Blogs

As many of you know, I recently left AWS. We are just a few days away from AWS re:invent getting started. The flood of announcements that have been coming out has been fast and furious this week. Honestly, I look forward to the announcements from the week before and the week after re:invent. This might surprise you, but my feeling is that the true innovation coming out of AWS is from some of the smaller services that don’t get the airtime of an Amazon S3, EC2, or EBS.

You might be asking, so what is going to be announced that gets you excited? Unfortunately, I cannot go into any of that till after next week or they will kill me (or at least sue me). But here are a few things, call them trends, that were talked about in the last two weeks that are interesting to me. You also might be very surprised that some of these “features” did not exist before. Many IT organizations can be surprised by assuming these features exist already. AWS definitely needs to “raise the bar” when it comes to explaining a few of these services and what's on the truck.

I enjoy how this industry keeps pulling us in directions that challenge the norm and highlight the value of innovation. It has quickly become evident that connecting people over video is the low bar in creating immersive experiences for employees and customers. Remember back two years ago that not everyone was very comfortable on video and would frequently not even turn their cameras on. Fast forward to today and what I saw Slack highlight at Frontiers and you will see that video is one small piece of the way people interact, managers manage, and companies connect with customers. I appreciated how Slack used the below simple message at Slack Frontiers to provide inspiration across three very important constituents: teams, partners, AND customers.

Did you know: Almost 90% of organizations leverage multiple cloud service providers?

Having just joined ESG from Amazon Web Services, this is not surprising to me. Did it surprise you? It shouldn’t be a surprise at all. Talking with 1000s of enterprises of all different sizes, different verticals, and different application stacks over the past, I have heard many legitimate reasons for using more than one cloud service provider (CSP). But I am getting ahead of myself, let me introduce myself.

I’ve always made it a priority to choose roles where I can make the biggest impact, and where I can learn and grow. It hasn’t been a clear path (as Sheryl Sandberg would say, it’s not a ladder, it’s a jungle gym), but I can confidently say it’s led me to fulfilling roles.

In this blog post, I’ll share a bit about my background, and then describe why I’m thrilled to join ESG to cover cloud-native and application security – a rapidly evolving and dynamic space.

Let's face it, while businesses recognize that they should be managing devices, apps, and data better than they are currently doing, there are still MANY midmarket businesses that have not put controls and process in place. I highly suspect that good intentions exist in these companies, but lack of skills, complex solutions, balancing risk and time are all factoring into where device management lands on their priority list. Apple is out to help change this.

Check out the latest episode of The Bigger Truth. 

This week, I share my thoughts on the following enterprise technology news stories:

Researcher cracks 70% of neighborhood Wi-Fi passwords: https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com...

When you buy something online, a toaster for instance, do you simply find one in your price range and hit “order?” Or do you first look for third-party articles about which toasters are on the market (top rated, or those that include a specific feature you want)? You may also check to see which toasters have the highest customer ratings and read the reviews. From something as simple as a toaster, all the way up to a data center full of hyperconverged infrastructure, customers put trust in the opinions of those who don’t have stakes in the game. Independent third parties deliver the facts about product features and differentiation (why the customer should consider the product), and customer reviews provide raw, personal, and honest feedback about the product. Both are invaluable to customers that are trying to choose between several products in a saturated market.

You know those people who seem to have more than 24 hours in a day? They simultaneously balance work, hobbies, family, friends, and health (somehow). These “super humans” do it all. And although those aspects of life are separate entities, they still affect one another and must be managed concurrently. A desire to continuously “do more” creates challenges in our lives – it adds complexity and requires us to find new ways to become more efficient. Similarly, IT teams are tasked with doing more with the limited resources and budget they are provided - all in a world in which IT environments are becoming more and more complex. Organizations strive to increase operational efficiency and speed while minimizing costs and downtime; but this is no easy feat.

Last week I had the pleasure of (virtually) joining Commvault Connections 2021, along with colleagues Vinny Choinski and Kevin Rhone. In this video, we collectively share our insight on what we all agree was a very complete—but also concise—event.