🐠 Snorkelling: Getting Started with Microsoft Cloud Security

Welcome to the reef. It’s bright, busy, and occasionally bites.

If you’ve ever looked at Microsoft’s cloud security stack and felt overwhelmed—relax. You don’t need a million certs, a rack of gear, or clearance from ASIO. What you do need are a few essential tools, a healthy dose of curiosity, and the philosophical fortitude of one very strange animal.

Let’s begin.

🧰 1. A Laptop (Not Fancy, Just Functional)

You don’t need a 96-core monster with RGB lighting and a GPU capable of rendering Middle-earth. A solid laptop with a modern browser, a decent CPU, and a willingness to multitask is more than enough.

📚 2. Documentation (The Microsoft Kind)

Your new best friend is the Microsoft Learn platform. Bookmark the docs for Defender for Cloud, Entra ID, Intune, and the Security Compliance toolkit.

💻 3. VS Code (or Something Equally Sassy)

You’ll be scripting policies, writing JSON, and poking Graph API with a stick. Visual Studio Code is your lightweight Swiss Army knife. Install extensions for:

  • Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
  • Bicep
  • PowerShell
  • Markdown

Bonus: add GitHub integration.

🦆 4. An Insatiable Need to Know (Activate Your Inner Platypus)

You’ll need one key trait to thrive in Microsoft Cloud Security: curiosity. Channel your inner platypus—a creature that lays eggs, senses electromagnetic fields, and has venom.

The inquisitive platypus

It’s weird, underestimated, and perfectly adapted to thrive where few others can.
So should you be.

🐙 Coming Up Next in Snorkelling:

  • “The Portal Tour: What the Hell is Where?”
  • “M365 vs Azure Security: Why Are There Two of Everything?”
  • “Conditional Access for Humans (Not Robots)”

Until then, snorkel up, curiosity on. The reef’s only going to get weirder from here.