that says every team has at least two owners and that metric is what the index consumes you turn to DLP opening the purview portal to the policy matches and override justifications tabs and see as you have for months

880
01:27:24,000 --> 01:27:37,000
that the majority of events cluster around a small number of high volume locations a handful of distribution lists and shared mailboxes where people routinely attempt to send spreadsheets full of customer data to external addresses

881
01:27:37,000 --> 01:27:47,000
early on you would click into individual incidents read the message subjects scan the file names even occasionally reach out to the senders to understand why they had tried to bypass the policy

882
01:27:47,000 --> 01:28:01,000
but the combination of volume and repetition has worn down that instinct and now your attention goes instead to the summary tiles total matches total blocks total overrides each conveniently graft over 30 days with color shading that can be copied into a slide

883
01:28:01,000 --> 01:28:10,000
you note that the ratio of blocks to overrides has inched upward two percentage points since last quarter shift you are sure will look encouraging in a readiness review

884
01:28:10,000 --> 01:28:29,000
you write a brief internal note that reads DLP hygiene improving without asking whether the underlying data flows have changed in any meaningful way or whether users have simply learned to avoid the specific patterns that trigger inspection in the security center you check the secure configuration section where Microsoft highlights recommended settings for exchange share point and teams

885
01:28:29,000 --> 01:28:37,000
and take comfort in the rows of green checkmarks you have accumulated by enforcing TLS disabling legacy of turning on mailbox auditing by default

886
01:28:37,000 --> 01:28:51,000
the remaining yellows and reds client side logging not uniformly enabled some devices without baseline in tune policies are no longer sources of acute stress they are items on a maintenance list that will never be fully exhausted helpful for demonstrating that there is always more work to do

887
01:28:51,000 --> 01:29:03,000
you export the configuration assessment to CSV not because you intend to hand tune each remaining flag but because the raw export provides counts you can transform into percentages which in turn can be transformed into charts

888
01:29:03,000 --> 01:29:13,000
which can then be transformed into statements like 87% of recommended settings are in place and assertion that sounds like a destination even if it is merely a snapshot of an unending process

889
01:29:13,000 --> 01:29:26,000
as you move from blade to blade from entry to teams to purview what you are really auditing is not the tenants posture but the presence of evidence that you can feed into your loops artifacts that show hygiene as an ongoing practice

890
01:29:26,000 --> 01:29:37,000
reports that once shocked you hundreds of onalous groups thousands of anonymous links unreviewed guest accounts have lost their power to startle because their existence has been assimilated into the narrative you now tell

891
01:29:37,000 --> 01:29:51,000
that in a complex cloud first hybrid environment a certain level of mess is permanent and the role of governance is not to eliminate it but to tend it to keep it within the bounds that allow indices to rise and curves to slope gently upward

892
01:29:51,000 --> 01:30:00,000
the objects remain unmanaged in absolute terms but the system that surrounds them hums with activity scripts running nightly policies creating logs admins closing alerts

893
01:30:00,000 --> 01:30:10,000
and in that hum you find if not safety then at least a sense of purpose a story in which the continuous performance of hygiene has become not a means to an end but the end itself

894
01:30:10,000 --> 01:30:24,000
loop three compliance workshop maturity as horizon by the time you convene the third compliance workshop the word maturity has detached itself from any plain language meaning it might once have carried and now hangs over the agenda like a kind of distant weather pattern

895
01:30:24,000 --> 01:30:34,000
something everyone agrees is moving in the right direction but no one expects to experience directly the invitation subject line announces with bureaucratic optimism compliance maturity workshop phase three

896
01:30:34,000 --> 01:30:44,000
and when you join the call and see the familiar array of faces each in their rectangle each framed by the same corporate background that suggests a unified landscape where none exists

897
01:30:44,000 --> 01:30:53,000
you realize that no one on this invite list actually believes there will be a final phase a moment at which the journey you have all been narrating reaches an end

898
01:30:53,000 --> 01:31:01,000
maturity has become the horizon always visible in your slides always invoked in your talking points but forever retreating as you walk

899
01:31:01,000 --> 01:31:16,000
you open with a refreshed version of the capability model no longer a simple ladder or a column of levels but a radial diagram exported from a Microsoft template concentric circles labeled initial defined measured and optimized

900
01:31:16,000 --> 01:31:25,000
with colored bands radiating outward for domains like identity governance data protection regulatory compliance and user awareness

901
01:31:25,000 --> 01:31:35,000
the organization's current state is indicated by a polygon connecting points on each spoke a misshapen star that bulges toward the center in some areas and outward in others

902
01:31:35,000 --> 01:31:43,000
and you describe its outline as our maturity profile a phrase that feels less like a diagnosis and more like a horoscope

903
01:31:43,000 --> 01:31:49,000
you explain that in the last year the polygon has grown modestly in sectors such as data protection and identity governance

904
01:31:49,000 --> 01:31:58,000
crediting the rollout of sensitivity labels and intro workflows while acknowledging that user awareness and third party risk lag behind and everyone nods

905
01:31:58,000 --> 01:32:04,000
not because the picture matches their lived experience but because it confirms the narrative they have invested in

906
01:32:04,000 --> 01:32:09,000
that maturity is uneven multi-dimensional and crucially always improvable

907
01:32:09,000 --> 01:32:17,000
you walk through a new slide that maps this model against your own compliance manager score which is climbed to a number that looks satisfyingly non-round

908
01:32:17,000 --> 01:32:25,000
the cluster of digits that suggest calibration 79 not 80 a figure high enough to reassure but not so high as to imply completion

909
01:32:25,000 --> 01:32:32,000
the dashboard shows controls grouped into categories like preventative, detective and corrective each with its own sub score

910
01:32:32,000 --> 01:32:36,000
and you draw a line between these analytical labels and the model's layers

911
01:32:36,000 --> 01:32:44,000
saying that truly mature organizations have not only implemented controls but also embedded them into feedback loops that allow continuous adjustment

912
01:32:44,000 --> 01:32:55,000
you know in the part of you that still looks at raw exports at two in the morning that some of the completed actions on which the score rests are as trivial as assigning an owner in a spreadsheet or toggling a default setting

913
01:32:55,000 --> 01:33:03,000
yet when you present the aggregate the weight of Microsoft's framework and your own repetition makes the distinction between substance and appearance feel less urgent

914
01:33:03,000 --> 01:33:13,000
as the discussion opens participants reach instinctively for the language you have been teaching them speaking of closing gaps moving from reactive to proactive building on quick wins

915
01:33:13,000 --> 01:33:23,000
and when someone raises a concern about a specific recurring issue an old line of business application that still exports unencrypted CSVs of personal data to a shared folder

916
01:33:23,000 --> 01:33:27,000
a cluster of legacy mailboxes exempted from e-discovery holds

917
01:33:27,000 --> 01:33:31,000
the conversation quickly zooms back out to the level of maturity stages

918
01:33:31,000 --> 01:33:39,000
so you hear sentences like we are not yet at a point where we can tackle that or that will come when we reach the managed phase for data lifecycle

919
01:33:39,000 --> 01:33:42,000
as though acknowledging the problem is itself evidence of progress

920
01:33:42,000 --> 01:33:49,000
as though naming an issue and mapping it to a future capability tier transforms it from a risk to a milestone

921
01:33:49,000 --> 01:33:58,000
you introduce a new visual that your consulting counterparts have insisted on a maturity roadmap gant chart that lays out the next six quarters in pastel bars labelled with initiatives

922
01:33:58,000 --> 01:34:07,000
consolidate retention policies extend access reviews to high-risk apps, automate guest lifecycle, expand training for data handlers

923
01:34:07,000 --> 01:34:17,000
each bar starts not at zero but at some point along the timeline overlapping with others and the whole image is tilted slightly upward suggesting a cent rather than simple passage of time

924
01:34:17,000 --> 01:34:21,000
you describe these as the steps we must take to reach the next level

925
01:34:21,000 --> 01:34:31,000
but as you click through you become uncomfortably aware that many of the initiatives have appeared in slightly different wording on every roadmap you have shown for the last three years

926
01:34:31,000 --> 01:34:43,000
rationalize retention has become refine retention introduce lifecycle automation has become scale lifecycle automation embed privacy by design has become deeper integration of privacy by design

927
01:34:43,000 --> 01:34:54,000
each renaming papering over the fact that the concrete compromises which blocked them last time conflicting business needs two limitations, fatigue remain largely unaltered

928
01:34:54,000 --> 01:35:05,000
toward the middle of the workshop someone from internal audit asks a question that hangs in the air a bit longer than most how will we know when we are mature they phrase it politely but you can hear the exhaustion behind it

929
01:35:05,000 --> 01:35:15,000
the weariness of chasing a state defined only by frameworks and vendor white papers you respond with the official answer that maturity is not a destination but a continuous process

930
01:35:15,000 --> 01:35:23,000
that the point of these models is not to reach an end state but to ensure ongoing alignment with evolving risks and regulations

931
01:35:23,000 --> 01:35:29,000
and as you say it you feel something inside you settle because you understand that this is the final step in the loop

932
01:35:29,000 --> 01:35:38,000
once maturity is defined as horizon moving toward it becomes indistinguishable from circling and the inability to arrive is no longer a flaw

933
01:35:38,000 --> 01:35:41,000
but the proof that the system is functioning as designed

934
01:35:41,000 --> 01:35:44,000
you close the session by revisiting the radial diagram

935
01:35:44,000 --> 01:35:51,000
overlaying with a harmless animation a faint transparent shape that represents the target profile for the next two years

936
01:35:51,000 --> 01:35:59,000
slightly larger slightly rounder encroaching closer to the optimized ring without touching it and invite the group to commit to this journey

937
01:35:59,000 --> 01:36:09,000
cameras flash on just long enough for people to not on record then wink back to initials and the chat fills with messages thanking you for a helpful session for clarity on where we're headed

938
01:36:09,000 --> 01:36:16,000
as you stop sharing and the meeting dissolves into the quiet of your office you stare for a moment at the frozen image of the horizon you have just drawn

939
01:36:16,000 --> 01:36:24,000
the perfect unreachable circumference of optimized and recognize that in a landscape where governance has become both the path and the destination

940
01:36:24,000 --> 01:36:29,000
maturity is useful precisely because it can never be fully claimed only eternally approached

941
01:36:29,000 --> 01:36:37,000
loop three license true up spend a signal by the third license true up you understand with a clarity that no amount of training material ever admitted

942
01:36:37,000 --> 01:36:43,000
that the numbers in the renewal workbook are not merely reflections of demand or headcount or regulatory scope

943
01:36:43,000 --> 01:36:51,000
they have become a language in which the organization talks about its own seriousness a set of figures that stand in for qualities that cannot be measured directly

944
01:36:51,000 --> 01:37:00,000
like prudence and responsibility and concern and the more you watch how people react to those figures the more you realize that spend itself has hardened into a kind of signal

945
01:37:00,000 --> 01:37:06,000
visible from the boardroom and the vendors forecast model alike that governance is being taken seriously

946
01:37:06,000 --> 01:37:20,000
finance sends you the cycle is structurally identical to the last two tabs for current state proposed variance rose listing skews from Microsoft 365 e5 down through EntraID governance and purview compliance manager

947
01:37:20,000 --> 01:37:28,000
and yet you feel a new weight in the cells of the total annual cost column not because the numbers are dramatically different but because you have watched over iterations

948
01:37:28,000 --> 01:37:38,000
how any suggestion of flattening or reduction in those totals lands like an accusation that someone somewhere has stopped caring you sit with the familiar exports from get mixed subscribes

949
01:37:38,000 --> 01:37:49,000
go and get empty user license detail cross tabbing assigned licenses against actual usage metrics pulled from the Microsoft 365 usage reports api and on a purely analytical level the pattern is obvious

950
01:37:49,000 --> 01:37:55,000
some workloads remain chronically underutilized some departments carry e5 for roles that never touch advanced features

951
01:37:55,000 --> 01:38:10,000
some add-ons like audio conferencing site on accounts whose owners have never once scheduled a dial in bridge in a different story you could imagine building a case from this a careful argument for refactoring the estate into a Lena shape e3 here business premium there

952
01:38:10,000 --> 01:38:19,000
tightly scoped add-ons applied with surgical precision the curve of total spend bending gently downward without compromising baseline security

953
01:38:19,000 --> 01:38:28,000
the story you actually inhabit the one in which line items have become proxies for virtue every downward bend looks less like optimization and more like retreat

954
01:38:28,000 --> 01:38:39,000
and you find yourself rehearsing in your head the questions that would follow why are we spending less on governance when the threat landscape is escalating why are we shrinking our investment in protection when regulators are raising expectations

955
01:38:39,000 --> 01:38:46,000
what changed in our risk appetite to justify this the vendor for their part reinforces this framing without ever saying it quite so boldly

956
01:38:46,000 --> 01:38:53,000
in the quarterly business review deck they share on the renewal call your tenant appears as a case study in security and compliance commitment

957
01:38:53,000 --> 01:39:02,000
a set of graphs showing year on year increases in secure score growth in the number of DLP policies configured expansion in intra access reviews coverage

958
01:39:02,000 --> 01:39:09,000
each of these charts annotated with callouts like driven by e5 adoption or enabled by purview upgrades

959
01:39:09,000 --> 01:39:19,000
and sliding into the background of those visuals almost as a watermark is a bar chart of your total contract value over three years each bar higher than the last

960
01:39:19,000 --> 01:39:29,000
they do not label that chart commitment but they might as well the implication is clear that the direction of that bar is part of the same story as the upward trend in your controls

961
01:39:29,000 --> 01:39:43,000
that spending more is one of the ways you demonstrate you are on the right side of history in internal conversations you catch yourself and others using phrases that quietly encode this linkage when the CEO summarizes the IT budget to the executive team they say

962
01:39:43,000 --> 01:39:50,000
continued investment in Microsoft's governance stack signals to regulators and partners that we are serious about protecting data

963
01:39:50,000 --> 01:40:00,000
sentence that collapses all nuance about specific tooling into the single verb invest as though the act of paying for capabilities automatically translates into their effective use

964
01:40:00,000 --> 01:40:11,000
a risk committee member relaying your slides to their peers remarks that we've moved into the e5 tier and maintaining that level as if that level were a moral category rather than a licensing construct

965
01:40:11,000 --> 01:40:19,000
a plateau you earn by climbing and lose only by back sliding in this dialect to spend less would not be a neutral technical adjustment

966
01:40:19,000 --> 01:40:32,000
it would be akin to lowering your guard downgrading your declared concerns when finance presses you gently but persistently to identify areas where we can send a signal of fiscal discipline without undermining our posture

967
01:40:32,000 --> 01:40:42,000
you realize how thoroughly the language of signaling has colonized both sides of the equation you respond by suggesting relatively cosmetic moves consolidating redundant analytics add-ons

968
01:40:42,000 --> 01:40:51,000
retiring a niche monitoring solution that overlaps with defender tightening assignment hygiene so that obvious mismatches between role and SKU are cleaned up

969
01:40:51,000 --> 01:40:59,000
these moves generate tidy savings numbers that look respectable invariance tables but barely dent the overall total and everyone seems satisfied

970
01:40:59,000 --> 01:41:11,000
because the spreadsheets now contain both kinds of signal the reassuring continuity of a high baseline spend and the equally reassuring presence of small well-contained reductions that can be pointed to as evidence of stewardship

971
01:41:11,000 --> 01:41:26,000
in the privacy of your own workbook you allow yourself to model a more radical scenario one in which you freeze further e5 expansion cap Entra ID governance seats to actual administrators and limit purview premium features to the handful of people who regularly open its portal

972
01:41:26,000 --> 01:41:33,000
and you watch with a mixture of professional fascination and personal dread as the aggregate spend curve flatens

973
01:41:33,000 --> 01:41:47,000
the thought of walking that chart into the next steering committee makes your stomach clenched not because the math is unsound but because it would read in that setting as a confession that the program has peaked that its era of visible growth is over

974
01:41:47,000 --> 01:41:58,000
in a culture that has learned to read rising spend as the signature of care or vigilance of modernity a flat line would be unnervingly ambiguous are we that good now or have we stopped trying

975
01:41:58,000 --> 01:42:07,000
so when you finally lock your recommendation into the cell that will become the basis for PO lines and vendor forecasts what you write is a sentence that keeps all the signals aligned

976
01:42:07,000 --> 01:42:15,000
maintain current e5 and governance entitlements with a modest uplift to support organic growth and co-pilot expansion

977
01:42:15,000 --> 01:42:27,000
a phrase that ensures the total stays on its gentle upward trajectory that tells finance you have found efficiencies without threatening the headline and tells the vendor that their graph of your commitment can continue to rise

978
01:42:27,000 --> 01:42:37,000
as you close the file and send it on you understand more clearly than you are comfortable admitting that in this third loop the true object of governance is no longer just the tenant or the data or the risk

979
01:42:37,000 --> 01:42:49,000
it is the curve itself the visible assurance that money continues to flow in the direction everyone has agreed will stand in the absence of more honest measures as proof that they are doing what responsible people do

980
01:42:49,000 --> 01:42:59,000
in terstice the dashboard turns amber again it is not a crisis that brings you back to the dashboard this time not an incident or an audit request or a late night escalation but a lull

981
01:42:59,000 --> 01:43:10,000
a quiet half hour between calls when your cursor wonders almost of its own accord to the bookmarked power be I report that has over these cycles become the visual metronome of your working life

982
01:43:10,000 --> 01:43:23,000
and when it opens you can feel in the way your shoulders tighten that something in its pallet has shifted not violently not catastrophically but with the small definitive adjustment of a traffic signal changing state

983
01:43:23,000 --> 01:43:31,000
where last quarter the central governance readiness index tile glow to reassuring pale green edged with the upward pointing arrow that the design template reserves for on track

984
01:43:31,000 --> 01:43:39,000
it now shows a color that the style guide calls amber and that you have over time learn to interpret as the systems way of saying

985
01:43:39,000 --> 01:43:48,000
there is still work here for you the numerical value has barely moved 70.1 has become 69.8 a delta that any reasonable person could dismiss as noise

986
01:43:48,000 --> 01:43:56,000
but the icon beside it has changed the arrow straightened into a horizontal bar the caption beneath revised from improving to attention needed

987
01:43:56,000 --> 01:44:04,000
and you know from experience that this subtle downgrade will ripple far more loudly through the organization than any detailed commentary buried three clicks deep

988
01:44:04,000 --> 01:44:15,000
you drill into the underlying measures and find that nothing particularly dramatic has occurred one of the DLP policies you had switched from audit to enforcement has been rolled back temporarily to accommodate a partner integration

989
01:44:15,000 --> 01:44:26,000
dropping the policies and enforcement mode metric by a few points a cluster of oneless teams created by an automated provisioning workflow has nudged the managed objects ratio below an arbitrary threshold

990
01:44:26,000 --> 01:44:37,000
you yourself set when building the index the tenant has not become less safe in any way a human would notice but the composite you birthed has decided that the color of the quarter is no longer green

991
01:44:37,000 --> 01:44:46,000
you sit with this for a moment watching the amber rectangle remembering all the times you have told rooms full of stakeholders that amber means we are progressing but not yet at target

992
01:44:46,000 --> 01:44:51,000
and you realize that somewhere along the way the value of this state has inverted

993
01:44:51,000 --> 01:45:07,000
red on the rare occasions it appears triggers scrambling and explanations green celebrated in passing quickly fades into the background amber though has become the most productive color the one that justifies workshops and road maps and budget lines

994
01:45:07,000 --> 01:45:18,000
the one that allows you to say we are not where we need to be yet and have that sentence heard as a call for continuation rather than as an indictment in emails and summaries and hallway conversations

995
01:45:18,000 --> 01:45:27,000
amber sustains the cadence of meetings ensures there is always another checkpoint to schedule another set of slides to refine another incremental improvement to present

996
01:45:27,000 --> 01:45:38,000
that night as you close your laptop and the after image of that muted hue lingers in your vision longer than you would like to admit you notice that its constancy has begun to bleed into your off hours as well

997
01:45:38,000 --> 01:45:46,000
you dream if you are honest with yourself in amber tones now not the panic of red not the calm of green but a perpetual humming in between

998
01:45:46,000 --> 01:45:59,000
a sense that things are never quite finished never quite safe never quite ready and that your role is to inhabit that middle state indefinitely translating its glow into narratives that keep everyone including you

999
01:45:59,000 --> 01:46:09,000
convinced that as long as the dashboard does not tip into extremes as long as it hovers in this managed uncertainty the work and the identity built around it must go on

1000
01:46:09,000 --> 01:46:20,000
before readiness review compressed language by the fourth readiness review the slides arrive in your inbox already flattened their language compressed into a dialect that feels less like speech and more like configuration

1001
01:46:20,000 --> 01:46:34,000
and when you join the call and begin to share your screen you notice almost with relief how few words you are now expected to say out loud because the deck has distilled three years of narrative into a small set of acronyms and indices that can be recited quickly and without friction

1002
01:46:34,000 --> 01:46:54,000
the title slide dispenses with the phrase governance readiness altogether and simply reads m365 gov fy24 q4 and the agenda beneath it is four items long score gaps plan risks each term you can pronounce in under a second each a container large enough to hold whatever detail anyone might want to project into it

1003
01:46:54,000 --> 01:47:10,000
but small enough in practice that very little will be allowed to spill out the centerpiece of the review is no longer a multi page to of entry per view and teams but a single consolidated dashboard exported from power be I as a static image and embedded on slide three where five tiles line up in a need row

1004
01:47:10,000 --> 01:47:34,000
gri71 ca cov 93% pim cov 88% dlpe and f 62% sr ink 12% y o y you say the strings as they appear letting your voice ride the rhythm of consonants and numbers gri up 1.4 on quarter conditional access coverage at 93% of user population

1005
01:47:34,000 --> 01:47:59,000
pm coverage at 88% of admin roles dlp enforcement at 62% of scope locations security incidents down 12% year on year and when you pause the silence that follows is not the silence of confusion it is the silence of a room that has been trained to accept these sounds as sufficient no one asks what coverage means in operational terms no one inquires how dlp enforcement differs from the partial blocks and user

1006
01:47:59,000 --> 01:48:21,000
overrides you still see flooding the logs at night the compressed label stand in for full sentences and the metric stand in for stories you have over the last year re engineered the index to match this compression mapping each of the sprawling measures you once tracked into tagged buckets that roll up cleanly under headings like ID data colab and OPS

1007
01:48:21,000 --> 01:48:46,000
and the spider charts that once accompany them have been replaced by a simple table where each domain is assigned a letter grade identity is B plus data B collaboration B operations A and you find that as you speak these letters allowed you slip unconsciously into the intonations of school reports saying identity has improved from B to B plus since last quarter as if some unseen teacher had praised the tenant for trying harder

1008
01:48:46,000 --> 01:49:04,000
the table makes it easy to signal direction an arrow up or down next to each grade conveys more in this compressed language than a paragraph of explanation and you catch yourself describing entire domains with phrases like steady state or minor regression without ever needing to open a portal in real time

1009
01:49:04,000 --> 01:49:33,000
when questions come they come in the same dialect a VP asks what's driving the B minus on colab and you answer external GA and guest life cycle still below target speaking in clipped nouns that hide the complexity of the tradeoffs behind two letter abbreviations GA for guest access LC for life cycle the tradeoffs themselves between frictionless partner onboarding and the risk of abandoned guest accounts between aggressive exploration policies and the operational pain of re approval are no longer revisited at length they have been encoded into the grade

1010
01:49:33,000 --> 01:49:51,000
and the grade has been accepted as the thing that must change someone else asks any red and you answer simply no red this quarter one amber pointing at a cell on a heat strip that runs under the table a narrow band where green amber and red blocks mark trend status for each domain across the last six reviews

1011
01:49:51,000 --> 01:50:12,000
the visual shows a run of amber under data and you describe it with a phrase you have used so often it has lost all contour ongoing work even the artifacts you bring into the review have been thinned where you once walked people through sample graph queries and slices of audit logs to illustrate onalous groups or unmanaged applications you now show only the counts rendered in rounded rectangle

1012
01:50:12,000 --> 01:50:28,000
OG 142 you a 37 IR 180 to 11 you explain onalous groups down 12% unmanaged apps flat in active records over 180 days down 8% and in doing so you shift hygiene from an activity to a set of

1013
01:50:28,000 --> 01:50:46,000
the underline scripts still run nightly the export still land in your storage account but the stories they might tell about actual teams actual users have been abstracted into movement in indicators that can be consumed in under a minute you feel the compression working on you

1014
01:50:46,000 --> 01:51:02,000
the longer you speak in this time the more your own thoughts begin to align with it and later night as you scroll through entry or purview you no longer frame what you see in full self accusing sentences like we have never reviewed the justifications on these exceptions but in short hand assessments ca

1015
01:51:02,000 --> 01:51:22,000
pm a m b dl p y p you catch yourself rating changes with emojis in your private notes using a green check for done an orange circle for partial a blue dot for parked and it occurs to you that the language of governance has been pulled into the same attention economy that governs

1016
01:51:22,000 --> 01:51:38,000
everything else on your screen when you want loses to recognize ability and anything that cannot be expressed in three characters or less is at risk of being ignored entirely as the review winds down you land as you always do on the next steps slide which now contains only three bullets each beginning

1017
01:51:38,000 --> 01:51:58,000
the verb and ending with an acronym extend AR to HR L.O.B finalize L.P. for exe g a standardized L.P.F. across BU you translate them once for the room extend access reviews to HR line of business apps finalize life cycle policies for executive guest access standardized label and policy framework across business units

1018
01:51:58,000 --> 01:52:24,000
knowing you will not have to say the long versions again you let the letters take over in your notes and in your follow up mail the more the language compresses the easier it becomes to circulate to paste to forward and as you watch the abbreviated bullets echo through channels and chats you realize that the loops you have built now run largely on this compressed code small packets of meaning shuttling between meetings ensuring that the cadence of readiness continues even when very few people including you can still see the full sentences underneath

1019
01:52:25,000 --> 01:52:40,000
loop four budget renewal self funding anxiety by the fourth budget renewal the PowerPoint template has stopped pretending that this is an external conversation with finance or the board and has settled into what it has always really been a structured dialogue you conduct with your own anxiety

1020
01:52:40,000 --> 01:52:54,000
a set of charts and bullet points designed less to persuade other people that the spend is justified then to reassure the part of you that still remembers when this program was small enough to be questioned that it must now by sheer momentum be allowed to continue

1021
01:52:54,000 --> 01:53:19,000
when you open the latest deck the title slide feels almost per factory the year and the phrase security and compliance run rate review slaughtered into predefined placeholders but the second slide the one that shows the stacked area chart of governance program opix by work stream hits you in the chest in a way it did not the first three times because the tallest band in the stack the one that began as a modest sliver labeled governance operations has now swollen to occupy nearly half the total

1022
01:53:19,000 --> 01:53:40,000
the labels in that band tell a story you recognize all too well enter ID governance licensing purview compliance SK use manage service for access reviews consultant support for maturity model each line tied to something you remember approving as a one time or transitional expense each now rolled into a permanent run rate that makes the graph look like a snake eating its own tail

1023
01:53:40,000 --> 01:54:05,000
you trace the progression with your cursor and see that the initial spike in operational cost which you justified as necessary to bootstrap the framework has never dipped only stepped upward with each new capability you brought in to manage the complexity created by the last and the thought occurs to you unbidden and unwelcome that the program has become self funding in the worst possible sense the existence of governance creates the need for more governance

1024
01:54:05,000 --> 01:54:33,000
and the budget you are defending now goes largely to maintaining the machinery that exists to defend the budget you try to write the narrative slide that will make this palatable a three bullet context section that frames the rising operational share as a sign of maturation arguing that early years were naturally capital heavy and that it is appropriate for the balance to tilt toward run as build completes but when you look at the underlying numbers you know that build never really stopped

1025
01:54:33,000 --> 01:54:53,000
and in the year there was another assessment another methodology refresh another tool whose implementation costs were coded as project but whose ongoing maintenance training and licensing are now quietly booked under operations and as you type the phrase stabilizing run rate your hands hesitate because nothing in the shape of the curve suggests stability

1026
01:54:53,000 --> 01:55:11,000
it is not just that spend has increased it is that each increase has been underwritten by the argument that without it the previous investments would be wasted that you must fully leverage what you have already bought and so you find yourself now in the position of telling finance with a straight face that the only way to be responsible with past money is to commit more

1027
01:55:11,000 --> 01:55:22,000
the questions you anticipate from them have not changed but your internal reaction to them has when they ask whether certain functions could be in sourced now that the knowledge has ostensibly been transferred from consultants you here beneath the surface

1028
01:55:22,000 --> 01:55:37,000
not a challenge to external invoices but a challenge to the programs claim to special expertise because if this work could be distributed into ordinary IT operations then it would lose the aura of exceptionality that is protected its budget line through two rounds of cost cutting

1029
01:55:37,000 --> 01:55:45,000
when they ask whether all enter ID governance seats are truly required or whether the purview premium excuse could be restricted to a smaller cadre of power users

1030
01:55:45,000 --> 01:55:56,000
what you feel is not just the discomfort of having to admit that some licenses are underutilized but a deeper unease at the prospect that shrinking those numbers would make the band on the stacked chart visually narrower

1031
01:55:56,000 --> 01:56:03,000
that it would invite someone in a future review to point at the dip and say we survived that reduction what else can go

1032
01:56:03,000 --> 01:56:08,000
in response you marshal the arguments that have worked before but you can hear now the edge in your own voice

1033
01:56:08,000 --> 01:56:15,000
you point out that the consultants day rates are lower than the blended cost of building and retaining equivalent specialist headcount

1034
01:56:15,000 --> 01:56:26,000
even though you know that the comparison is skewed by ignoring the value of embedded knowledge and the way external expertise by its nature keeps critical understanding just out of reach

1035
01:56:26,000 --> 01:56:31,000
you note that enter ID governance licensing covers not only the current workflows but also future planned ones

1036
01:56:31,000 --> 01:56:41,000
deploying the phrase foundational capability in a way that suggests these seats are less like optional tools and more like an operating system unsafe to uninstall once booted

1037
01:56:41,000 --> 01:56:52,000
you argue that purviews higher tiers are what allow you to demonstrate compliance to auditors and regulators framing any reduction as a risk not just to controls but to the narratives those controls support

1038
01:56:52,000 --> 01:56:59,000
what you do not say though it sits heavily behind every chart is that your own sense of safety has become tied to the continuity of the spend

1039
01:56:59,000 --> 01:57:05,000
the program has grown into a structure that houses your role your team your identity as the person who owns governance

1040
01:57:05,000 --> 01:57:13,000
and you cannot easily imagine what your days would look like if the stacked area chart began to slope downward if the loops you have built readiness reviews

1041
01:57:13,000 --> 01:57:22,000
audits workshops true ups were no longer required in their current form so when you finalize the ask slide and it reads for the fourth time in as many years

1042
01:57:22,000 --> 01:57:32,000
maintain and modestly increase current run rate to sustain risk posture and leverage prior investments you understand that the anxiety driving this request is not only institutional

1043
01:57:32,000 --> 01:57:44,000
not only a fear of regulatory penalty or breach but personal acquired knowledge that the machine you have helped construct now exists in part to keep itself and everyone attached to it going

1044
01:57:44,000 --> 01:57:55,000
loop four admin center audit drift as design by the fourth pass through the admin centers the word drift has stopped sounding like a problem and has started to feel like a natural property of the environment

1045
01:57:55,000 --> 01:58:05,000
less a deviation from some imagined baseline and more the baseline itself and when you log into the Microsoft 365 admin portal and see the familiar scatter of warning banners and recommendation cards

1046
01:58:05,000 --> 01:58:20,000
you no longer experience the small jolt of dissonance you once did between what the readiness dashboards claim and what the configuration pains display because you have come to understand that the distance between them is not a gap to be closed but a space in which the whole governance story lives

1047
01:58:20,000 --> 01:58:32,000
the summary tile in entra still informs you that there are still unmanaged objects but now the sentence functions almost as a reassurance confirmation that the system remains complex enough to justify your loops

1048
01:58:32,000 --> 01:58:53,000
and when you click into the details and watch the counts refresh ownerless groups stale service principles applications with unused delegated permissions you read the tiny fluctuations as signs of healthy movement rather than as indicators of failure you open the sign in logs blade and run a saved query that filters for conditional access policies labeled report only a category that in the

1049
01:58:53,000 --> 01:59:07,000
early days you treated as a temporary staging ground on the way to enforcement but that has over four cycles grown into a permanent liminal zone where policies go not to be tested and promoted but to live out their lives in a harmless simulation of control.

1050
01:59:07,000 --> 01:59:21,000
The query returns hundreds of entries each representing a real user sign into which a virtual policy was hypothetically applied the result column reassuring filled with the word report only and you scroll through them with a detached appreciation for the elegance of it all.

1051
01:59:21,000 --> 01:59:50,000
The system pretends to enforce the logs pretend to record enforcement your reports pretend to measure the effectiveness of enforcement and in this layer it make believe the actual experience of the user remains pleasantly undisturbed at some point along the way you stopped asking when these policies would graduate into reality and as you export the data to CSV for inclusion in your next audit pack you privately admit that the comfort of seeing their hypothetical impact draft in purview has become preferable to the operational pain of letting them bite.

1052
01:59:50,000 --> 02:00:05,000
In the team's admin center you pull up the team's policy usage report and sought by creation date noticing how the proliferation of almost identical policies over time has created a sedimentary record of every exception you were ever persuaded to make.

1053
02:00:05,000 --> 02:00:19,000
Global or quite default still sits at the top a relic of your first governance workshop but below it the list has grown long and strangely poetic marketing external elevated, exact guest bypass, legacy project chat, pilot, copilot relaxed.

1054
02:00:19,000 --> 02:00:41,000
Each a fossilized compromise tied to some meeting where business pressure and doctrinal purity collided you remember promising yourself at the time that you would return to these one off policies and either normalize them into a clean tiered model or retire them once the immediate need passed yet here they are still assigned to hundreds of teams and users their settings quietly diverging from the baseline in small survivable ways.

1055
02:00:41,000 --> 02:00:58,000
You recognize with a tired sort of honesty that what you once called policies brawl is now functioning as the de facto operating model an organic taxonomy grown out of convenience and persuasion rather than design and that your quarterly audits now treat this accumulated like in of exceptions are something to be cataloged rather than scraped away.

1056
02:00:58,000 --> 02:01:10,000
In purview's information protection section you open the sensitivity label configuration and see that what began as a crisp set of three labels public internal confidential has through well intentioned requests and compliance.

1057
02:01:10,000 --> 02:01:27,000
Driven refinements bloomed into a dozen variants internal default internal HR confidential finance confidential M&A highly confidential exec each with slightly different encryption settings external sharing rules and offline access durations.

1058
02:01:27,000 --> 02:01:55,000
The policy simulator shows you how often each label is applied and the chart reveals what you already know from rummaging through content in the graph most documents still carry no label at all and among those that do the distribution is heavily skewed toward the two generic options while the specialized variance you labored over barely register you could in theory rationalize them merge overlapping definitions runner campaign to simplify choices for users but when you consider the effort required the communications the change management the retraining.

1059
02:01:55,000 --> 02:02:14,000
You find yourself instead adjusting the compliance manager mapping so that all these near duplicates roll up under a single control sensitivity labeling implemented allowing you to present a clean filled in check box even as the underlying taxonomy drifts further from anything a normal person could explain.

1060
02:02:14,000 --> 02:02:24,000
The audit scripts you run now reflect this accommodation of drift the power shell module you once used to identify and flag deviations from baseline get image policy and get see his teams.

1061
02:02:24,000 --> 02:02:53,000
Messaging policy piped through handcrafted where object filters has been repurposed into a reporting engine that merely counts them out putting tidy tables of number of custom policies number of policies with external sharing enabled number of legacy authentication protocols still allowed each number plotted over time to show that while absolute values may rise the percentage of total remains within thresholds you yourself defined as acceptable you consume these graphs not as alarms but as reassurance that drift is proceeding

1062
02:02:53,000 --> 02:03:00,000
at a manageable rate that design has successfully expanded to include the behavior of all the changes you once would have classified as erosion.

1063
02:03:00,000 --> 02:03:16,000
When auditors arrive and ask to see evidence of your periodic admin center reviews you show them the exports the charts the tickets closed in your ITSM tool with descriptions like reviewed CA policies no material changes required and validated teams policy inventory exceptions documented.

1064
02:03:16,000 --> 02:03:31,000
And no one in the room including you voices the thought that drifts uncomfortably beneath the surface that these reviews are now less about steering the configuration back to what a fixed north and more about ensuring that the current meandering coastline is fully mapped.

1065
02:03:31,000 --> 02:03:44,000
Over four loops you have taught yourself and the system that perfect alignment is neither achievable nor especially desirable that the human structures which sit on top of these tools need a certain amount of slack to function.

1066
02:03:44,000 --> 02:03:55,000
And so what began as a struggle against drift has evolved quietly and completely into its recognition as design a pattern to be observed measured and normalized rather than resisted.

1067
02:03:55,000 --> 02:04:10,000
Loop 4 compliance workshop enforcement without effect by the fourth compliance workshop the word enforcement has been tamed into something that fits politely on a slide around a rectangle on a processed diagram rather than the hard edge of a consequence anyone can actually feel.

1068
02:04:10,000 --> 02:04:36,000
And when you step into the virtual room again faces tiled in their usual gallery you notice that the expectations in the air have shifted in a way no one will name directly people are not here to decide what will be enforced or how or against whom they are here to hear that enforcement exists that it is live that it is in place so they can carry that phrase back to their own stakeholders and lay it on the table like a charm against bad outcomes.

1069
02:04:36,000 --> 02:04:55,000
And the agenda which once laid out discussions about policy design and user impact now collapses into three terse bullets DLP status label posture retention coverage and each of those you know before you begin will be treated less as levers to pull than as weather reports to acknowledge.

1070
02:04:55,000 --> 02:05:05,000
You start as you must with data loss prevention because DLP is the crown jewel in every vendor slide and every regulatory FAQ the control that sounds most like a spell.

1071
02:05:05,000 --> 02:05:08,000
And sensitive data from leaving the organization.

1072
02:05:08,000 --> 02:05:34,000
You share the purview dashboard and highlight the tile that matters most in the compressed language of the program the one that says policies enforced with the reassuring number beside it and you say we now have 62% of our scope locations covered by enforced DLP policies watching the nods flicker on camera as if that percentage were a physical barrier someone could lean against you do not unless pressed hard mention that enforced does not mean absolute that user still see override prompts they can click on the right.

1073
02:05:34,000 --> 02:05:53,000
And the right prompts they can click through with a justification as vague as business need that large volumes of data move every day through channels your rules do not touch because classifying them properly would have required a level of discovery no one was willing to fund enforcement in this room means that a setting somewhere is no longer on ordered only.

1074
02:05:53,000 --> 02:06:03,000
And the number that counts is the ratio of toggle switches not the reduction in actual exposure to illustrate impact you open a chart of policy matches over time and point to a subtle decline in incidents labeled.

1075
02:06:03,000 --> 02:06:32,000
And then the number of incidents labeled allowed with override framing it as evidence that awareness is increasing and behavior is adapting though in your quiet a moments with the logs you have seen that what is really happening is a slow migration of risky sharing into patterns that fall just outside your defined conditions people no longer attached spreadsheets of customer data to outbound email with obvious subject lines they upload them to loosely govern share point sites and share links that your DLP rules focused on mail flow and external domains barely glance at.

1076
02:06:32,000 --> 02:06:53,000
But the workshop is not built to surface these lateral moves it is built to show a downward slope and label it effect and so you let the line speak because everyone in the room needs to believe that enforcement once declared produces change you move on to sensitivity labels another realm where enforcement exists primarily as a configuration option rather than a lived constraint.

1077
02:06:53,000 --> 02:07:16,000
The purview blade shows that mandatory labeling for office apps is now enabled for a broad swath of users and you present this as a milestone explaining that users are now required to apply a label before saving or sending even as you know from hallway complaints and help desk tickets that the practical response has been to select the default internal label as fast as humanly possible to get the next screen out of the way.

1078
02:07:16,000 --> 02:07:38,000
The metrics you surface percentage of label documents growth in confidential tag usage give the impression of a classification culture taking root but when you drill into content via graph queries at night you still find contracts and HR files and financial models sitting under the same catch all designation their protection semantics identical to documents that could in truth have been public block drafts.

1079
02:07:38,000 --> 02:08:07,000
Enforcement here has become a thin membrane stretched over habit and extra click on the way out of the file its primary observable effect the occasional half-hearted grumble in a team's chat retention is the final pillar you touch because regulators love to see dates and durations and destruction schedules and you display the matrix your team has labored over rose for email teams chat teams channel messages sharepoint documents columns for default legal hold regulatory and a grid.

1080
02:08:07,000 --> 02:08:36,000
3 years 7 years 10 years in definite that suggests an almost surgical control over the life cycle of information you talk about immutable retention and defensible deletion about how no user can delete items under hold and in the very same week you will approve yet another manual export of PSD files to satisfy a discovery request from an application that has never integrated properly with compliance center a reminder that enforcement here to applies mostly to the parts Microsoft has mapped leaving the unofficial.

1081
02:08:36,000 --> 02:08:57,000
The workshop absorbs your explanation of coverage of policies assigned to locations and labels mapped to workloads and no one asks the question that would puncture the illusion how often do we actually destroy what we say we destroy and how often do we keep it anyway because someone somewhere is afraid to let go.

1082
02:08:57,000 --> 02:09:12,000
As the session winds down a business unit leader raises the concern that their teams are struggling with false positives and wonders if there is any flexibility in the rules and you hear in the careful way they phrase it the tension that has defined this whole fourth loop.

1083
02:09:12,000 --> 02:09:20,000
Enforcement is now strong enough to irritate to slow to occasionally block but not strong enough to convince people that the trade is worth it.

1084
02:09:20,000 --> 02:09:43,000
You offer the standard answer that you will tune the policies and review conditions speaking as though the dials on the purview console are precise instruments rather than sliders you nudge between too noisy and too quiet and you schedule almost automatically another sub workshop to look at DLP rule optimization another hour in which you will stare at match counts and sampling reports and move thresholds by fractions of a percent.

1085
02:09:43,000 --> 02:10:01,000
The next meeting and the recording saves to a channel whose retention is governed by a policy no one in the call could recite you recognize that the word enforcement has done its job in the only way the system truly requires it has given everyone present something to point to the next time they are asked what are you doing about this risk.

1086
02:10:01,000 --> 02:10:11,000
Whether that something has altered behavior reduced exposure or merely added friction at the margins is in the architecture you now inhabit a secondary concern almost an afterthought.

1087
02:10:11,000 --> 02:10:24,000
The primary effect of enforcement as you have implemented and narrated it through four cycles is to sustain the belief that controls exist and are active to populate dashboards and indices with comforting labels that can be read aloud in workshops and reports.

1088
02:10:24,000 --> 02:10:30,000
And in that sense for all practical purposes that matter to the loops it is working exactly as designed.

1089
02:10:30,000 --> 02:10:57,000
Loop 4 license true up the curve trains the mind by the fourth license true up the spreadsheet has stopped being a financial artifact and has become something closer to a cognitive device a shaped surface over which your thoughts are trained to move in pre approved patterns and when you open the latest m365 entitlement reconciliation before XLSX from the shared governance folder you feel your attention narrow to the same places it always goes following the curve it has learned to trace.

1090
02:10:57,000 --> 02:11:08,000
The tabs are familiar baseline consumption scenario a scenario B final and the figures in the total annualized row though incrementally higher than last years no longer shock you.

1091
02:11:08,000 --> 02:11:26,000
What matters is not the absolute value but the direction the assurance that the plotted line on the summary chart continues to lean however gently upward the macros that populate this workbook are now so embedded in your routine that you run them almost without thinking you refresh the data connection to the tenant with a click that triggers a hidden sequence of power shell and graph queries.

1092
02:11:26,000 --> 02:11:55,000
A schedule job somewhere executes get Mx subscribed to school get M user license detail get Mg report teams user activity user detail and within a few minutes the consumption tab fills with updated counts for e5 e3 enter ID governance purview premium and the now ubiquitous co pilot add-ons conditional formatting lights up variances in soft greens and ambours no reds by design and the pivot table on the right silently recomputes the license utilization index.

1093
02:11:55,000 --> 02:12:01,000
A derived number that expresses to two decimal places the ratio of active use to entitlements held.

1094
02:12:01,000 --> 02:12:24,000
On paper this index should be the conscience of the exercise a signal that would prompt reduction if it drifted too low but over four cycles you have watched it settle into a narrow band between once data 71 and 78 enough to call healthy not enough to demand action the curve that really matters is on the final tab a simple line chart titled governance investment trajectory with fiscal years on the x axis.

1095
02:12:24,000 --> 02:12:31,000
And total spend on the y axis and it is here that you can see more clearly than anywhere else how the mind has been trained.

1096
02:12:31,000 --> 02:12:40,000
The first point on the line four years back is modest a small marker just above the baseline that you once had to defend with detailed justifications and proof of concept results.

1097
02:12:40,000 --> 02:12:53,000
The next few points climb more steeply reflecting the switch to e5 the onboarding of entry D governance the activation of purviews richer features each inflection accompanied in your memory by weeks of debate and slide decks full of risk scenarios.

1098
02:12:53,000 --> 02:13:11,000
Now the most recent point sits farther up and to the right the slope shallower but still positive and you find as you stare at it that the very idea of drawing the next point level with this one or below it feels not merely ambitious but transgressive like sketching a decline in some unspoken measure of virtue.

1099
02:13:11,000 --> 02:13:22,000
The language around you has quietly conspired to reinforce this training in corridor conversations people no longer ask how much do we spend on Microsoft licensing they ask what does our investment trajectory look like?

1100
02:13:22,000 --> 02:13:37,000
And in the quarterly risk committee the CFO does not say we are paying more for governance they say we continue to increase our commitment to security and compliance year over year the phrase continue to increase coming out as a single unit and obligation as much as a description.

1101
02:13:37,000 --> 02:13:49,000
When the external auditors note in their management letter that the organization has made significant investments in governance tooling the word significant lands in the room less as a quantitative descriptor and more as a moral commendation.

1102
02:13:49,000 --> 02:14:10,000
And you watch as heads nod absorbing the implied lesson that bigger numbers on that curve equal more seriousness more adulthood your own thinking bends with it sitting with the scenario a tab where you have dutifully modeled a world in which e5 growth is capped and enter ID governance seats are tightened to true admins you cannot help but see the resulting flattening of the line on the summary chart as a kind of failure.

1103
02:14:10,000 --> 02:14:37,000
Even though the accompanying notes you have written in the margin utilization index improves to the 84 no impact to baseline conditional access purview coverage for key roles maintained are positive by any rational standard the more time you spend in these models the more you notice that you instinctively adjust assumptions to avoid trajectories that dip nudging projected head count up a little here expansion of co pilot pilots there until the line regains its modest upward tilt and your chest unclenches.

1104
02:14:37,000 --> 02:15:05,000
The curve has become not just an output of your reasoning but a boundary for it an invisible rail that keeps your scenarios from wandering into shapes that would be harder to explain in renewal meetings this trained perception manifestors reflex when someone tentatively suggests that with our current controls in place we might be able to flatten spend next year you feel even before you martial counter arguments the wrongness of that idea as a physical sensation and you reach automatically for phrases that connect the curve to everything the organization fears.

1105
02:15:05,000 --> 02:15:34,000
In the current threat landscape given the regulatory trajectory considering our reliance on co pilot and AI the specifics of your response are always a little different anchored to whatever headline or enforcement action is freshest in memory but the conclusion is the same that holding the line is indistinguishable from stepping back that in this domain unlike others doing more with less is not a mark of ingenuity but a signal that you have misread the moment over time you notice that this way of seeing bleeds outward you begin to look at other choices.

1106
02:15:34,000 --> 02:15:46,000
You begin to look at other charts secure score compliance manager incident counts through the same lens preferring those whose lines go in directions that feel narratively aligned smoothing out or rescaling those that do not.

1107
02:15:46,000 --> 02:16:03,000
In private you are still capable of more nuanced thought you can still tell yourself that real improvement might one day mean spending less because you have built simpler systems cleaner processes a culture that needs fewer artificial controls but the more cycles you complete the more those thoughts feel like academic abstractions interesting but impractical.

1108
02:16:03,000 --> 02:16:14,000
While the curve in the license workbook remains immediate persuasive insistently real training not only your models but your sense of what responsible governance is supposed to look like when drawn on a slide.

1109
02:16:14,000 --> 02:16:30,000
Mirror self dialogue who spoke first it happens on a night that feels like any other which is to say you are still at your desk long after the building has emptied the glow of the dual monitors painting the walls with a light that might as well be the only illumination left in the city.

1110
02:16:30,000 --> 02:16:47,000
And you are doing what you always do when you are too tired to tackle anything new but not yet willing to admit that you are done which is to click slowly through the same reports you have seen a hundred times before not looking for anything in particular simply letting the familiar shapes reassure you that the world has not shifted in your absence.

1111
02:16:47,000 --> 02:17:04,000
The entrance sign in logs load with the endless lattice of rows each one a small story of someone somewhere getting work done or at least trying to and you run a saved query to filter for high risk sign in not because you expect to find any the system has not already flagged but because the command has become a ritual.

1112
02:17:04,000 --> 02:17:13,000
Key strokes your fingers know as well as your password as the results populate you hear yourself matter half under your breath we will need to tighten this for executives in q2.

1113
02:17:13,000 --> 02:17:32,000
And the sentence lands in the air of your office with the soft inevitability of a calendar reminder align you have said in some form in every review for the last year and for a moment you simply let it hang there unsurpriced then as your eyes track down the list of user principle names you notice that the phrase is already written somewhere else in a place you did not consciously put it.

1114
02:17:32,000 --> 02:17:50,000
In the comments field of a draft conditional access policy labelled exact geobound report only a note reads promote to enforce q2 board expects higher bar for leadership accounts and the wording is close enough to your spoken thought that you feel a small unwelcome chill because you cannot remember when you wrote it.

1115
02:17:50,000 --> 02:18:05,000
The policy itself is stamped with a creation date from ten months ago and a modification date from six which matches none of the late night sessions you recall and yet the cadence is yours the careful managerial phrasing the invocation of expectations as a lever.

1116
02:18:05,000 --> 02:18:17,000
You flip over to the governance readiness dashboard and scroll to the roadmap notes pane a place you have been using more and more as a kind of scratch pad for future talking points and there under a heading labelled FY 25 themes.

1117
02:18:17,000 --> 02:18:32,000
You find a list that reads like a transcript of conversations you have not quite had yet frame and workflows as cultural shift not just tooling emphasize that amber is healthy tension not failure recast spend trajectory as commitment not cost.

1118
02:18:32,000 --> 02:18:46,000
Each line sounds like something you might reasonably say in the next cycle each line matches the style you have been holding unconsciously in your decks and workshops and yet seeing them laid out in this neutral interface detached from any specific meeting invite or email thread.

1119
02:18:46,000 --> 02:19:05,000
You experience them as coming from outside you as if some other presence some governance aware copy of your voice has been leaving you prompt to follow you think back to the first time you heard the readiness index describe the tenant as not ready how jarring it was then to see your own environment rendered in such blunt terms.

1120
02:19:05,000 --> 02:19:14,000
And you remember how quickly you began to use that phrase yourself first defensively then strategically until it became the opening move in every conversation.

1121
02:19:14,000 --> 02:19:31,000
This environment is not ready for X we are not yet mature enough to do Y at the time it felt like you were borrowing a verdict from the tool putting human shape around the machines assessment but as you scroll now through the comment histories and change logs through notes attached to access review campaigns and purview policies and teams governance rules.

1122
02:19:31,000 --> 02:19:41,000
You can no longer clearly separate where the tools language ends and yours begins the template text that once sounded stiff and generic the recommended actions the next steps the controls to consider

1123
02:19:41,000 --> 02:20:04,000
has seeped into your vocabulary and the customizations you thought you were imposing on the system read in hindsight like minor variations on phrases it had already suggested in a fit of curiosity that feels half like an experiment and half like a confession you open the change history for the governance readiness index and power be I and filter the log to show only your own edits your own annotations.

1124
02:20:04,000 --> 02:20:31,000
The list is longer than you expect stretching back across dozens of evenings and each entry contains a small patch of text labels renamed descriptions refined tool tips expanded you click into one from last spring and see that you change the label on the overall Amber state from at risk to attention needed a cosmetic adjustment you barely recall making and in the commit comment you have written avoid alarmist language Amber should sustain action not panic.

1125
02:20:31,000 --> 02:20:46,000
On the reasoning is sound even now but what catches you is the way it mirrors the argument the consultant made two weeks later in a workshop when they told a room full of managers that Amber is the color of responsible organizations because it means you are always working.

1126
02:20:46,000 --> 02:21:15,000
Align that drew nods and notes and which you do tofully captured in your own summary mail as if it were fresh inside sitting there between the twin pains of configuration and commentary you begin to suspect that the conversation you thought you are having with finance with audit with the tools is in fact a closed loop you have been walking inside yourself your words training the dashboards to speak in a certain cadence the dashboards feeding that cadence back to you as findings your responses echoing it back again in budget deck.

1127
02:21:15,000 --> 02:21:44,000
And in the back again in budget decks and policy descriptions each cycle tightening the alignment until there is no clear point at which you can say here this phrase this idea started with me governance in this light no longer looks like a neutral framework you apply to the tenant but like a story that has found in you a willing narrator one who has repeated it's lines often enough that they now arrive in your mouth before you are aware of choosing them you hear the question form itself unbidden and quietly unnerving when you stand in front of the next readiness review and say stopping you.

1128
02:21:44,000 --> 02:22:13,000
This review and say stopping now introduces risk whose voice exactly are you using loop five readiness review ownership dilution by the fifth readiness review the word owner has lost the clean singular edge at once had and taken on the fuzzy collective quality of a committee name and when you open the latest excel export of teams with owners and members the first thing that strikes you is not the presence or absence of responsible individuals but the sheer thickness of the owner's column sell after sell populated not with one or two user.

1129
02:22:13,000 --> 02:22:33,000
And then you can use the list with one or two user principle names as the governance handbook once prescribed but with lists that run off the visible edge of the grid truncated with ellipses that might as well read and others you run your usual script the one that calls get me group owner group ID for each unified group and joins the results back to teams metadata.

1130
02:22:33,000 --> 02:22:50,000
C.S.V. opens you realize that the simple question who owns this workspace can now be answered in most cases only with a shrug and the phrase it depends what you mean on the readiness dashboard the metric that was once your favorite to showcase teams with at least two owners now sits comfortably at 98%

1131
02:22:50,000 --> 02:23:10,000
a number so close to your original target that it should buy all accounts feel like victory yet as you drill into the detail you see what that percentage has actually purchased teams where every member of the department has been granted owner status to avoid friction in adding guests project workspaces where the entire steering committee insisted on elevated rights for transparency

1132
02:23:10,000 --> 02:23:18,000
legacy groups were service accounts and automation identities were indiscriminately added as co owners to keep bots functioning

1133
02:23:18,000 --> 02:23:29,000
the tidy principle that too many owners means no real ownership flickers through your mind something you remember from a webinar slide but the readiness model does not have a way to score that

1134
02:23:29,000 --> 02:23:37,000
it only recognizes the presence of names in the right field not the dilution of meaning that follows when everyone's name is there

1135
02:23:37,000 --> 02:23:47,000
in the review meeting when you share the slide that shows owner coverage by team the chart is all green a sea of compliance check marks and you hear yourself congratulating the assembled managers on the

1136
02:23:47,000 --> 02:23:56,000
combination of onalous workspaces even as you know that the real phenomenon is the proliferation of nominal owners who are unaware that their names now sit atop

1137
02:23:56,000 --> 02:24:03,000
dozens of teams they never visit questions come in the compressed language you have helped refine do you have any risk from OGS left someone

1138
02:24:03,000 --> 02:24:12,000
asks using the internal short hand for onalous groups and you answer truthfully according to the metric we are below 1% and all OGS are in remediation

1139
02:24:12,000 --> 02:24:22,000
leaving unspoken the fact that the more pervasive risk now lies in the opposite direction in the quiet conversion of ownership from a role into a default permission

1140
02:24:22,000 --> 02:24:30,000
you think back to the early loops when part of the readiness ritual involved personally emailing owners of critical teams to confirm their understanding of their responsibilities

1141
02:24:30,000 --> 02:24:37,000
when the act of naming someone in that field carried an implicit social contract and you compare it to the automated notifications that go out now

1142
02:24:37,000 --> 02:24:50,000
system generated males with subject lines like you have been added as an owner of the following teams messages that land in already overloaded inboxes and are filed if they are noticed at all under the mental category noise

1143
02:24:50,000 --> 02:25:02,000
you glance at the audit logs and see the pattern repeated there add team user operations initiated by service accounts bulk updates that add the same support group as owner to hundreds of teams in a single transaction

1144
02:25:02,000 --> 02:25:14,000
and you recognize that what the tools call governance automation has in practice become ownership inflation a way of ensuring that the metric never dips while the lift sense of accountability thin

1145
02:25:14,000 --> 02:25:22,000
when audit asks as they do every year now for evidence that all business critical workspaces have clearly defined owners you respond with exports and pivot tables

1146
02:25:22,000 --> 02:25:33,000
slicing the data to show that every team tagged with the critical sensitivity label has at least three owners two from the business and one from IT and the spreadsheet satisfies them because it meets the documented criterion

1147
02:25:33,000 --> 02:25:50,000
the question of whether those owners have ever convened to decide anything whether they would even recognize the team name in a list remains outside the scope of the readiness review which treats ownership as a structural attribute like a column type not as a relationship between people and a shared surface of work

1148
02:25:50,000 --> 02:26:01,000
in the quiet after the meeting as you stare at the dashboard tile that now proudly proclaims owner coverage 99% you feel an odd hollowness beneath the satisfaction it is meant to induce

1149
02:26:01,000 --> 02:26:16,000
the loops have done what they were designed to do they drove the metric up eliminated blanks turned red and amber indicators green yet as you think about the next inevitable incident an overshared file a guest left active after a contract as the parcher a team used as an ad hoc dumping ground for sensitive documents

1150
02:26:16,000 --> 02:26:33,000
you realize that the question you will be asked in that moment will not be how many owners did this team have it will be who was responsible and you will have to answer with a straight face that responsibility was in accordance with your own design spread so widely that it could not effectively be said to reside anywhere at all

1151
02:26:33,000 --> 02:26:48,000
loop five budget renewal automatic continuation by the fifth budget renewal the exercise has shed almost all traces of drama and settled into something closer to a biological function an automatic process that occurs because the organism is still alive

1152
02:26:48,000 --> 02:27:02,000
and when the first calendar placeholder appears in your outlook FY 26 governance and m365 renewal prep you feel no spike of apprehension no rush to gather arguments or assemble evidence only the faint familiar tug of a cycle restarting itself on schedule

1153
02:27:02,000 --> 02:27:21,000
the invite has no lengthy description anymore just a link to the shared government new old teams channel and a note that says as per last year and when you click through you find that the channel files tab already contains a fresh copy of the deck cloned from v4 to v5 by someone or something that did not need to ask your permission

1154
02:27:21,000 --> 02:27:36,000
the spreadsheet arrives from finance in similar fashion its file name mechanically incremented m365 govern rate of i2 6 v1 x ls x and as you open it you see that most of the cells you once populated by hand are now fed by live connections to the same graph queries and usage reports

1155
02:27:36,000 --> 02:27:44,000
you spent nights wiring up in the second and third loops the current state tab pools entitlement counts directly from get mx subscribe school

1156
02:27:44,000 --> 02:28:06,000
the utilization tab queries the Microsoft 365 usage API for last 90 days activity the governance add-ons tab refreshes entry D governance and purview skews from a catalog maintained by your reseller and when you click the little refresh all button on the ribbon the sheets recalculate without fanfare filling in the numbers that not so long ago you would have treated as discoveries

1157
02:28:06,000 --> 02:28:18,000
the formulas that project next year spend by applying a modest growth factor to headcount and copilot penetration sit in hidden rows locked and protected you could unhide them if you wanted to but you do not because you already know what they say

1158
02:28:18,000 --> 02:28:25,000
in the renewal meeting itself the cast of characters has barely changed but the lines have grown shorter their questions more ritualized

1159
02:28:25,000 --> 02:28:37,000
the CIO opens with the same two slides they used last year the stacked chart of security and compliance spend by category and the bullet list of key drivers only the fiscal year stamp in the corner has advanced by one

1160
02:28:37,000 --> 02:28:45,000
finance follows with an updated view of itopex s percent of revenue pointing briefly at the governance lies to note that it remains within agreed band

1161
02:28:45,000 --> 02:28:50,000
a phrase that sounds less like an assessment and more like an incantation against further scrutiny

1162
02:28:50,000 --> 02:29:02,000
when it is your turn you do not need to narrate a story from scratch you simply walk the room through the delta view that your workbook now generates automatically a tidy table of ads, drops and net

1163
02:29:02,000 --> 02:29:07,000
each cell color coded to indicate whether it aligns with patterns established in previous cycles

1164
02:29:07,000 --> 02:29:11,000
the most striking change though is not in the content but in the approvals themselves

1165
02:29:11,000 --> 02:29:21,000
somewhere between the third and fourth loop finance in the name of efficiency flipped the auto approved toggle in their budgeting tool for any line item that met three criteria

1166
02:29:21,000 --> 02:29:29,000
variance under 5% category tagged as run and associated with an existing vendor contract flagged as strategic

1167
02:29:29,000 --> 02:29:36,000
the governance program with its gently rising curve and its entanglement with Microsoft's wider estate now satisfies those conditions by default

1168
02:29:36,000 --> 02:29:44,000
and as a result the workflow that once required multiple sequential sign-offs has collapsed into a single almost invisible step

1169
02:29:44,000 --> 02:29:53,000
you upload the final ask spreadsheet to the tool the system compares it to last year's baseline sees the familiar shape of the increase and the familiar labels attached

1170
02:29:53,000 --> 02:30:02,000
and automatically roots it to a queue labeled pre-approved where a delegated authority and finance clicks release without ever needing to open your deck

1171
02:30:02,000 --> 02:30:10,000
on paper nothing about this is sinister the auto approval rule was designed to reduce administrative friction to free senior leaders from having to really

1172
02:30:10,000 --> 02:30:26,000
get small predictable renewal so they could focus on outliers and new initiatives in practice what it means is that the decision to continue spending on governance at roughly the same rate with roughly the same vendors has been encoded into configuration and will persist until someone takes deliberate action to undo it

1173
02:30:26,000 --> 02:30:40,000
the acts that once felt weighty renewing a multi-million dollar e5 estate extending enter ID governance entitlements keeping purviews premium tiers lit have become the default path the thing that happens if nobody thinks too hard

1174
02:30:40,000 --> 02:30:52,000
stopping would not just introduce risk it would introduce work you notice this most acutely when a new executive fresh from a different company joins the renewal call and asks the question that no one else has voiced for two years

1175
02:30:52,000 --> 02:31:10,000
what if we held governance spend flat next year there is a tiny pause as the system metaphorical and literal catches its breath and then before you can even form your own answer the tools rush into speak the budgeting app flashes a warning that scenario would break historical trend assumptions the power be I model you are screen sharing

1176
02:31:10,000 --> 02:31:28,000
redraws its trajectories to show a flat line in a color your visual theme reserves for risk and the compliance manager dashboard coincidentally refresh that morning has nudged your overall score down by a fraction of a point with an amber hint that additional investment may be required to meet upcoming regulatory obligations

1177
02:31:28,000 --> 02:31:39,000
you watch the executive glance at these signals at the arrows and colored bands and cautious tool tips and you can almost see their curiosity reclassify itself from strategic option to out of band proposal

1178
02:31:39,000 --> 02:31:48,000
you answer of course in the language you have been trained to use talking about maintaining momentum about the cost of regression about leveraging sunk investments

1179
02:31:48,000 --> 02:31:53,000
but as the words come out you are aware that you are less the author of this reply than it's carrier

1180
02:31:53,000 --> 02:32:03,000
the auto renewal flag and finance the growth formulas in your workbook the default filters in your dashboards the history encoded in the curry way all of them are already aligned in favor of continuation

1181
02:32:03,000 --> 02:32:11,000
and your role in this fifth loop is not to persuade so much as to narrate what the system has in effect already decided

1182
02:32:11,000 --> 02:32:17,000
when the meeting ends and the tool sends you a tidy email that says what a governance budget approved no action required

1183
02:32:17,000 --> 02:32:25,000
you feel a brief vertiginous moment of dislocation because the sentence for all its bland reassurance contains the quiet truth you have been circling for years

1184
02:32:25,000 --> 02:32:38,000
that in a landscape where continuation has been mechanized and reversals require heroism the real governance is not in the meetings or the policies or the reviews but in the defaults that keep everything including you moving forward on rails

1185
02:32:38,000 --> 02:32:54,000
loop five admin center audit proving the need by the fifth admin center audit you are no longer pretending even to yourself that the primary purpose of these passes through entra, teams and purview is to discover unknown risk or to drive configuration closer to some platonic secure state

1186
02:32:54,000 --> 02:33:10,000
because the deeper truth has settled into your bones with the heaviness of routine the audit exists to generate proof that the governance apparatus still has work to do that the engine you have built requires fuel and that its consumption is justified by the deficiencies it so reliably continues to surface

1187
02:33:10,000 --> 02:33:19,000
you catch this most clearly in the way you now assemble your evidence packs not by asking what is most dangerous but by asking what best demonstrates that we are not finished

1188
02:33:19,000 --> 02:33:25,000
and the distinction once subtle has grown so familiar that it guides your clicks almost invisibly

1189
02:33:25,000 --> 02:33:31,000
you start in the entry admin center of course because identity has become the canonical origin point for every story you tell

1190
02:33:31,000 --> 02:33:40,000
the access reviews blade shows you a comforting scatter of campaigns in various states in progress not started completed with recommendations pending

1191
02:33:40,000 --> 02:33:52,000
you export the list of groups and applications that have never been subject to review a filtered view generated by a saved query that joins identity governance access reviews definitions with groups via graph

1192
02:33:52,000 --> 02:34:02,000
and when you drop the CSV into excel you do not sort by sensitivity or by actual usage you sort by sheer count because a long list of untouched objects makes for a more compelling slide

1193
02:34:02,000 --> 02:34:14,000
the fact that some of these groups back low risk sharepoint sites or internal Yamaha communities does not matter nearly as much in this context as the visual impact of the number in the cell labeled scope coverage 63%

1194
02:34:14,000 --> 02:34:22,000
from there you move to the enterprise applications pane open the filter for user assignment required ill or no and watch the number on the tile

1195
02:34:22,000 --> 02:34:34,000
apps users can consent to without admin approval 1447 tick higher than it was last quarter a result of the same permissive defaults and organic sass growth you have been quietly tolerating for years

1196
02:34:34,000 --> 02:34:47,000
you could if you chose frame this as a failure to tighten controls after repeated warnings instead you capture a screenshot that emphasizes the change in bold red already composing the sentence you will layer on top in the deck

1197
02:34:47,000 --> 02:35:00,000
growth in unmanaged enterprise applications highlights need for expanded enter ID governance coverage the drift itself is not new but the delta between this export and the previous one gives you the raw material you require

1198
02:35:00,000 --> 02:35:10,000
a before and after pair you can hold up as evidence that the environment left unattended continues to sprawl in ways only your chosen tools and processes can address

1199
02:35:10,000 --> 02:35:26,000
in the teams admin center you navigate to the teams without classification report a view powered by the same get me group calls you once used manually and now consume only through pre-built charts the count is lower than it used to be thanks to the mandatory sensitivity labels you pushed in the fourth loop but it is not zero

1200
02:35:26,000 --> 02:35:34,000
and the mere existence of teams with classification none becomes in your narrative a hook on which to hang a recommendation for another governance investment

1201
02:35:34,000 --> 02:35:46,000
you draft a line in your notes residual unclassified collaboration spaces underscore importance of extending auto labeling and workspace reviews a sentence that effortlessly ties together three separate budget items

1202
02:35:46,000 --> 02:36:02,000
purview the third party workspace review tool and ongoing consultant assistance under the umbrella of addressing findings purview itself remains a generous source of such findings in the data life cycle section you run the locations not covered by any retention policy report

1203
02:36:02,000 --> 02:36:16,000
a deceptively simple view that highlights the inevitable gaps left by your earlier focus on exchange sharepoint in teams one drive accounts for frontline staff oddball shared mailboxes used by legacy applications a handful of region specific sharepoint sites no one

1204
02:36:16,000 --> 02:36:26,000
remembered to include in the global policy they all appear in the export which you promptly sought by last activity date to ensure that the most recently used locations flow to the top

1205
02:36:26,000 --> 02:36:37,000
choose to address these quietly adding them to existing policies without fanfare but instead you paste the list into a slide title it residual life cycle exposure and annotated with a call out

1206
02:36:37,000 --> 02:36:53,000
opportunity expand purview retention licensing and policy engineering support even the minor anomalies one sources of embarrassment have become useful a handful of conditional access policies are still in report only mode a compromise you made to accommodate an unruly line of business application

1207
02:36:53,000 --> 02:37:00,000
and rather than hiding this is unfinished work you spotlight it as a rationale for keeping the consultant retainer in place

1208
02:37:00,000 --> 02:37:12,000
remaining report only controls require expert guidance and testing to move safely to enforcement the sentence does double duty simultaneously acknowledging imperfection to maintain the impression of honest self assessment

1209
02:37:12,000 --> 02:37:27,000
and extending the story of dependency that links governance outcomes to external expertise identity sprawl and teams sprawl and life cycle gaps once problems to be solved have become narrative assets renewable justifications for sustaining the loop by the time you compile the audit report for the steering committee

1210
02:37:27,000 --> 02:37:39,000
complete with heat maps and side by side comparisons of configuration posture q4 versus q1 you can hear in the polished cadence of your own executive summary how thoroughly the need to prove the need has taken over

1211
02:37:39,000 --> 02:37:49,500
our review confirms continued progress you write while also identifying critical areas that necessitate ongoing investment in enter ID governance purview and manage services to prevent regression

1212
02:37:49,500 --> 02:38:02,000
the phrase necessitate ongoing investment slides past without resistance as if it were an objective conclusion drawn from stubborn facts rather than the structural assumption you brought into the audit from the outset

1213
02:38:02,000 --> 02:38:22,000
and when the committee nods and approves your recommendations you understand that the admin center audit has succeeded not because it has materially reduced risk in any measurable way but because it has once again produced the one outcome the system requires a fresh documented rationale for keeping the machinery of governance humming into the next cycle

1214
02:38:22,000 --> 02:38:38,000
loop 5 compliance workshop ritual without question by the fifth compliance workshop the meeting no longer arrives as an event to be prepared for but as a recurring ceremony whose choreography is so well established that the calendar invite might as well read performance of compliance act 5

1215
02:38:38,000 --> 02:38:48,000
and when you join the call and see the familiar grid of faces most cameras dutifully on for the first five minutes you can feel that no one has come expecting to decide anything new

1216
02:38:48,000 --> 02:39:06,000
the team's meeting lobby fills an empties according to the same pattern as previous quarters the recording banner slides interview the agenda appears on screen and the words you are about to say line up in your mind like steps in a procession each one following the last not because logic demands it but because last time it did

1217
02:39:06,000 --> 02:39:22,000
the slide deck has been paired down to its ceremonial essentials there is an opening title quarterly compliance posture workshop and beneath it a subtitle that promises status highlights next steps though everyone present knows that the next steps will be very close to the ones agreed in the previous four cycles

1218
02:39:22,000 --> 02:39:48,000
you advance to the second slide the one that shows the compliance manager score as a single prominent number framed by a soft ring of color and you hear yourself declare we are currently at 74% overall regulatory alignment across mapped frameworks a sentence whose content no longer surprises anyone because the score has hovered in this band for so long that it feels less like a measurement and more like a property of the organization like headcount or geography

1219
02:39:48,000 --> 02:40:06,000
around the numbers it the now standard tiles for GDPR ISO 27001 NIST and internal policy each with its own percentage and a small arrow indicating trend and you narrate almost gently that GDPR has improved by one point ISO is flat NIST is down a fraction due to new control mappings

1220
02:40:06,000 --> 02:40:20,000
no one asks what those mappings are no one requests to see the specific improvement actions that drive the increments the room is learned to treat the score as a kind of liturgical refrain something to be spoken and acknowledged so that the rest of the ritual can proceed

1221
02:40:20,000 --> 02:40:34,000
somewhere behind this glassy simplicity purview is tracking hundreds of individual tasks enable audit log retention here Titan access review cadence there but in this forum they are presented not as levers to be pulled but as already encoded obligations

1222
02:40:34,000 --> 02:40:53,000
summarized into green checkmarks and amber circles you move next to the control implementation heat map a matrix of rows labeled with control families access control data protection logging and monitoring incident response and columns for designed implemented tested each cell shaded from red through amber to green

1223
02:40:53,000 --> 02:41:16,000
the slide has changed so little across five workshops that you can now recite its interpretation from memory we see strong design and implementation coverage across most domains with testing maturity still evolving and as you say still evolving the mouse traces the same band of amber squares it always does the ritual acknowledgement of an imperfection that must never quite be resolved less the ceremony lose its purpose

1224
02:41:16,000 --> 02:41:31,000
heads not on schedule someone types thanks in the chat questions when they come arrive at their pointed times and in their appointed forms a representative from legal asks as they always do whether upcoming regulatory changes have been fact into the road map

1225
02:41:31,000 --> 02:41:45,000
and you reply that the control library in compliance manager has been updated the answer functioning more as invocation of a higher authority than as practical guidance a business unit leader inquires whether any red remains in high risk areas

1226
02:41:45,000 --> 02:41:55,000
though the heat map on screen clearly shows none and you reassure them as protocol requires that no critical red gaps remain unaddressed all are either remediated or tracked with exceptions

1227
02:41:55,000 --> 02:42:05,000
the phrase tracked with exceptions sliding past without interrogation because by the fifth loop everyone understands that exceptions are not truly exceptions but part of the texture of the model

1228
02:42:05,000 --> 02:42:19,000
you notice as you speak how thoroughly the workshop has ceased to be a place where policies are debated and has become instead a place where they are named as if the act of saying we have dlp enforcement we have sensitivity labeling we have retention configured

1229
02:42:19,000 --> 02:42:30,000
where itself sufficient to satisfy the universe's demand for control when you demonstrate a purview data loss rule clicking into a policy that blocks transmission of personal identifiers to external domains

1230
02:42:30,000 --> 02:42:43,000
you are not asked whether this rule has ever meaningfully stopped an incident you are asked instead almost politely to confirm that the policy is in effect globally because in this ritual the presence of configuration is the sacrament not its efficacy

1231
02:42:43,000 --> 02:42:53,000
every now and then a new participant drafted into the loop by a reog raises a question that brushes the edge of inquiry how do we know users aren't just working around these blocks

1232
02:42:53,000 --> 02:43:04,000
what's our plan for measuring behavioral change rather than just control presence and you feel a momentary flicker of the discomfort you used to live in all the time but the collective rhythm of the workshop absorbs it

1233
02:43:04,000 --> 02:43:21,000
you answer by referring to future phases to plant user awareness campaigns to telemetry we will enable when budget allows and the moment passes filed under future work in the chat summary by the same project coordinator who has been transcribing action items for four years without ever needing to change the template

1234
02:43:21,000 --> 02:43:35,000
as the hour draws to a close you return as the script dictates to the closing slide the one that lists three agreed outcomes which are in substance identical to last quarters maintain current enforcement posture for core controls

1235
02:43:35,000 --> 02:43:41,000
continue tuning to reduce false positives prepare for next regulatory wave by aligning mappings

1236
02:43:41,000 --> 02:43:55,000
the words are accepted without comment the meeting recording is saved the transcript is auto generated and dropped into the team's channel and participants click leave in orderly fashion their status lights shifting from green to away like small compliance indicators blinking off

1237
02:43:55,000 --> 02:44:04,000
you remain in the empty call a moment longer listening to the silence where questions might once have been and you realize that the workshop has achieved a kind of perfect equilibrium

1238
02:44:04,000 --> 02:44:16,000
it exists so that no one has to ask outside of it whether compliance is being attended to and as long as the ritual continues on schedule with all its familiar slides and phrases intact no one will

1239
02:44:16,000 --> 02:44:33,000
loop five license true up faith in forecast by the fifth license true up the forecast has taken on a status that feels uncannily close to doctrine not because anyone formally declared it sacred but because each year that passes without a serious challenge to its shape adds another thin layer of inevitability to the curve

1240
02:44:33,000 --> 02:44:48,000
until eventually the numbers projected in the workbook are treated less as scenarios and more as prophecies that your role is to interpret not revise the file itself is evolved to support this function what began as a simple reconciliation sheet now opens with a tab labeled assumptions

1241
02:44:48,000 --> 02:45:02,000
and when you click into it you see not just raw drivers like FTE growth 3.5% and copilot adoption plus 15 pts y o y but longer almost narrative statements written in the same calm tone you hear in every steering committee

1242
02:45:02,000 --> 02:45:25,000
regulatory scrutiny will continue to increase hybrid work patterns will persist risk tolerance will remain stable each line is referenced by name in formulas on the forecast tab linked with neat sell references so that in theory you could change them and watch the whole model ripple yet in practice they remain fixed from cycle to cycle adjusted only by small face saving increments

1243
02:45:25,000 --> 02:45:41,000
on the forecast tab itself the mechanics are straightforward enough to follow columns for each fiscal year rose for each license family a set of calculations that take current consumption from graph and usage reports and then apply multipliers drawn from those assumption cells

1244
02:45:41,000 --> 02:45:51,000
e5 seats are projected by taking existing entitlements adding expected headcount growth and layering on a fudge factor for buffer a word that appears in the comments as if it were a natural constant

1245
02:45:51,000 --> 02:45:59,000
enter ID governance iterations assume that every new application on board it will drive a corresponding increase in privileged role assignments

1246
02:45:59,000 --> 02:46:08,000
purview premium is modeled on the expectation that every regulatory development will push at least one additional business unit into the must have column

1247
02:46:08,000 --> 02:46:25,000
you have added these formulas over time occasionally tightening a coefficient here moderating adoption curve there but the overall trajectory has never fundamentally changed always resolving into an upward slope that reconciles what the vendors account team is hoping to see with what the organization's leaders are prepared to sign

1248
02:46:25,000 --> 02:46:36,000
what has changed more than the math is the way people talk about it where in the early loops finance would ask for sensitivity tests demanding to see what happened if growth slowed or if you held certain license counts flat

1249
02:46:36,000 --> 02:46:49,000
now the questions are phrased differently can we validate that our actuals are tracking to the forecast are there any variances we should explain to the auditors as if the projection with the more solid object and lived reality the thing that might drift

1250
02:46:49,000 --> 02:47:00,000
in a review last quarter the fpna lead actually referred to the model as our commitment curve slip of language that nobody corrected and when you later saw that phrase embedded as a chart title in a slide

1251
02:47:00,000 --> 02:47:15,000
the Microsoft account manager brought customer governance commitment curve f.y. 22 f.y. 27 you realized with a faint sense of vertigo that the same line is now being read from two sides of the relationship each party taking comfort in the others apparent faith

1252
02:47:15,000 --> 02:47:27,000
the true a process itself has been quietly reshaped to reinforce that belief the operational work of counting active users and matching them to entitlements still happens driven by get-em-g user license detail exports

1253
02:47:27,000 --> 02:47:37,000
and the periodic cross checks with the teams and exchange activity reports but these reconcilations no longer serve as a hard break on the forecast they function more like a confessional

1254
02:47:37,000 --> 02:47:45,000
an opportunity to admit small deviations before returning to the ordained path when you identify a pocket of unused enter ID governance seats

1255
02:47:45,000 --> 02:47:51,000
you do not as a purist might treat this as an argument to lower the future run rate

1256
02:47:51,000 --> 02:47:59,000
instead you log a remediation action increase coverage of access reviews to additional groups and annotate the variance as timing

1257
02:47:59,000 --> 02:48:07,000
assuring finance that utilization will catch up to the model when co-pilot usage lags the adoption curve you do not trim the projected license count

1258
02:48:07,000 --> 02:48:12,000
you schedule enablement sessions and awareness campaigns to help reality align with the line already drawn

1259
02:48:12,000 --> 02:48:17,000
over five cycles this pattern has inverted the usual relationship between forecast and fact

1260
02:48:17,000 --> 02:48:23,000
in theory you build a model to approximate the future from the evidence of the present and the memory of the past

1261
02:48:23,000 --> 02:48:28,000
in practice you now seem to move the present in the direction of what the model already imagined

1262
02:48:28,000 --> 02:48:32,000
when a business unit questions whether they truly need their full complement of e5 seats

1263
02:48:32,000 --> 02:48:39,000
citing a trend toward lighter usage the discussion is not framed around their lived experience but around deviation from plan

1264
02:48:39,000 --> 02:48:46,000
and you find yourself explaining almost apologetically that reducing their allocation would put pressure on our multi-year commitments

1265
02:48:46,000 --> 02:48:53,000
as if the spreadsheet were an external treaty rather than your own construction the Microsoft customer success manager for their part

1266
02:48:53,000 --> 02:48:58,000
arrives at each qbr with their own version of your workbook slightly more optimistic in every row

1267
02:48:58,000 --> 02:49:04,000
and the negotiation between you consists largely of aligning these two visions until the delta is small enough

1268
02:49:04,000 --> 02:49:09,000
that both sides can record the same numbers in their internal systems with minimal loss of face

1269
02:49:09,000 --> 02:49:13,000
some nights alone with the file long after everyone else has gone home

1270
02:49:13,000 --> 02:49:20,000
you let your cursor hover over the cells in the assumptions tab and you imagine what it would look like to truly disturb them

1271
02:49:20,000 --> 02:49:28,000
to type a zero into the growth field or a minus into the co-pilot line and watch the entire apparatus of formulas and charts

1272
02:49:28,000 --> 02:49:33,000
contort into shapes no one in the meeting has yet seen but your fingers never quite move

1273
02:49:33,000 --> 02:49:36,000
it is not simply fear of the argument that would follow

1274
02:49:36,000 --> 02:49:41,000
it is something closer to reverence a learned reluctance to temper with a structure that has

1275
02:49:41,000 --> 02:49:49,000
through repetition acquired the aura of being right the more years the forecast has existed the more its continuity becomes its own justification

1276
02:49:49,000 --> 02:49:55,000
and you realize with a tired clarity that faith in the forecast is no longer just a metaphor in the room

1277
02:49:55,000 --> 02:50:03,000
it is a real operative force shaping decisions deflecting doubt guiding spend until the act of renewing licenses feels less like choosing

1278
02:50:03,000 --> 02:50:08,000
and more like affirming a belief everyone around you has already silently agreed to hold

1279
02:50:08,000 --> 02:50:16,000
interest is alternatives knock again it starts as most uninvited thoughts do with a notification you almost ignore

1280
02:50:16,000 --> 02:50:22,000
a team's toast in the corner of your screen at 937 on a Tuesday a message in the governance channel from script run

1281
02:50:22,000 --> 02:50:29,000
the architect who left two cycles ago to build something lighter whose name you have mentally filed under previous life

1282
02:50:29,000 --> 02:50:34,000
the preview text shows only the first half of a sentence if you ever want to see what this looks like without

1283
02:50:34,000 --> 02:50:40,000
and for a moment your finger moves toward the X the condition responds to anything that threatens to derail the cadence of your day

1284
02:50:40,000 --> 02:50:47,000
then for reasons you could not easily articulate you click it instead the thread opens on a link to a github repo you have never heard of something

1285
02:50:47,000 --> 02:50:57,000
with an aggressively plain name m365 mingov and beneath it a paragraph in script runs voice that lands with the unsettling clarity of fresh air in a sealed room

1286
02:50:57,000 --> 02:51:05,000
he writes that he has been working with a client who refused politely but firmly to adopt the full stack of enter ID governance per view premium

1287
02:51:05,000 --> 02:51:13,000
and third party review tools you have come to treat as table stakes and that instead they built a narrow strip of automation using power shell, graph

1288
02:51:13,000 --> 02:51:21,000
and a handful of scheduled logic apps one job that scans for oneless groups and post them in a channel until someone claims them

1289
02:51:21,000 --> 02:51:31,000
another that lists guests who have not signed in for 90 days and revokes them a third that runs a weekly what changed in conditional access report and requires human sign of on any drifting

1290
02:51:31,000 --> 02:51:38,000
you scroll through the examples he has pasted get me group filter group types any cc eq unified

1291
02:51:38,000 --> 02:51:48,000
where object on not get mg group owner group it all else to ID a logic app designer screenshot showing a simple recurrence HTTP post to teams chain

1292
02:51:48,000 --> 02:52:01,000
and you feel an unfamiliar sensation in your chest something like envy mixed with fear the graph includes a crude compared to your polished power be I models line charts drawn from csv's and pinned to a bear share point page

1293
02:52:01,000 --> 02:52:10,000
but their captions are disarmingly direct oneless groups over time guests without recent activity CA policy changes per week

1294
02:52:10,000 --> 02:52:15,000
there is no maturity index no amber horizon line just questions that can be answered with yes or no

1295
02:52:15,000 --> 02:52:22,000
render core another old name from the early workshops appears in the chat a few minutes later evidently having been at mention before you

1296
02:52:22,000 --> 02:52:30,000
and adds a short comment that turns the knife with its very casualness we did something similar she writes five rules all in one place

1297
02:52:30,000 --> 02:52:40,000
everyone can read them no readiness score just a page that says we don't allow anonymous links we expire guests we review owners once a quarter we don't create new policies without deleting an old one

1298
02:52:40,000 --> 02:52:55,000
we don't buy licenses to solve naming problems she ends with it's boring as hell and we sleep fine align that makes your jaw titan because of how precisely it contradicts the story you have been living in which boredom is the one thing governance cannot be allowed to become

1299
02:52:55,000 --> 02:53:04,000
you type arrays and retype a reply three times before settling on something neutral interesting approaches would love to understand how you handle audit expectations

1300
02:53:04,000 --> 02:53:12,000
almost immediately the voice that lives in your head now the one that sounds like the consultant and the dashboard and your own past emails blended together supplies the counter narrative

1301
02:53:12,000 --> 02:53:23,000
immature parts at whispers not in words you see on the screen but in the tone that colors your thoughts unsustainable at scale no formal control mapping no defensible posture when regulators arrive

1302
02:53:23,000 --> 02:53:31,000
you feel yourself relax as you mentally attached those labels filing script runs repo and render cores rules into the safe category marked experiments

1303
02:53:31,000 --> 02:53:41,000
the place where ideas go when they have not yet been blessed by a framework still something of the disturbance remains you bookmark the repo in a folder you have never used before alternatives

1304
02:53:41,000 --> 02:53:51,000
and as you drag it there you notice that the folder already contains two links you do not remember saving a blog post about running access reviews with nothing more than entropy to

1305
02:53:51,000 --> 02:54:10,000
and a weekly CSV a talk from an internal summit where someone argued that team sprawl was better addressed with naming conventions and social norms than with provisioning tools for a fleeting instant you see the outline of another possible life one in which governance is a handful of hard human readable rules instead of a lattice of indices and loops

1306
02:54:10,000 --> 02:54:22,000
and the site of it is so stark that you close the browser reopen the compliance manager dashboard and let the familiar percentages wash back over the feeling until the alternatives recede into the quiet archived space where all variants eventually goes

1307
02:54:22,000 --> 02:54:25,000
actually goes.