In 2026, I was honored to be renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the fifteenth consecutive year in the Cloud and Datacenter Management category. This year the recognition carries an additional meaning: the award now also covers the Security category, which marks a return to a domain where I had already been recognized as MVP back in 2023. Holding both categories reflects how deeply infrastructure and security have converged in my daily work — from hybrid datacenters to threat detection and response.
A year of community and content
The past twelve months have been among the most intense of my community journey. On the events side, I had the privilege of speaking and contributing at:
- AperiTeams Conference 2026, held on June 24 at Microsoft House in Milan — the conference I co-founded, once again bringing together the Italian Microsoft community for a full day of technical sessions.
- WPC 2025, the leading Italian conference on Microsoft technologies.
- Cloud Conference Italia 2025, with a focus on cloud infrastructure and security scenarios.
- Global Azure Ticino 2026 and Global Azure Veneto 2026, part of the worldwide Global Azure initiative.
The book: Azure Local Unleashed
Together with my friend and fellow MVP Francesco Molfese, this year I published Azure Local Unleashed, a book dedicated to modernizing hybrid infrastructure with cloud-consistent management and governance. Writing it was a long journey, and seeing it in the hands of the community — the same community that shaped much of its content — has been one of the highlights of the year.
Project Brioche: the Microsoft Sentinel Toolkit
On the security side, I released the Microsoft Sentinel Toolkit, internally known as Project Brioche and published under the CyberGuard brand by Inside Technologies. It is a free, 100% client-side operational tool for SOC teams and security analysts: a Rules Manager for Sentinel analytics rules, a curated KQL query library mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, content pack exploration, and coverage analysis against CISA KEV and live threat intelligence feeds. The toolkit is continuously updated and open to the entire security community.
All of these activities are underpinned by my focus on three principal domains: Azure Local, Microsoft Defender XDR, and Microsoft Sentinel.
Conclusion
Fifteen years as an MVP is not a finish line — it is a reminder of why this journey started: sharing knowledge, learning from the community, and giving back more than I take. With the dual award in Cloud and Datacenter Management and Security, the direction for the next twelve months is clear: keep building where infrastructure and security meet.
DBS