How to thrive in a cloud-native culture – outside the cloud

It is no contradiction to say that being ‘cloud-native’ has not much to do with cloud computing. There is an idea that cloud is a place, a suite of technologies or services that run somewhere in data centres. But the cloud is not a place; it is a way of working. A culture. 

But what does culture really mean in the context of cloud? American sociologist Ron Westrum defined organisational culture as “the organisation’s pattern of response to the problems and...

27 May 2021 | Applications

Choosing the right IT and cloud services provider post-Covid: A guide

Few, if any, industries escaped the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even in the technology sector, where change is a normal part of business, many professional services and technology consulting firms struggled to cope with the disruption.

That seems almost paradoxical given that organisations across just about every market sector had to embrace work-from-home operations or other business changes and implement the technology resources — including cloud services — to support...

19 May 2021 | Best Practice

Breaking the top five myths around chaos engineering

If the only exposure you’ve had to chaos engineering is Chaos Monkey and some flashy blog headlines, it’s easy to paint the whole endeavour as reckless. After all, testing in production is an internet meme, and arguing for it makes for an attractive story. It turns out, however, to be a double-edged sword since a lot of people still associate chaos engineering with extra risk - yet  the premise of the practice is, in fact, all about understanding and mitigating risk.

Myth #1:...

28 April 2021 | Architecture

Extract: Cloud Native Transformation: Practical Patterns for Innovation: Understanding the principles

Editor's note: This is an exclusive extract from Cloud Native Transformation: Practical Patterns for Innovation, by Jamie Dobson, Pini Reznik and Michelle Gienow, published by O'Reilly Media. The book is currently available for free for a limited period of time. You can find out more here.

Cloud native is a lot to wrap your head around: it’s an architecture, a tech stack, an approach to software development and delivery, and a complete paradigm shift all rolled into one!...

27 April 2021 | Architecture

Five key best practices for AWS cost optimisation – analysed

Keeping cloud costs in check is a struggle. Companies either lose control of their budgets and spend even 23% more than planned or end up overprovisioning their workloads. 

Optimising cloud costs is about striking a healthy balance between price and performance. You want your applications to have enough resources, but at the same time avoid cloud waste. 

Here are five tips to get you started on your AWS cost optimisation journey.

#1: Allocate costs for...

16 April 2021 | AWS

How cloud adoption has become essential to digital transformation

Cloud adoption is now a key framework for the technology that upholds our everyday life, and has evolved into an essential feature for all businesses.

Within the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw a clear focus on crisis management – with organisations desperate to build on their cloud usage and adopt new tech to ensure business continuity. Now, cloud technology is vital to a company’s digital transformation. With the situation in our world continuing for the...

12 April 2021 | Adoption

Google Cloud: Three tech and cloud trends which are fuelling business recovery in 2021

Businesses are at a pivotal moment in time. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that global GDP shrank by 4.4% in 2020, and contraction in the most advanced economies is estimated to be 5.8%. Today, however, vaccine availability and distribution brings us the brightest glimmer of hope yet that slowing the devastation of the virus may be a reality. More effectively addressing the health crisis also means economic recovery is becoming a stronger possibility - if businesses can...

11 March 2021 | Applications

International Women’s Day 2021: On disruption, democratisation, and doing more

The theme of International Women's Day 2021, March 8, is 'choose to challenge.' "A challenged world is an alert world and from challenge comes change," in the words of the IWD website. "So let's all choose to challenge."

For the adtech industry, the 'choose to challenge' theme was the keynote of a recent excoriating article (warning: NSFW themes) from Amy Kean, author and culture editor at Shots Studios. Kean pointed out that, in spite of the 'good guys' in the industry -...

8 March 2021 | Adoption

Cloud conundrums and legacy systems: Should they stay or should they go?

Survey after survey has shown that IT and business leaders have had to drastically rethink priorities, strategies and spending in the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The survey that our company conducted in October has showed that technology spending hasn’t taken a terrible hit: in fact, 60% of IT leaders report that they have either significantly or moderately increased their IT budgets in the last six months. Other research from 2020 has mirrored those findings.

Yet...

10 December 2020 | Architecture

How SaaS companies can build on their popularity with a good digital marketing strategy

With the Covid-19 pandemic forcing firms to allow more home and remote working, SaaS offerings are seeing large subscription increases. Recent figures reported by market research company Technavio suggests the global SaaS market could grow to over $60 billion in 2023.

So what happens when a working vaccine becomes available - which according to recent media reports is on the horizon - and people can resume their normal working routine at the office? How can SaaS firms ‘seize the...

17 November 2020 | Best Practice