About us
This group is for anyone interested in a discussion with others local to the Houston area around any aspect of Microsoft Azure and it's rapidly-growing, surrounding (non-Microsoft) ecosystem. Non-locals are also very welcome to join!
We meet each month or so - usually the second Tuesday of each month - and talk about some aspect of Azure that might be of interest to as many people as possible. Topics range across both all Azure services and 3rd-Party solutions that are deployed upon it so there should be something for everyone.
Attendees to our events usually cover a wide range, and often include students, project managers, infrastructure-focused IT professionals, Developers, Solution, Application or Enterprise Architects, Security practitioners, "Big Data" Scientists, and business leaders. We also sometimes discuss solutions that 3rd Party (i.e. non-Microsoft) software vendors build on top of Azure to fill in feature gaps (via the Azure Marketplace).
The one thing we try NOT our events to be a 'sales pitch' of any kind: we are just about community, learning about technology and gaining experiences in using them from one-another.
Each event will usually focus on just one Azure area or Service or 3rd Party (Marketplace) solution, and typically have a guest speaker, a high-level overview followed by technical demonstration(s), and a Q&A session so we can not only share stories but everyone can learn from each other's experiences.
We do record our events and post them on our YouTube Channel.
Our Code Of Conduct, which applies to all attendees to all our events, can be found here.
We look forward to seeing you soon!
Upcoming events
1
Rethinking Privileged Access: RBAC and JIT that works for humans and machines
·HybridMicrosoft Office Houston, 750 Town and Country Blvd #1000, Houston, TX, USAzure gives teams strong building blocks for privileged access. Azure RBAC defines what an identity can do and where it can do it, and Entra PIM has made just-in-time activation standard practice for human admins.
The hard part comes at scale. Role assignments pile up across subscriptions, broad roles get granted because they're the fastest way to unblock someone, and most identities end up holding privileged permissions they never use. Fixing it is daunting - what permissions can and can't be safely removed without breaking anything is unclear.
Meanwhile, most of the growth in a typical tenant isn't people. Service principals, managed identities, CI/CD pipelines, and AI agents often carry the most privilege, and they can't open a portal and ask for elevation when they need it.
This session looks at privileged access from the permission side instead of the identity side. We'll cover how to use activity data to find unused RBAC assignments and right-size over-privileged roles without breaking workloads. We'll also show how to extend JIT to machine identities by treating the attempted action itself as the access request. You'll leave with a practical way to get to zero standing privilege in Azure, one your developers won't push back on.
Speaker: Sandy Bird, Co-founder & CTO, Sonrai Security
PARKING: For free parking please park across the street on the third and fourth floors of the parking garage at 12711 Queensbury; parking in the Microsoft building is not free.
In-person: 750 Town and Country Blvd #1000 · Houston, TX
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/@HoustonAzureUserGroup12 attendees
Past events
128
