Is the Cloud Ready?

The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference is taking place this week in Toronto (week of 7/18/16), and the cloud is unquestionably its key topic. Many CIOs and CTOs have caught the cloud bug and have openly stated that their infrastructures are moving to the cloud. But what exactly is “the cloud,” and is it really ready for prime time?

Root Cause Analysis Is Not Dead

Eric Wright of VMTurbo wrote about the death of root cause analysis (RCA) with the rise of microservices. I take exception to this, as microservices aren’t really all that new. Even what’s being called “serverless computing” isn’t particularly new. However, that’s a discussion for another time. The point of RCA is to find the real reasons …

Data Sovereignty, Data Ownership

Data drives the modern business. It drives the modern development process. And it drives IT operations analytics in the NOC and the SOC. This raises the questions “Who owns all this data? Do data sovereignty rules apply?” Data is everywhere, and it is used in many ways. In many cases, the same data is used in multiple …

ITOA Types of Data

Any part of any infrastructure, application, or cloud is data. Data is used by applications, and myriad data is presented to IT organizations for their use, edification, insights, and more. But what really is this data? Can we classify the types of data in some way? Data classifications should not be just “structured” and “unstructured”; they must go deeper than …

Has AWS Peaked?

There can be no real arguing against the fact that Amazon Web Services reigns supreme with regard to public cloud. Its recently announced quarterly results show that AWS is not only gaining revenue, but actually making a “small” surplus. OK, maybe not so small: a tad over half a billion dollars, compared to a $57 million loss for the same quarter in 2015. What …