It seems like every article you read about technology today includes a service delivered in an ‘-As-A-Service’ approach. We have an abundance of Software-As-A-Service (SaaS), Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS), Communications-As-A-Service (CaaS), Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS) and many other X-aaS systems/platforms. In fact, XaaS is being used to denote the ‘Everything-As-A-Service’ mentality. The ‘Everything-As-A-Service’ approach is one that makes a […]
What is the Cloud…Really?
March 11, 2015 by Leave a Comment
I read a lot of blogs and articles talking about the cloud. Many of these articles try to go really deep into the technology stack found within the cloud while others try to keep the discussions at a very high level. While reading some of these articles, I realized that there is rarely a basic […]
A Primary Goal of an Agile Data Center – Portability
March 10, 2015 by Leave a Comment
If you ask one hundred people (or companies) what it means to have an agile data center, you’ll most likely get a large number of diverse answers. While you’ll most likely hear different answers from different people, I think many of those answers would fall into line with what I wrote in “The Right Services […]
Disaster Recovery and the Agile Data Center
March 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment
If there was one time that a data center and an IT group absolutely need to be agile, it would be the time immediately after a disaster strikes. Disaster recovery planning is a challenge for every organization. The challenge doesn’t come from understanding the ‘what’ of disaster recovery; everyone knows what should be done to […]
The Data Center of Tomorrow
March 3, 2015 by 1 Comment
The data center of tomorrow will look much differently than the data center of today. That particular sentence should not be that surprising to anyone who’s been in an organization that has internal data centers. Most organizations have been working on data center transformation projects over the last few years. With these transformation projects, companies […]
The IT Group as Cost Center – Or Innovation Center?
February 23, 2015 by 1 Comment
Mark Thiele published a post recently titled “Why we Value IT Incorrectly – Innovation vs Cost Center.” You should go read it. If you don’t follow Mark’s writing on his blog or twitter, you should…he has some great insights into IT , IT leadership, the data center and many other aspects of the IT group.. […]
Use Cases for the Cloud
February 18, 2015 by 4 Comments
If you’ve spent any time within IT over the last few years, you’ve probably heard the term ‘cloud’ more than you really wanted to. The cloud has become something of a buzzword over the years. Buzzwords are created when a term is overused, and the cloud has been overused quite a bit in many organizations. […]
Don’t Ask if you Can’t Act
February 4, 2015 by Leave a Comment
In a recent Harvard Business Review article titled “Don’t Ask for New Ideas If You’re Not Ready to Act on Them”, Ron Ashkenas provides an example of a company wanting to do the ‘right’ thing but not having the processes or systems in place to pull it off. The example provided by Ashkenas is one […]
An Agile Business Needs an Agile IT Group
February 2, 2015 by 3 Comments
If you ask any business leader whether they’d prefer that their organization be thought of as ‘slow moving’ or ‘agile’, most would respond with ‘agile’ as their preference. Those that don’t respond in the affirmative toward agility are most likely running a dying business or are just out of sync with their industry and their […]
The Right Services in the Right Way
January 30, 2015 by 3 Comments
I’ve written a bit about the agile data center lately. I’ve previously defined the agile data center as something that “allows organizations to efficiently and effectively add, remove and change services at the speed of the business, not the speed of technology.” I still stand by that definition but I wanted to expand on it […]
Eric D. Brown, D.Sc. is a