Without a doubt the advantages of migration to cloud computing and operational adoption have been a foundational game-changer for large organizations. However, cloud computing is fast becoming a change agent for Mid-Tier Enterprises (MTEs) as well.
Engineering
We understand maintaining delivery agility when your workforce is running remote Agile is critical to your business success.
Unfortunately, circumstances both within and outside of our control often create the need for remote working arrangements. While operating Agile can be a wonderful experience, when quickly altered from physical co-location to remote Agile, there are some challenges that can impede team progress, individual performance, and the overall sense of belonging to a community.
There are hundreds of monitoring products in the marketplace that cover monitoring from enterprise scale to small and medium businesses. How can a monitoring system help your team? It is imperative that an IT team know the state of the environment and quickly respond to issues.
Most IT teams have a monitoring system, or several monitoring systems. These systems monitor applications, services, operating systems, network devices, and technology infrastructure.
Most IT environments have a requirement to keep systems up to date on vendor patches. Typically, in on-premise environments there are dedicated systems that scan and update patching targets. The patching targets in this case are the operating systems of servers or virtual machines, including Windows servers and many variants of Linux. Examples of this kind of software include Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Red Hat Satellite, IBM BigFix, or Ivanti. This blog specifically references operating system patching.
The term “technical debt” originated from Ward Cunningham, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. He once said that some problems with code are like financial debt. Technical debt is incurred by completing work in a swift way with some known and/or unknown gaps, which is like a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt results in interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that technology professionals must do in future work because of design choices or shortcuts. We can continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by correcting or polishing the hasty work results into more refined results. Technical debt is usually unintentional, but similar to accrued interest, the impact often increases over time.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), microservices, and cloud best practices can result in the creation of loosely coupled complex systems with many potential points-of-failure. At Impact Makers, we observe many customers dealing with service outages, which are difficult to diagnose and more importantly, difficult to recover from quickly. Service outages have significant financial impact; therefore, it is incumbent upon software architects and engineers to find ways to prove the systems we build and deploy make it easy to detect and recover from failures.
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is the practice of defining templates that can be used to provision technology infrastructure to support software and applications. Traditionally, physical hardware configuration of network switches/routers, servers, network-attached storage, etc. has been a time-consuming and difficult task that not only was prone to human error—but was also not easily repeatable. Even after the advent of virtualization and the automated software configuration revolution, technology infrastructure was still built on a backbone of (usually) manually-managed hypervisors overseen by IT operations staff.
Ever heard the saying, “The Cloud is just someone else’s computer”? This is one of the many arguments I encountered as I became an early adopter in 2010. While it is technically true, it misses the point: the inherent flexibility and benefits of the “Cloud” maximize the chances of differentiating your company from its competitors, especially in financial services.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) published a case study on Impact Makers’ project with MedStar Health. Impact Makers used AWS to support a new digital presence for MedStar. The collaboration with AWS provides a state-of-the-art platform that is highly secure, scalable and cost-effective.
