In the last of this series looking at the shift to public cloud we discuss getting the best from your cloud and the value of understanding the behaviour of your cloud infrastructure. On this show I’m joined by Sumo Logic’s Colin Fernandez as we look at public cloud, the value of what it delivers and how an understanding of its performance is crucial to not only help achieve desired outcomes, but to do so while meeting those ever-critical security and governance requirements. Colin is a self-proc...
Sep 11, 2018•35 min
This show was recorded pre the announcement on August 27th, 2018 of CloudHealth Technologies acquisition by VMware. This is the 3rd in our series looking at the move to public cloud, the challenges involved and some of the tips and technologies that can help you to overcome them. In this episode we look at perhaps the biggest challenge facing most organisations moving to public cloud, the issues of multi-cloud. To discuss this I'm joined by Joe Kinsella CTO and Founder of CloudHealth Tech, a com...
Aug 29, 2018•34 min
As the desire to integrate public cloud into our organisations IT continues to grow, the need to ensure we maintain control and security of our key assets is a challenge but one that we need to overcome if we are going to use cloud as a fundamental part of our future IT infrastructure. The importance of security and reducing our vulnerabilities is not, of course, unique to using public cloud, it's a key part of any organisations IT and data strategy. However, the move to public cloud does introd...
Aug 14, 2018•33 min
The move to public cloud is nothing new, many companies have moved or attempted to move key workloads into the big hyperscale providers, AWS, Azure, Google and IBM, but for some it has been a mixed success. We have probably all heard of cloud projects (or maybe even had projects) that have not gone to plan, this can be for a range of reasons, cost, technical difficulties, performance. There is a long list of reasons that cloud projects don’t go the way that’s expected. But at the heart of many o...
Aug 01, 2018•34 min
A couple of times a year I like to do a show that reviews the current state of the data market, the chance to take a check on the challenges facing both the makers and consumers of data technology, how they are been addressed, the technology changes and trends that decisions makers should consider and what the future holds for the industry. Earlier this year I spoke with industry analyst Chris Evans to look ahead to 2018. For this half year review, I was very fortunate to get some time with reno...
Jul 18, 2018•37 min
Compliance of data continues to trouble many business execs, whether IT focused or not, it is high on the agenda for most organisations. A few weeks ago I wrote an article called, Building a modern data platform "prevention" focused on how Microsoft Office365 could aide an organisation in preventing the loss of data using some excellent, if not well known tools, inside Office365. This got me to thinking, what else do Microsoft have in their portfolio that people don't know about? This episode of...
Jul 03, 2018•37 min
I recently attended a fascinating event with the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) and Microsoft. BIMA exist to drive innovation and excellence across the digital industry. One of the ways they do this is via community events and forum to help give their industry leaders an opportunity to share ideas with their peers. One of the other things communities like BIMA do well is engage with influential organisations who are shaping the way industries develop and BIMA have recently run a se...
Jun 27, 2018•37 min
As the move to cloud continues we are starting to see a new development, with organisations no longer relying on a single cloud provider to deliver their key services, many now opting for multiple providers. This multi-cloud environment makes perfect sense, the whole point of adopting cloud is to provide you with the flexibility to consume your data, infrastructure, applications and services from the best provider at any given time, which would be very difficult to do if we only had a single pro...
Jun 12, 2018•34 min
A couple of weeks ago Veeam had their annual technical conference VeeamON at that event they shared among other things their new strategic messaging. That message is an interesting one and their shift from "backup" company to one focused on intelligent data management across multiple repositories is, in my opinion, exactly the right move to be making. With that in mind, I wanted to take a look at some of those messages as well as some of the other interesting announcements from the show and that...
Jun 05, 2018•34 min
I've spoken a bit recently about the world of Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) especially as the technology continues to mature, with both improved hardware stacks and software looking to take advantage of this hardware, it is becoming an ever more compelling prospect. How do these developments, an HCI version 2.0 if you like, manifest themselves? Recently I saw a good example in a series of blog posts and videos from friend of the show Ruairi McBride, which demonstrated really well both the...
May 22, 2018•30 min
Buzzwords are a constant in IT, Cloud, HCI, Analytics, GDPR are often bandied about and serious discussions are had, however not everyone is sure what some of these buzzwords mean, what the technology consists of and importantly what positive impact does it have on an organisation? Another contender to the buzzword Olympics is IoT or “The Internet of Things” what does that mean? What is a thing? And do I want things? When I heard that a friend of the podcast had taken on a new role as an IoT Sol...
May 06, 2018•32 min
GDPR has been a constant business conversation over the last 18 months or so, it's discussed in the press, on the news and social media, as well as a handful of episodes of this podcast. However, much of the conversation has focussed on what you should be considering and doing to take on the GDPR challenge, while very little has come from those who have already made great strides on their compliance journey. With that in mind, a few weeks ago I read a fascinating series of blogs from software co...
May 01, 2018•41 min
Cyber Security, be it how we secure our perimeter, infrastructure, mobile devices or data, is a complex and ever-changing challenge. In the face of this complexity where do we start when it comes to building our organisations cyber security standards. Well perhaps the answer may lie in standardised frameworks and accreditation's. If you think about it, one of the biggest challenges we have when it comes to security is knowing where to start, so having a standard to work towards makes perfect sen...
Apr 18, 2018•26 min
At the start of 2018 the technology industry was hit by two new threats unlike anything it had seen before. Spectre and Meltdown used vulnerabilities not in operating system code or poorly written applications, but ones at a much lower level than that. This vulnerability was not only something of concern to today’s technology providers, but also to those looking at architecting the way technology will work in the future. As we try to push technology further and have it deal with more data, more ...
Mar 27, 2018•36 min
Recently I wrote a blog post in which I touched on the importance of availability, especially In a world were our reliance on technology is ever increasing, from the way we operate our business, to the way we live our lives and how digitally focussed businesses can no longer tolerate downtime, planned or unplanned, in the way they could even 5 years ago. The crux of that article talked about how crucial availability is in our modern platforms. So how do we maintain availability and mitigate agai...
Mar 13, 2018•35 min
As our IT systems become ever more complex, with more data, devices and ways of working, the demands on our systems and ensuring they are always operating efficiently grow. This in turn presents us and our IT teams with a whole new range of management challenges. Systems management has always been a challenge for organisations, how do we keep on top of an ever-increasing amount of systems ? how do we ensure they remain secure and patched ? and how do we cope with our users and their multitude of...
Mar 07, 2018•34 min
If there is one thing that we can say is a certainty in the technology industry it is the constant state of change, how technology works, how we want to use it, where we want to use it and what we expect from it is constantly changing and in reality is ever more demanding. One of the things I like to do in my role is spend time looking at technology predictions and listen to ideas from those in the industry tasked with defining the strategic direction of their businesses, not to judge whether th...
Feb 21, 2018•44 min
One of the favourite parts of my role over the last few years has been my involvement in tech community, whether that's been working with advocacy groups like the NetApp A-Team, with local user groups like TechUG, presenting at a range of different community events or just answering questions in technical communities, all of these investments (and they are investments) have paid back, they've introduced me to great people, given me access to resources and expertise I would never have found norma...
Feb 13, 2018•26 min
Wanting to get the very best from your data and "extracting value" from it seems to be a constant conversation with technology and business leaders in pretty much any organisation, but what does getting value from it mean and how do we go about it? A couple of weeks ago I read a very interesting article from this weeks guest where he introduced the concept of Data Amplification Ratio, the basic premise of this article was that one of the key ways to get more from your data is to ensure that the ...
Feb 07, 2018•28 min
As organisations we can see the benefit of cloud and almost all organisations are taking advantage of it, be it a software service such as Office365 or backup and DR, the efficiency and simplicity of deployment of these kinds of services make them an attractive option. However, what we are not seeing, in general, is organisations moving 100% to a cloud-based IT infrastructure, this can be for many reasons, suitability, complexity and cost, for example. But our desire to take advantage of cloud s...
Jan 31, 2018•37 min
One of my favourite phrases is that "those who make the most of their data, will be the success stories of the future" and I think that is echoed by our obsession with data as a new all-powerful resource for us to mine and exploit. But, it's not quite that straightforward is it? There is no getting away from the importance of security and privacy when it comes to our data. Be that keeping it from unwarranted access, data leakage or maintaining compliance with ever increasing regulatory requireme...
Jan 23, 2018•30 min
There is no doubt for many 2018 will be the year of data privacy, driven, in no small part, by the impending EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In my opinion GDPR has many positives elements to it, it's the opportunity for businesses to look at how they manage, secure and retain the privacy of data across their organisations and for too many of us, this is something that's long overdue. GDPR (and other regulations) however are not just a good idea, they are something that we need to c...
Jan 16, 2018•27 min
It’s the kind of thing us podcasters like to do this time of year, we like to take a bit of a retrospective view of the previous year as well as a look forward to the new, so not wanting to miss a trick on the Tech Interviews podcast, that’s exactly what we do in this episode. To help me to look forward and look back at the tech industry I’m joined by Analyst Chris Evans. We take a look at a whole range of topics, we discuss how a move to a more software defined future has not stopped the re-eme...
Jan 09, 2018•43 min
As we become more data-driven in our organisations and ever more used to the way big public cloud providers deliver our services, it is putting more pressure on internal IT to deliver infrastructure that provides this data focussed, cloud like experience, but where do you start in designing this next-generation of datacentre. That's the subject of this week's podcast, the last of the shows recorded at NetApp Insight in Berlin, where I catch up with two members of a fascinating panel discussion I...
Dec 12, 2017•22 min
There is no doubt that the amount of data we have, manage, control and analyse continues to grow ever more rapidly and increasingly this is unstructured data, documents, images, engineering drawings, data that often needs to be stored in one place and be easily accessible. However, this presents problems, how do you get all of this data in one place when it's not just TB's it 100's of TB's and made up of billions of files that need to be accessed quickly, how on earth do you build that kind of c...
Dec 05, 2017•18 min
The IT industry is full of new trends, some you get, some you don't, one such trend, that until recently I didn't really get, was Hyper-Converged, why have I not gotten onboard? A good test with any new technology is does it solve a problem or improve the way I currently do things? Up to now with Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) I'm not sure it really does, is it helping me build a more automated, flexible, agile IT infrastructure? Is it helping me build a hybrid environment? Is it automatin...
Nov 28, 2017•20 min
I've discussed in a number of blog posts, as well as previous episodes of Tech Interviews, the importance of building a data strategy. The term "Data Fabric" is an increasingly common way of describing such a strategy, this was something I first heard 3 years ago at NetApp's annual technical conference Insight as they introduced their first ideas for building a strategy that would start to move them from a storage company to a data management company. When NetApp first discussed this three years...
Nov 21, 2017•20 min
One of the main components of any tech conference is the keynote sessions, these are the sessions that share the vision, set the context for the show and a good keynote is a vital part of creating the right atmosphere for those attending. What I wanted to do with these special shows was to try and grab some of the immediate reaction from those attending the events and the keynote presentations that come with them. Our first set of keynote reviews come from NetApp Insight 2017 in Berlin, getting ...
Nov 16, 2017•13 min
One of the main components of any tech conference is the keynote sessions, these are the sessions that share the vision, set the context for the show and a good keynote is a vital part of creating the right atmosphere for those attending. What I wanted to do with these special shows was to try and grab some of the immediate reaction from those attending the events and the keynote presentations that come with them. Our first set of keynote reviews come from NetApp Insight 2017 in Berlin, getting ...
Nov 15, 2017•10 min
One of the main components of any tech conference is the keynote sessions, these are the sessions that share the vision, set the context for the show and a good keynote is a vital part of creating the right atmosphere for those attending. What I wanted to do with these special shows was to try and grab some of the immediate reaction from those attending the events and the keynote presentations that come with them. For these first shows, I'm at NetApp's Insight conference in Berlin, where we expe...
Nov 14, 2017•14 min
