EP38 | Nobody Knows Where Their Cryptography Lives

It is just Richard and David this episode, with Cyrus taking a break. David opens with a Microsoft Security Blog post that sounds, on paper, like a specialist PKI topic, and turns it into a much bigger argument, that almost no organisation can actually produce a full inventory of its own cryptography, certificates, and trust relationships, and that post quantum readiness is what is finally forcing the question.

Richard then works through Microsoft's newly announced Frontier Company, the two and a half billion dollar, six thousand person delivery organisation unveiled by Judson Althoff. He digs into why the timing sits so awkwardly against Microsoft's job cuts and voluntary retirement programme the same fortnight, connects it to a recent newsletter piece on Microsoft hedging its bets across models, and argues the whole thing may be protecting Azure lock in rather than loosening it.

Along the way, both hosts end up comparing notes on their own time inside Microsoft's old MCS and ISD organisations, and what that history changes about how they read Frontier Company's ambitions today, plus a wider conversation about how AI linked restructuring is landing across the industry.

Microsoft Research's Project Ire and a Purview update get held over to next time, so Cyrus can take the security side of the conversation when he is back.

Links

• Building your cryptographic inventory (Microsoft Security Blog)
• Microsoft Frontier Company announcement
• GeekWire, on Frontier Company's legal entity status
• TechCrunch, layoffs linked to Frontier Company
• GeekWire, voluntary retirement programme details
• Richard's newsletter, four bets on models
• AWS re:Invent 2025 keynote coverage

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Music: Null Invocation, Monochrome Pulse. https://is.gd/b1kNU9