Field Notes: Architectural Principles and Design Notes

This Field Notes series chronicles my experiences with a major transformation project I’ve been involved in for the past eighteen months. I have worked on almost every aspect of this project, from application rationalization to portfolio management to reconstructing business processes and aligning and synchronizing IT with the business.

Everybody Has to Print—Or Do They?

It feels like we have been promised the paperless office forever. When I first entered the IT industry in the mid 1990s, it was a mantra, and it is still a mantra today. The fact is, we still need to print. We may have moved away from managers’ administrative assistants printing emails for them to read, …

Where to Persist Your Containers

When we were first introduced to Docker containers, we were told that they should be ephemeral and stateless. It turns out that there are lot of great uses for Docker containers that are either stateful or long-lived. The stateful part is leading to a bunch of startups that have storage products to deliver persistent storage to these …

Time to Go All In With the Cloud: Vembu to the Rescue

In this, the seventh article in our series investigating the benefits of Vembu BDR for virtualized environments, we carry on examining Vembu’s migration capabilities. We all know that backing up your data is only one part of the equation. The ability to recover is the other, and arguably more important, side. This is where Vembu …

Life During and After DDoS

DDoS happens. It happens quite a bit. It will continue to happen. Information on how to prevent DDoS is readily available, but information on how to survive is missing. DDoS is an outage. Do you have a business continuity plan that covers this sort of outage? Does your business close for the day, or do you keep running in …