Michael Noel - Past Speaking Engagements

CollabDays Portugal 2025 - Lisbon Edition

25/10/2025, Lisbon
Lisbon, Portugal

PANEL: Security vs. Productivity, can we have both in the AI era?

microsoft-365

ai

security

Enterprises face a growing paradox: the stricter the security, the slower the innovation. Sensitivity labels, Zero Trust, and defenses against relentless cyberattacks promise airtight protection, yet often create friction for users and developers. Meanwhile, Copilot extensibility and AI-driven tools demand speed, openness, and constant iteration. Can organizations realistically reconcile these opposing forces, or will the pursuit of security always come at the expense of progress? This panel challenges assumptions, sparks debate and asks whether true balance is even possible in the age of AI productivity.

CollabDays Portugal 2025 - Lisbon Edition

25/10/2025, Lisbon
Lisbon, Portugal

Implementing Zero Trust: Best Practices for Microsoft Cloud Environments

ai

zero-trust

rbac

mfa

entra-id

As organizations continue to embrace hybrid and cloud environments, traditional network security approaches are no longer sufficient to protect against the rapidly evolving threat landscape. Enter Zero Trust—a security model that assumes no user, device, or application should be trusted by default. Microsoft’s Zero Trust architecture is designed to protect identities, endpoints, applications, networks, and data by continuously verifying the legitimacy of every access request and enforcing granular least-privilege access. This session will explore how Microsoft cloud services such as Azure AD Conditional Access, Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud can be used to implement Zero Trust principles across your organization’s IT environment. Learn how to move beyond perimeter-based security and embrace a Zero Trust approach that aligns with today’s sophisticated threats and the needs of a modern enterprise. • Discover the Zero Trust model: Understand the key principles of Zero Trust and how Microsoft technologies can help enforce these principles in your cloud and hybrid environments. • Secure identities and endpoints: Gain insights into best practices for protecting your workforce with Azure AD Conditional Access policies, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and Microsoft Endpoint Manager. • Implement Zero Trust for applications and data: Explore how to safeguard your applications and data using Microsoft Defender for Cloud, role-based access control (RBAC), and information protection policies. • Build continuous monitoring and automated response capabilities: Learn how to leverage AI and automation within Microsoft’s security solutions to detect and respond to suspicious activity in real-time.

Thrive Conference 2025

02/06/2025, Kompas Xnet
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Defending Against AI-Driven Cyber Attacks: Real-World Use Cases and Solutions

ai

sentinel

defender

cybersecurity

With the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence by cybercriminals, the threat landscape is evolving faster than ever. From AI-powered phishing campaigns to sophisticated machine learning models that can evade traditional detection methods, these emerging threats present new challenges for defenders. Organizations need to rethink their strategies and implement advanced defenses to keep up with AI-driven cyber attacks. This session delves into real-world use cases where AI has played a significant role in enabling cyber attacks and how Microsoft’s security solutions can be used to counter these threats. We will explore specific incidents, examine attacker techniques, and demonstrate how Microsoft technologies such as Azure Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Identity, and Microsoft 365 Defender can be leveraged to detect, investigate, and respond to AI-enhanced attacks. • Understand AI-enhanced attack vectors: Learn how attackers use AI to improve the speed, accuracy, and impact of attacks, including AI-generated phishing emails, automated social engineering, and adaptive malware. • Examine Real-world case studies: Analyze high-profile incidents where AI was a key enabler of the attack, including how the threats were detected, investigated, and remediated using Microsoft technologies. • Explore Microsoft solutions for defending against AI-driven threats: Discover how Azure Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can be used together to provide an integrated defense strategy. • Leverage AI and automation for proactive defense: Understand how to use AI within Microsoft’s security tools to predict, prevent, and respond to cyber threats before they cause damage.

Thrive Conference 2025

02/06/2025, Kompas Xnet
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Build Your Own ChatGPT in Azure

ai

openai

chatgpt

azure-openai

azure-ai-search

Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have emerged as a disruptive force for organizations all over the world. The ability to search through disparate content using natural language queries and to be able to intelligently pull together useful information that would ordinarily be siloed is incredibly useful to modern organizations. Those same organizations are naturally reluctant to upload their own proprietary information into public LLMs and are often limited to using these tools against public datasets. As part of Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, several new offerings have been introduced to Microsoft’s Azure cloud services that allow organizations to use a ChatGPT engine to query their own proprietary content and to create valuable chat engines that employees can use to quickly and efficiently query and reference internal knowledge. These tools are powerful and easy to configure and can be used immediately by organizations of any size, not requiring any special licensing above and beyond minimal costs for the running Azure infrastructure. This session demonstrates the step-by-step process of deploying a ChatGPT chat engine in Azure, focusing on all steps needed to build the environment from scratch, including loading content, creating the search indexes, and provisioning the web application to run the engine on. • View in detail the steps necessary to build your own ChatGPT environment that queries off your own data in your own isolated Azure instance • Understand how to maintain data within the environment and how to upload and update the indexes and documents in the platform • Understand the security ramifications of using LLMs and how to properly isolate your environment

European Collaboration Summit 2025

26/05/2025, Congress Center Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf, Germany

Defending Against AI-Driven Cyber Attacks: Real-World Use Cases and Solutions

azure

ai

defender

cybersecurity

microsoft-defender

azure-sentinel

artificialintelligence

With the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence by cybercriminals, the threat landscape is evolving faster than ever. From AI-powered phishing campaigns to sophisticated machine learning models that can evade traditional detection methods, these emerging threats present new challenges for defenders. Organizations need to rethink their strategies and implement advanced defenses to keep up with AI-driven cyber attacks. This session delves into real-world use cases where AI has played a significant role in enabling cyber attacks and how Microsoft’s security solutions can be used to counter these threats. We will explore specific incidents, examine attacker techniques, and demonstrate how Microsoft technologies such as Azure Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Identity, and Microsoft 365 Defender can be leveraged to detect, investigate, and respond to AI-enhanced attacks. • Understand AI-enhanced attack vectors: Learn how attackers use AI to improve the speed, accuracy, and impact of attacks, including AI-generated phishing emails, automated social engineering, and adaptive malware. • Examine Real-world case studies: Analyze high-profile incidents where AI was a key enabler of the attack, including how the threats were detected, investigated, and remediated using Microsoft technologies. • Explore Microsoft solutions for defending against AI-driven threats: Discover how Azure Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can be used together to provide an integrated defense strategy. • Leverage AI and automation for proactive defense: Understand how to use AI within Microsoft’s security tools to predict, prevent, and respond to cyber threats before they cause damage.

CollabDays Bletchley Park 2024

25/09/2024, The National Museum of Computing
Bletchley, United Kingdom

AI is Hacking You – How Cybercriminals Leverage Artificial Intelligence

ai

artificial-intelligence

cybersecurity

it-security

information-technology

Organisations today are vastly unprepared for the threat of modern artificial intelligence tools being utilised by cyber-criminals against their IT infrastructure. Modern attackers are highly organised, well-resourced, and skilled in the use of the latest commercially released artificial intelligence tools to be able to give them an edge with criminal activity. The reality is that it has unfortunately become a lucrative business to hack, disrupt, and steal intellectual property from organisations of all sizes and in all business sectors. While the attackers are becoming more sophisticated, organisations have their IT security positioned for threats from the past century with insecure password management, security log overload, and outdated tools that unfortunately keep defenders one step behind these types of modern AI attacks. This unfortunately makes it that much easier for attackers to obtain access to your critical intellectual property and makes career-ruining disruptions commonplace. This session focuses on understanding how modern cyber-criminals utilise AI tools to attack your people, IT processes, and IT infrastructure and what type of changes to existing strategies, security practices, and tools can be used to try to gain an upper hand on these sophisticated AI-enabled cybercriminals. • Understand how AI is being used by cybercriminals to improve the effectiveness of phishing attacks, DDOS attacks, and social engineering exploits • Identify weaknesses in modern IT systems and how they are being actively exploited • Examine tools, techniques, and processes which can be used to defend from AI-enhanced attacks

CollabDays Portugal 2024 - Porto Edition

21/09/2024, Isep Parque
Porto, Portugal

AI is Hacking You – How Cybercriminals Leverage Artificial Intelligence

ai

security

artificial-intelligence

cybersecurity

it-security

copilot

Organizations today are vastly unprepared for the threat of modern artificial intelligence tools being utilized by cyber-criminals against their IT infrastructure. Modern attackers are highly organized, well-resourced, and skilled in the use of the latest commercially released artificial intelligence tools to be able to give them an edge with criminal activity. The reality is that it has unfortunately become a lucrative business to hack, disrupt, and steal intellectual property from organizations of all sizes and in all business sectors. While the attackers are becoming more sophisticated, organizations have their IT security positioned for threats from the past century with insecure password management, security log overload, and outdated tools that unfortunately keep defenders one step behind these type of modern AI attacks. This unfortunately makes it that much easier for attackers to obtain access to your critical intellectual property and makes career-ruining disruptions commonplace. This session focuses on understanding how modern cyber-criminals utilize AI tools to attack your people, IT processes, and IT infrastructure and what type of changes to existing strategies, security practices, and tools can be used to try to gain an upper hand on these sophisticated AI-enabled cybercriminals. • Understand how AI is being used by cybercriminals to improve the effectiveness of phishing attacks, DDOS attacks, and social engineering exploits • Identify weaknesses in modern IT systems and how they are being actively exploited • Examine tools, techniques, and processes which can be used to defend from AI-enhanced attacks

Thrive Conference 2024

20/05/2024, Kompas Xnet
Ljubljana, Slovenia

AI is Hacking You – How Cybercriminals Leverage Artificial Intelligence

ai

security

defender

artificial-intelligence

cybersecurity

it-security

chatgpt

Organizations today are vastly unprepared for the threat of modern artificial intelligence tools being utilized by cyber-criminals against their IT infrastructure. Modern attackers are highly organized, well-resourced, and skilled in the use of the latest commercially released artificial intelligence tools to be able to give them an edge with criminal activity. The reality is that it has unfortunately become a lucrative business to hack, disrupt, and steal intellectual property from organizations of all sizes and in all business sectors. While the attackers are becoming more sophisticated, organizations have their IT security positioned for threats from the past century with insecure password management, security log overload, and outdated tools that unfortunately keep defenders one step behind these type of modern AI attacks. This unfortunately makes it that much easier for attackers to obtain access to your critical intellectual property and makes career-ruining disruptions commonplace. This session focuses on understanding how modern cyber-criminals utilize AI tools to attack your people, IT processes, and IT infrastructure and what type of changes to existing strategies, security practices, and tools can be used to try to gain an upper hand on these sophisticated AI-enabled cybercriminals. • Understand how AI is being used by cybercriminals to improve the effectiveness of phishing attacks, DDOS attacks, and social engineering exploits • Identify weaknesses in modern IT systems and how they are being actively exploited • Examine tools, techniques, and processes which can be used to defend from AI-enhanced attacks

Thrive Conference 2024

20/05/2024, Kompas Xnet
Ljubljana, Slovenia

IT Insecurity - Understanding the Threat of Modern Cyber-attacks

cybersecurity

microsoft-defender

azure-sentinel

it-security

microsoft-defender-365

Organizations today are vastly unprepared for the threat of modern cyber-attacks. At the same time, the attackers are becoming more sophisticated and the number of resources at their disposal is increasing. It has become a lucrative business to hack, disrupt, and steal intellectual property from organizations of all sizes and in all business sectors. While the attackers are becoming more sophisticated, organizations have their IT security positioned for threats from the past century, with poor password management techniques, simple ACL based file permissions, and basic firewall and zone-based containment techniques. This makes it easier for attackers to obtain access to critical intellectual property and makes career-ruining disruptions all the more common. This session focuses on understanding what is currently wrong with IT security practices and how your organization can change processes, techniques, and tools to provide for a significantly higher level of IT security without necessarily having to implement expensive tools or obtrusive processes. • Understand the pitfalls of current IT Security practices, including myths around password change policies, allowing logins without providing multiple factors, and the proliferation of ‘always-on’ admin rights. • Examine how simple changes in IT strategy can greatly improve your overall IT posture, including providing for up to a 99% improvement in the likelihood of a data credential theft. • Determine which easy to deploy tools and features which you may already be licensed for can be used to tighten up IT security within an environment, including solutions such as Microsoft Defender 365, Azure Defender, Azure Sentinel, next-generation firewalls, and more.

European Collaboration Summit 2024

14/05/2024, Rheinmain Congresscenter
Wiesbaden, Germany

AI is Hacking You – How Cybercriminals Leverage Artificial Intelligence

ai

cybersecurity

artificialintelligence

Organisations today are vastly unprepared for the threat of modern artificial intelligence tools being utilised by cyber-criminals against their IT infrastructure. Modern attackers are highly organised, well-resourced, and skilled in the use of the latest commercially released artificial intelligence tools to be able to give them an edge with criminal activity. The reality is that it has unfortunately become a lucrative business to hack, disrupt, and steal intellectual property from organisations of all sizes and in all business sectors. While the attackers are becoming more sophisticated, organisations have their IT security positioned for threats from the past century with insecure password management, security log overload, and outdated tools that unfortunately keep defenders one step behind these type of modern AI attacks. This unfortunately makes it that much easier for attackers to obtain access to your critical intellectual property and makes career-ruining disruptions commonplace. This session focuses on understanding how modern cyber-criminals utilise AI tools to attack your people, IT processes, and IT infrastructure and what type of changes to existing strategies, security practices, and tools can be used to try to gain an upper hand on these sophisticated AI-enabled cybercriminals. • Understand how AI is being used by cybercriminals to improve the effectiveness of phishing attacks, DDOS attacks, and social engineering exploits • Identify weaknesses in modern IT systems and how they are being actively exploited • Examine tools, techniques, and processes which can be used to defend from AI-enhanced attacks

11. MSCommunity BiH Konferencija

18/04/2024, Garden City Hotel Konjic
Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Build Your Own ChatGPT in Microsoft Azure

ai

artificial-intelligence

openai

azure-search

chatgpt

azure-cognitive-services

azure-openai

Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have emerged as a disruptive force for organizations all over the world. The ability to search through disparate content using natural language queries and to be able to intelligently pull together useful information that would ordinarily be siloed is incredibly useful to modern organizations. Those same organizations are naturally reluctant to upload their own proprietary information into public LLMs and are often limited to using these tools against public datasets. As part of Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, several new offerings have been introduced to Microsoft’s Azure cloud services that allow organizations to use a ChatGPT engine to query their own proprietary content and to create valuable chat engines that employees can use to quickly and efficiently query and reference internal knowledge. These tools are powerful and easy to configure and can be used immediately by organizations of any size, not requiring any special licensing above and beyond minimal costs for the running Azure infrastructure. This session demonstrates the step-by-step process of deploying a ChatGPT chat engine in Azure, focusing on all steps needed to build the environment from scratch, including loading content, creating the search indexes, and provisioning the web application to run the engine on. • View in detail the steps necessary to build your own ChatGPT environment that queries off your own data in your own isolated Azure instance • Understand how to maintain data within the environment and how to upload and update the indexes and documents in the platform • Understand the security ramifications of using LLMs and how to properly isolate your environment

11. MSCommunity BiH Konferencija

18/04/2024, Garden City Hotel Konjic
Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina

AI is Hacking You – How Cybercriminals Leverage Artificial Intelligence

ai

artificial-intelligence

cybersecurity

it-security

Organizations today are vastly unprepared for the threat of modern artificial intelligence tools being utilized by cyber-criminals against their IT infrastructure. Modern attackers are highly organized, well-resourced, and skilled in the use of the latest commercially released artificial intelligence tools to be able to give them an edge with criminal activity. The reality is that it has unfortunately become a lucrative business to hack, disrupt, and steal intellectual property from organizations of all sizes and in all business sectors. While the attackers are becoming more sophisticated, organizations have their IT security positioned for threats from the past century with insecure password management, security log overload, and outdated tools that unfortunately keep defenders one step behind these type of modern AI attacks. This unfortunately makes it that much easier for attackers to obtain access to your critical intellectual property and makes career-ruining disruptions commonplace. This session focuses on understanding how modern cyber-criminals utilize AI tools to attack your people, IT processes, and IT infrastructure and what type of changes to existing strategies, security practices, and tools can be used to try to gain an upper hand on these sophisticated AI-enabled cybercriminals. • Understand how AI is being used by cybercriminals to improve the effectiveness of phishing attacks, DDOS attacks, and social engineering exploits • Identify weaknesses in modern IT systems and how they are being actively exploited • Examine tools, techniques, and processes which can be used to defend from AI-enhanced attacks

Digital Workplace Conference 2024 - New Zealand

27/02/2024, Christchurch
Christchurch, New Zealand

AI is Hacking You – How Cybercriminals Leverage Artificial Intelligence

ai

cybersecurity

artificialintelligence

Organizations today are vastly unprepared for the threat of modern artificial intelligence tools being utilized by cyber-criminals against their IT infrastructure. Modern attackers are highly organized, well-resourced, and skilled in the use of the latest commercially released artificial intelligence tools to be able to give them an edge with criminal activity. The reality is that it has unfortunately become a lucrative business to hack, disrupt, and steal intellectual property from organizations of all sizes and in all business sectors. While the attackers are becoming more sophisticated, organizations have their IT security positioned for threats from the past century with insecure password management, security log overload, and outdated tools that unfortunately keep defenders one step behind these type of modern AI attacks. This unfortunately makes it that much easier for attackers to obtain access to your critical intellectual property and makes career-ruining disruptions commonplace. This session focuses on understanding how modern cyber-criminals utilize AI tools to attack your people, IT processes, and IT infrastructure and what type of changes to existing strategies, security practices, and tools can be used to try to gain an upper hand on these sophisticated AI-enabled cybercriminals. • Understand how AI is being used by cybercriminals to improve the effectiveness of phishing attacks, DDOS attacks, and social engineering exploits • Identify weaknesses in modern IT systems and how they are being actively exploited • Examine tools, techniques, and processes which can be used to defend from AI-enhanced attacks

European Collaboration Summit 2023

22/05/2023, Congress Center Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf, Germany

Combatting Cyberthreats with Microsoft Defender 365

cybersecurity

itsecurity

microsoftdefender

microsoftdefender365

microsoftdefenderforcloudapps

microsoftdefenderforendpoints

microsoftdefenderforidentity

The dramatic rise in the number and severity of cyber-threats faced by organisations today has led to a proliferation of countermeasure IT security tool-sets. In many cases, these security tools operate independently from each other and can lead to siloed alerting and monitoring making it difficult for IT staff to effectively identify threats and mitigate them before they become major issues. The Microsoft Defender 365 suite of cloud security tools consolidates multiple security tool-sets under a single management interface and provides for end-to-end security, allowing administrators to quickly identify and contain threats. Rather than constantly being on the defensive, Defender 365 provides for the ability to proactively hunt for vulnerabilities and potential bad actors while they are still making lateral moves within your environment, allowing IT cybersecurity the ability to stay one step ahead of increasingly sophisticated hackers. This session takes an in-depth look at the tools that are part of the Microsoft Defender 365 suite, including Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Identity and more. Discover how to better control, audit, and manage your organisation’s data in both the cloud and on-premises infrastructure. • Explore the various tool-sets and capabilities built into Microsoft 365 Defender, including Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) functionality, endpoint threat detection and management, and sophisticated on-premises real-time threat prevention tools. • Examine how real-time threats can overwhelm more traditional threat management systems and how an intuitive ‘single pane of glass’ view of threat detection and management can greatly improve the odds of stopping sophisticated cyber-attacks. • Understand how Microsoft licensing for Microsoft Defender 365 is structured and how you can take advantage of these security tools for little or even no cost in some scenarios.

CollabDays Poland 2023

13/05/2023, Microsoft
Warszawa, Poland

Combatting Cyberthreats with Microsoft Defender 365

defender

cybersecurity

mdca

msdefender

The dramatic rise in the number and severity of cyberthreats faced by organizations today has led to a proliferation of countermeasure IT security toolsets. In many cases, these security tools operate independently from each other and can lead to siloed alerting and monitoring making it difficult for IT staff to effectively identify threats and mitigate them before they become major issues. Microsoft Defender 365 suite of cloud security tools consolidates multiple security toolsets under a single management interface and provides for end-to-end security, allowing administrators to quickly identify and contain threats. Rather than constantly being on the defensive, Defender 365 provides for the ability to proactively hunt for vulnerabilities and potential bad actors while they are still making lateral moves within your environment, allowing IT cybersecurity the ability to stay one step ahead of increasingly sophisticated hackers. This session takes an in-depth look at the tools that are part of the Microsoft Defender 365 suite, including Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Identity and more. Discover how to better control, audit, and manage your organization’s data in both the cloud and on-premises infrastructure. • Explore the various toolsets and capabilities built into Microsoft 365 Defender, including Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) functionality, endpoint threat detection and management, and sophisticated on-premises real-time threat prevention tools. • Examine how real-time threats can overwhelm more traditional threat management systems and how an intuitive ‘single pane of glass’ view of threat detection and management can greatly improve the odds of stopping sophisticated cyberattacks. • Understand how Microsoft licensing for Microsoft Defender 365 is structured and how you can take advantage of these security tools for little or even no cost in some scenarios.

Partner

United States of America

Past Speaking Engagements

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