This year, ESPC is delighted to present an exclusive conference bonus track of 12 sessions – a mix of track sessions and professional development. To access these sessions, an All Access or Pro Access ticket is required.

Geek to Chic: Build Your Brand & Elevate Your Career in 5 Steps

with Dux Raymond Sy, Microsoft Regional Director, MVP, AvePoint, USA  

Are you ready to take your career to the next level? Thinking about reinventing your personal brand and be known for more than your mad IT skillz? As you know in this day and age, strategically building your brand and taking control of it will effectively position you as an authority in your domain and a person of influence. A strong brand will open massive opportunities, ultimately resulting in career acceleration.

Join Dux Raymond Sy in this interactive session and learn how to build your brand both online and offline, who you are, what you do, what your core strengths and skills are as well as the value you can bring to the industry.

You’ll get your personal brand into tip top shape so that you become confident wherever you go, stand out during interviews, make networking easy, and set yourself up to become influential in your field.

8 Easy Steps to Improve your Security Posture in Azure

with Maarten Goet, Microsoft Regional Director, MVP, Wortell, Netherlands  

You’ve deployed your application on Azure. Instantly hackers are targeting your public IP and the brute forcing of passwords and ports starts. What now? Should I deploy Azure Sentinel, or just enable Azure Security Center as a start? Maarten Goet will give you 8 easy steps into improving your security posture on Azure. This is a demo heavy session no cloud engineer or developer should miss!

Unlimited Sherlock: Deep-Dive into Current Threats and Mitigations

with Paula Januszkiewicz, CEO and Founder of CQURE, Cybersecurity Expert, CQURE, Poland  

In this current climate of spoofed domains and cleverly faked emails, organizations are starting to wise up that by discovering how an attacker gained entry to a system, similar attacks can be prevented. Can moving some services to the cloud minimize the risk of breach?

During this session, you will receive ready-to-launch instructions about how to extract information in the operating system and monitoring solutions.

Microsoft Teams: What you SHOULD know about SharePoint

with Tracy Van der Schyff, MVP, The Guid Stuff (Pty) Ltd, South Africa  

With the launch of Microsoft Teams, we suddenly found ourselves amidst a world where overnight, end users became super users, managed became chaotic over-adoption and SharePoint dropped off the map, or did it? For someone who entered the Microsoft 365 world through the SharePoint ‘portal’, it might be easy to understand the integration as well as importance of the SharePoint basics. However, many still struggle, as most issues in Microsoft Teams are directly related to owners and members in teams not being empowered in all the aspects necessary.

Building Custom Connectors for Power Platform using Azure

with Jussi Roine, North Advisors, Finland  

In this presentation, we’ll take a fierce look at developing and deploying custom connectors for Power Platform. We’ll tackle the business reasons (briefly), and then get down to building a custom solution. These connectors can be utilized in PowerApps and Power Automate, but also in Logic Apps. Then, for Power BI we take a look at how it differs when you need a custom connector for your data. Our custom connectors will live in Azure, and we take a look at the different ways of implementing them – Azure Functions, API Apps, Logic Apps, and such.

Behind the Scenes: How to Build a Conference Winning Technical Session

with Sami Laiho, MVP, Adminize, Finland  

Want to enjoy some time among the tech heavy sessions and learn how an Ignite-winning session was actually put together? This is a one-time chance of seeing a behind-the-scenes session about what it takes to build a conference winning session. Sami Laiho has won all the major TechEd and Ignite sessions and now he is willing to be the magician revealing his tricks to the audience. Whether you are a seasoned public speaker or an attendee who want’s to better understand how these sessions are put together, you’ll enjoy this session.

Microsoft 365 Certifications Overview

with Vlad Catrinescu, MVP, MCT, vNext Solutions, Canada  

Are you a Microsoft 365 professional that is thinking of getting certified in 2021? If yes, this session is for you! This session will introduce you to the available Microsoft 365 Certifications that Microsoft offers in 2021, as well as share links to the best learning resources!

Your Security in Microsoft 365 is Set Up. Now How About Compliance?

Keeping your data safe is not only about security. Of course you need to configure your security policies in your environment, but keeping your organisation compliant is just as important. Microsoft can help you with that, whether that is for your own compliancy framework or for standards like ISO 27001 and GDPR.

In this session we’ll do a deep dive in the compliance features that Microsoft offers for information protection and discovery + response, and we’ll discuss some real-world cases and practices.

Effective Access Control in Azure

with Magnus Mårtensson, Microsoft Regional Director, MVP, Loftysoft, Sweden  

Commonly way too many have too broad access in your Azure subscriptions. Random changes in environments leads to time-consuming ghost hunts in deployments, human error leads to costly mistakes, and compliance for overall security goes out the window. There are ways to ensure you keep to the straight and narrow when it comes to managing access to Azure. It is a little bit more involved and complex, but it is way more effective, valuable and a true time-saver in the end. Your Azure users must have all the access they need but should never have more than they need. Add to that just-in-time access with Privileged Identity Management (PIM) and you are arriving in the Cloud empowered and able to do the right thing for your projects and your company. Everyone in their right place and no one burdened with access to things they do not need to access. Locking down production areas gives you confidence, speed and makes for smooth running services and happy customers.

Join this session to dig into, by example what people don’t do well with Azure Access Control and the steps you need to make it better!

Burnout BeGONE As A Service

with Dona Sarkar, Microsoft, USA  

 Are you weirdly irritable with your colleagues?

 Is the thought of checking your calendar just way too overwhelming?

 Are you feeling like you’re not actually having *real* impact in your work but rather just doing “activity”?

You, my friend, might be facing Job Burnout. The World Health Organization has defined this to be a real “occupational phenomenon” that’s impacting millions & billions of us.

So…what are you going to do about it? How about hear learn a process to figure out if you’re burned out…then a formula for how to banish it?

Join us!

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) like a Boss – With Terraform

with Thorsten Hans, MVP, Thinktecture AG, Germany  

Learn everything you need to know about Terraform in this session. Starting from scratch, you will see how to build predictable and professional cloud infrastructures using open-source Terraform.

Are you asking yourself why you should use Terraform instead of ARM templates? Or do you face specific problems with your infrastructure deployment? Get your questions answered and join this talk by Terraform specialist Thorsten Hans. Let’s boost your IaC skills and tame cloud infrastructures by diving through many demos addressing real-world requirements.

Book an All Access or Pro Pass ticket to avail of these stellar bonus track sessions.