Heavy Strategy

Whats the deal with Quiet Quitting ? Johna & Greg get into a heated debate about the nature of work. Johna wants people to ‘do your job’, Greg wants ‘pay me more to do more’. How much can a companies expect from their employees as hustle culture is being rejected by more people.

Should LEO space networks be part of your network ? Are there common questions about using and designing for them ? What should be expecting from your telco ?

Graphiant Stateless Cloud WAN addresses the limitations of SDWAN - better scalability, more flexibility and service guarantees. Their stateless network core is multi-tenant, predictable and scalable. Customers get the benefit of SDWAN with less of the problems. We unpack the details in this episiode with Khalid Raza, Founder and CEO of Graphiant and ask questions to understand how it would fit your strategy.

Is there a role for career mentors and coaches in modern IT ? We discuss the topic and establish some points. IT Careers are high value and high effort but unlike other professions (such as law or medicine) there are no gatekeepers to working. This leads to training and ‘life coaches’ that are unregulated and often unprofessional.

We discuss how Kolide tools engage the user to improve end-point security. Monitoring devices and then contacting the user to gather more information and provide contextual questions is a novel approach.

Both sides of the low code/no code debate. We outline two sides of the debate, discuss four topics in favour of low code and then cover four negatives. Avoidance of toil coding, avoid skill shortage and viable testing are good things. Lockin, shadow IT and ownership are problematic. Its a solid debate on the topic.

The pro and con's of having preferred supplier for IT technology ? You can save time and effort, simplify purchasing and move quicker but are you getting the best solution and support. We discuss different perspectives on going down the path and point out the subscription pricing moves towards vendor lockin.

We discuss different aspects of selecting technology to buy. Topics include business case, planning, selection, evaluation and review - as you might expect - but we find that there isn't one right answer.

Cold takes on the Broadcom/VMware acquisition. We consider Broadcom's stated goal to increase VMW profit margin from 35% to 65% and what this will mean to customer experience.

What are the right questions for developing and maintaining a technology strategy for your company ?

Does planning for cybersecurity failure include the concept of 'crime scene' ? Can you provide evidence to an external investigation sufficient to get justice or simply prove to insurance investigator that you met the policy requirements ? Should you be lobbying governments ? How does this drive your cyber spending - defense, microsegmentation, detection or evidence collection ?

Shadow IT does not always lead to bad outcom

What about changing the work we do ? Perhaps with orchestration / automation and even AI ? So many questions, not many answers.

Contracts are caveat emptor but the client often knows little about the what they are buying and why.

We start debating the nature of technical debt. What is it, how is it created before moving into solutions. Then we take an unexpected turn into operational debt, why its more important and how software defined has delivered solutions here. Also, we dunk on digital transformation.

Headlines about ‘great resignation’ tend to ignore that people are moving jobs not quitting work. We believe many people are making choices about what work they want in their lives. We discuss four reasons: 1) toxic workplaces 2) lifestyle and remote work 3) downstepping and 4) early retirement. We note that recruiters are toxic arms... Read more »

What makes a technology strategy ? Where do you start ? Are you business or solution centric ? Being a leader means risk and funding, being a follower is simpler and faster. What questions should you be asking when establishing an IT strategy ? Heavy Strategy is where the questions are more important than the... Read more »

Johna believes that API management is part of IT operations. Greg doesn't understand the question and so we set off in search of answers.

The internet has become part of society now and this means that governments will want to put controls on it. Are our standards bodies fit for purpose ?

Discussing what might drives team structure in Enterprise IT.

With so much money allocated to marketing teams, why do customers find it disagreeable and unpleasant to be a victim of their activities ?

Do you need new hardware to cloud enable your infrastructure ? Should you strategise products on new hardware/greenfield basis or enable your existing brownfield infrastructure ? In this episode we discuss value of enabling existing infrastructure Beware of the vendor goldfield that Greenfield represents Whether supply chain impacts your decisions ? The value of federated... Read more »

SaaS is popular as a 'not my problem' solution and easy-on-pocket entrè. So lets examine adversarial question "What does the customer lose?". Johna and Greg discuss many issues on both in the search for critical analysis on SaaS and the longer term impacts.

A rarely covered topic in technology is professional development. Other careers have extensive programs to ensure practitioners develop and maintain a wide range of skills but this principle is rare in IT.

We discuss what we know so far about supply chain disruption, what impacts to your projects. We also consider resellers/distributors survival and what plans can companies make.

When it comes to allocating budget for cybersecurity there are many approaches to breaking it down into line items. We discuss various ideas and possibilities that might offer some insight for your own situation.

How do you measure IT Security ? Specifically, how do you decide to allocate budget and justify the underlying reasoning. Most companies allocate a percentage of IT Budget, but Johna argues differently.

What five issues would be top of mind for IT architects ? Security, Backup.Recovery, Cloud, Skills Development and Distributed/Hybrid Work. Listen in on why and how these issues are our choices. If you have feedback or want us to followup then head over to our Follow Up page and send us your anonymous (or not) feedback.

Returning to the office is a key issue as companies learn that being "in person" is the new remote working

Some call it subscription but we call it renting your hyper-converged solution. Whats the business and technology strategy of consumption based HCI ?

The question: Is open source is viable for Enterprise IT ? The discussion resulted in describing the mechanics of onboarding new products as infection repsonse. Did the metaphor work ?

Kubernetes is operational not transformational.

Are DPU's something that you want ? What use cases can be addressed ? What makes them more than a SmartNIC ? How do you consume DPU's in your infrastructure ?

A topic that’s been popular from my blog is Microsoft is VMware’s biggest threat. The core of the conversation around it seems be about the stack. Does it make sense to outsource private and public cloud engineering to a provider such as Microsoft. An adjacent conversation is does VMware matter when you zoom out of... Read more »

Greg brings the topic of Hype in 5G Marketing and attempts to explain why some hype is legit but humans should care less. Keith puts the brakes on and provides context, breakdown and reality.