The Upgrade Cycle

As we move through the year, there are often monthly and quarterly upgrade cycles to our virtual and cloud environments. These are caused by security issues, natural upgrades to hardware, software, or even application updates. Application updates are now continuous, using continuous integration and deployment strategies, while hardware and other upgrades come more slowly. Cloud …

Container as a Service?

Every day, IT professionals live and breathe applications, yet our focus for operational tools is a single container, virtual machine, database, etc. How do these items map to the application in use? Even the monolithic-looking applications of yesterday were actually made up of services. Those services will be reborn as microservices within the applications of …

Security in Our Modern Times, Part 3: My Final Thoughts

Security in our modern times and my final thoughts. This is a continuation of my other “Security in our Modern Times” post that can be found here and here and this story has gotten to a point where you just cannot make this up. So let me give you the Reader’s Digest review of the story and then give you my opinion on the latest twist and see if you agree with my opinion.

More Secure vs. Better/Cheaper/Faster … or Both?

With the myriad cases of cyber-theft and security breaches that headline the news every day, it’s no wonder that system improvements are taking a back seat to security items within most IT organizations. While many vendors highlight new products or features as being better, cheaper, and/or faster, those items are having limited success compared to …

Getting to Green: Monitoring Your Cloud

Recently, we upgraded our cloud environment. This raises the question, “What is wrong with the environment after an upgrade?” As tools improve, we get new warnings, messages, and analytics. This often leads to a decision to ensure that after the upgrade, all monitoring, alerts, and other diagnostics show green across the board. Is this required, desirable, and …