12–14 October 2022, Seattle (hybrid). First hybrid Ignite — in-person at Seattle Convention Center, satellite events in Germany, France, UK, Japan, LATAM. The conference where Microsoft started framing every announcement under one slogan: "do more with less with the Microsoft Cloud."
What we took away
- Microsoft Entra family expansion. Preview of Microsoft Entra Identity Governance (Lifecycle Workflows, separation of duties in Entitlement Management), plus Entra Verified ID GA-track work. The first time the Identity story got branding that felt deliberate.
- Microsoft Defender for DevOps — central DevOps security posture across multi-pipeline / multi-cloud, plus Defender CSPM preview with agentless scanning.
- Sentinel + Defender unified investigation experience and a new low-cost log storage tier for SOC retention.
- Microsoft Teams Premium announced (intelligent meeting recap, advanced webinars); Mesh avatars preview in Teams; Loop app preview; Excel Live inside Teams meetings.
- Microsoft Designer — DALL·E 2-powered graphic design app. The first really visible sign that the GenAI consumer wave was about to land at Microsoft.
Why it mattered for us
Defender for DevOps and CSPM landed at the right moment for us — we were just standing up the security posture for an MSP-grade customer who wanted one dashboard across Azure DevOps and three different subscriptions. Microsoft handed us the dashboard.
And Entra Identity Governance changed how we structure tenant cleanups: lifecycle workflows mean we can actually retire a leaver's access in time, not "by next Friday, hopefully."
"Do more with less with the Microsoft Cloud." — the slogan of Ignite 2022, repeated until it stuck.
A solid year-of-discipline framing for a recession year.