RichardHam.co.uk Blog

Tag: M365

  • M365 Copilot GA: Auditing in the AI Era

    M365 Copilot GA: When Enterprise AI Hits Your Clients
    Published: January 15, 2024 (retrospective)

    Microsoft 365 Copilot’s September 2023 general availability created immediate cybersecurity headaches for SME fractional CISOs like me. Clients asked: “Is this safe to roll out?” My answer was always the same: not without an audit first. I built a suite of PowerShell tools—orchestrated by early Control Tower prototypes—to find out.

    Risk Patterns Found

    Across 12 client audits in Q4 2023 and Q1 2024, three risk patterns dominated:

    • Over-permissive app consents: 67% of tenants had third-party apps with excessive Graph API permissions
    • Mailbox forwarding rules: Weaponised by attackers pre-Copilot, now surfaced by AI queries
    • Intune policy drift: Devices out of compliance baseline, Copilot amplifying exposure
    Finding Prevalence Avg Fix Time
    App consent overreach 67% 2h
    Forwarding rules 23% 45 mins
    Intune policy drift 11% 3h

    The Audit Stack

    PowerShell + Graph API + ChatGPT-generated report templates cut audit delivery time from 3 days to 6 hours. Every finding logged to GitHub for client traceability—an early governance habit that fed into SentinelForge later.

    Lessons for IT Leaders

    1. Enable Copilot only after a permissions audit—not before.
    2. AI tools surface hidden risks as well as create them.
    3. Automation + human oversight beats manual-only every time.

    Need an M365 Copilot readiness audit? Book via richardham.co.uk/services.

    Next: Zero-trust frameworks collide with AI governance (Apr 2024).

  • ChatGPT Enterprise: My First Steps into AI-Assisted IT

    ChatGPT Enterprise: My First Steps into AI-Assisted IT
    Published: September 25, 2023 (retrospective)

    2023 marked my pivot from 25+ years of pure IT/cybersecurity scripting to blending AI into daily workflows—starting with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise launch in late August. As a fractional IT Director managing M365 environments and Proxmox homelabs, I was sceptical: could AI handle PowerShell automation without hallucinating disasters? This post recaps those early experiments, wins, and the spark that ignited my AI journey.

    The Catalyst: Enterprise AI Goes Live

    ChatGPT Enterprise dropped on August 28, 2023, promising admin controls, data privacy, and unlimited GPT-4 access—perfect for SME cybersecurity without the free-tier limits. I spun it up immediately for real client work: generating Intune policies, parsing M365 audit logs, and drafting Bash scripts for QNAP backups. No more hours tweaking regex—AI nailed 80% on first try.

    Early tests:
    – Converted manual PowerShell M365 mailbox audits to reusable functions
    – Automated DD-WRT router configs for client VPNs
    – Brainstormed cPanel/WHM hardening checklists

    Key Wins and Pitfalls

    Q3 Milestones:
    – September: First AI-generated Intune deployment script—deployed live, zero errors. Saved 4 hours per client.
    – October: Ollama early access teased local runs, but cloud GPT-4 crushed complex queries.
    – November: GitHub’s generative AI repos tripled to 65k+, inspiring my first LocalLLM-Router sketches.

    Experiment Time Saved Issues Found
    M365 Audits 4h/client Overly verbose outputs
    Intune Policies 2 days/project Needed fact-checking
    Backup Scripts 3h/setup Hallucinated syntax (fixed iteratively)

    Pitfalls taught resilience: AI excelled at boilerplate but flopped on edge cases—my cybersecurity instincts always double-checked outputs.

    Lessons from the Frontlines

    1. Start small: Use AI for scripting grunt work, not strategy.
    2. Local potential: Ollama’s October buzz hinted at cost escapes from cloud tokens.
    3. Governance early: Even then, I logged prompts/outputs for audit trails—foreshadowing SentinelForge.

    ChatGPT Enterprise wasn’t a replacement; it amplified my expertise, prepping 2024’s Control Tower orchestration.

    Ready for AI-secured IT? Contact me for M365 audits or homelab setups.

    Next: GitHub AI Boom and My Homelab Shift (Nov 2023).

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