Posts from the Field: Application Portfolio Rationalization

I recently spent four months mired knee-deep in a large enterprise transformation project, analyzing and working directly with the customer on a bloated application portfolio rationalization. This isn’t easy, especially with a very large, diverse enterprise. Companies of this type have multiple business areas, some of which in turn have multiple business units, each with its own complexities and quirks. These areas and units …

The State of DevOps in 2016

Puppet recently published its annual State of DevOps report. Previously, its 2014 report revealed that DevOps was becoming widely accepted in the enterprise. The 2015 report explained that as enterprises become more mature with DevOps, they become higher performing and release software more frequently with better quality. This year’s report has expanded the research to include …

Why Do You Need an SD-WAN?

The vast majority of companies—any companies that have multiple sites or remote access workers—need to consider the question “Why do I need an SD-WAN?” This is no longer just the purview of the large enterprise. First, a definition is in order.  SDxCentral defines the SD-WAN as follows: The software-defined wide area network (SD–WAN) is a specific application of …

Cloud Security Seems to Be Bolt-Ons

There are two sides to cloud security: the tenant and the provider. At the moment, it appears from both perspectives that cloud computing is using bolt-ons to create a sense of security. This is more perception than reality. Perception is what is preventing cloud adoption. What does this perception mean? Are clouds really using bolt-on …

Will Containers Bring about a Smaller Shoe Size?

Will containers change the shoe size of the physical servers in the datacenter? When having a conversation with some of my peers about containers in general, the discussion started to move in a direction of what containers can bring to the environment and as such what steps or changes would be needed to be implemented to make the environment to be able to bring about the greatest success when offering containers as an option to the customers. To truly understand the change in thinking about the physical server’s footprint size I first need to make sure that we have a basic understanding of what the difference is between virtualization as a general term and container virtualization.