Don't mention the "C" word!

I have recently been involved with an organisation that can't say the "C" word: "Cloud". There I said it. Now, that wasn't so bad was it?

So what's the problem? I'll tell you what: organisations, particularly large ones, still don't know what the Cloud means to them... So rather than say it, they skirt around it: "Elastic Infrastructure", "On-demand Provisioning", "Capacity driven", and so on. All the while this further confuses the client as to what Cloud is, and what the organisation's strategy is to move towards all that Cloud goodness, whatever that may be. It's a funny old situation, and I'm wondering if it's unique. Are we all still struggling to define the Cloud? Should we just accept it for what it is, which is whatever you want it to be?

So what is it to me? In a word: differentiation, and in two: business differentiation. So what do I mean by this? In a nutshell it's about creating business opportunity by freeing up resources, and empowering those resources to be innovative. Innovation comes when you have a culture that enables people to not only fail fast, but to learn fast. This learning drives the innovation. Cloud technology allows us to do this in a cost effective, and timely manner. Its really that simple.

Stop worrying about saying the "C" word; just work or what your business goals and challenges are, and then see how Cloud can help you realise them.

Visualisation - a British spelling

An old colleague of mine has a great blog on BI (Business Intelligence) and it's application through a tool called Tableau. It was from reading Paul's blog that made me think I should start outputting some of my architecture ramblings; the ones I don't have the chance to during the working day, or the ones nobody wants to listen to;-)

In my head I see the visualisation piece as being the icing on the top of the cake: there is a whole data architecture that needs to underpin this, within the IT environment it is part of the ITOA movement I mentioned in a previous post.

That being said, Tableau is both a very powerful tool, and more importantly a very easy tool to get up and running to gain some valuable business insights.  Empowering a user base is one thing I look for in a platform, since it avoids service bottlenecks: i.e. a team of staff managing requests. Power to the people is what I say!

Anyhoo, recommend checking Paul's blog out for all your Tableau visualisation needs.

Going the ExtraHop

ITOA (IT Operations Analytics) is going mainstream big style in 2014. This is an area I am particularly interested in from an instrumentation, aggregation, analytics and visualisation perspective. This is an area IT folks can really add some business differentiation, but there are a number of hurdles to overcome: breaking down the silos, the usual road to DevOps enlightenment.

I had an interesting update from ExtraHop today. They have slick on-the-wire instrumentation product that does packet header analysis and correlation in real-time. They're also able to offload to Splunk to take advantage of Splunk's indexing capabilities; one nice result of this means you can use less Splunk license given you're targeting the data that's indexed using triggers (don't tell Splunk's sales people;-).

Hello world

This is the start of a little blog for me to use as an outlet for all things technology and architecture. Why undercover? Well I'm more a behind the scenes kinda guy - I like success through others. In hoping that though this blog I can sync up with other like minded technology architects working in the field.