Tech Interviews

The world finds itself in uncharted territory, gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic putting unprecedented pressure on public health and the global economy. For enterprises of all types, the challenges of trying to continue business as normal are going to be significant. I’ve been wondering how I could help, one idea is to try to share good practice and advice from those in the IT and business continuity industries on dealing with the current crisis and giving your enterprises the very best chance of successfully finding a path through these challenging times. What better way to do that than through the Tech Interviews podcast. In this special episode, we pick up on something that is a question I’ve been asked on many occasions over the last couple of weeks “with all of these remote users how do I ensure we maintain the security of our systems and data?” It’s a great question to be asking, to help me explore this topic I’ve drafted in a returning guest Amy Stokes-Waters, Amy works for Identity Experts a company

The world finds itself in uncharted territory, gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic putting unprecedented pressure on public health and the global economy. For enterprises of all types, the challenges of trying to continue business as normal are going to be significant. In this special episode, we discuss one of the biggest challenges that we have seen reported already and that is the robustness of remote connectivity, this goes beyond just those working from home, how are people who work in critical enterprises, who have remote locations and services that are needed and under increased pressure and demand at this time, ensure they remain stable and usable when it is very difficult to access those facilities and services when your IT Pro’s can no longer travel to them. This topic came up when this episode’s guest contacted me to ask if he could come on and share some of his experiences and of course I was happy to provide the platform. Roger Sands is CEO at Wyebot and he shares some of his experiences in helpin

The world finds itself in uncharted territory, gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic putting unprecedented pressure on public health and the global economy. For enterprises of all types, the challenges of trying to continue business as normal are going significant. How do we go about it? What is our business continuance strategy? What are some of the key things we should be considering and the challenges we need to overcome? I’ve been wondering over the last few days how I could help, one idea is to try to share good practice and advice from those in the IT and business continuity industries on dealing with the current crisis and giving your enterprises the very best chance of successfully finding a path through these challenging times. What better way to do that than through the Tech Interviews podcast. In this first Tech Interviews special, I speak with business continuity specialist and returning guest, Steve Lambert of Biscon, a UK based risk and business continuity consultancy to share with us their experie

The use of virtual desktops is seemingly always about to become the next big wave of technology, there is an industry running joke that this year will be the year of VDI (and completely coincidentally for this podcast, flexible and remote working technology has never been more in the news) but it has never quite happened, it’s not that VDI or centralised desktops aren’t deployed or remain a strategically relevant consideration, it just never quite seems to get the critical mass that it often promises too. Why hasn’t VDI become a widely adopted technology? On this week’s show, I’m joined by NetApp’s Laurence James (Products and Solutions Manager for Northern EMEA), to explore VDI, why it has not been more widely adopted up to this point and how both changing end-user computer demands, as well as more powerful and flexible technology, may be evolving just enough to drive wider virtual desktop adoption, is this finally the year of VDI? In this week’s episode, we discuss. • What is VDI? • How a changing world

Modernisation is a buzzword across the IT industry, but it is more than just a technology subject, it is about changing the way you view and use technology, deliver services, products, deal with customers and drive innovation across all aspects of the enterprise and of course IT plays a part in that, but how? This week’s podcast was recorded at Microsoft’s Ignite Tour in London early in 2020 where I caught up with two of my friends from the IT industry, Ruairi McBride and Jason Benedicic to discuss modernisation across applications, datacentres and businesses and how technology providers like Microsoft are helping to enable this kind of transformational change. Amongst our topics, we discuss. *What we mean by modernisation *How and what is application modernisation *How the speed of development and delivery is key *What types of companies are investing in application modernisation *Who is modernising their datacentres? *Why it is much more than just technology refresh *Why “consumer” technology is driving

It’s a big week for Veeam software with the release of Version 10 of their core product set Veeam Availability Suite. Major software releases are often about much more than just a set of new features, they are about solving evolving industry and customer challenges and helping to drive forward a company strategy (I wrote a piece recently discussing this). What then are some of the drivers behind these software releases? What thinking goes into them? Why do they sometimes take a long time to come out? And why do they focus on some of the features they do? With Veeam having a major software release, I thought it would be a great time to explore some of those questions with two friends of Tech Interviews Michael Cade and Adam Bergh of Veeam Software. We discuss. • Why V10 took 3 years? • The importance or recognising the changing landscape • 5 keys of cloud data management • V10 helping deliver an overall strategy • Delivering what customers need and putting data to work • The value of close partnerships • T

When we deploy technology into an organisation it’s important we focus on the right thing, technology shouldn’t be deployed for its own sake, it is there to serve a purpose, deliver an outcome and provide a good and useful experience for our customers and end-users. But how do we know that our technology is providing that? Understanding our user experience is not something that is easy to do, but Why does it matter? Why is a good end-user experience important? And do we really need to care? They are some of the questions we cover on this week’s podcast as we examine the idea of Digital Customer Experience monitoring with Catchpoint founder and CEO Medhi Daoudi. He formed Catchpoint 11 years ago but has spent most of his career working in technology monitoring and shares with us that experience and how you can build a strategy for ensuring that both your customers and employee experience with your technology is a positive one. We discuss; • What is digital experience monitoring? • The positive experience mo

The move to the cloud continues at a pace as more organisations look to harness cloud-like capabilities like scale, flexibility and commercial value into their business operations. These companies are now more likely to be more "traditional" types that already have a datacentre and an enterprise IT environment, finding ways to tactically use the cloud in these environments is high on the priory list for IT teams across many types of business. One interesting consideration for helping with this integration is looking at how to exploit more traditional enterprise technology to ease adoption and integration and that is the premise of this week's show. To discuss this I'm joined by Kelly Goolsby a Presales Solutions Architect at Liquidweb, working with customers to help them find the right technology to meet their changing business demands, he has 17 years in the IT industry under his belt spent predominately in the cloud and hosting space. During the show we cover; Cloud, more than just someone else's compute

It’s part two of our new year look ahead last week we looked at areas such as tech company consolidation, more acceptance of the move to cloud and maybe even the death of blockchain. In this second part, I catch up with two more respected industry figures Rick Vanover and John Nicholson. Rick and John are highly experienced technologists and provide some fascinating thoughts on what the next 12 months may bring. We cover topics from 5G networks, accepting that hybrid cloud is OK and Kubernetes moving from hype to adoption. Background on our guests. Rick Vanover @RickVanover Rick is Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam and a well-known figure across the technology community. He’s now entering his 10th year at Veeam and has spent much of his career in the data management and protection field. John Nicholson @lost_signal John is part of the technical marketing team at VMware, focussing on their HCI and VSAN technologies, also a well know tech community figure, John co-hosts the excellent Virtually Spe

A new year a new set of Tech Interviews podcasts for you to enjoy. In our first two shows of 2020 I chat with five people from across the technology industry to find out what trends, technologies and ideas they expect to see shape the next 12 months in enterprise IT. In this first episode, I speak with Chris Evans, Sarah Lean and Greg Knieriemen to see how they think 2020 is going to shape up. In our conversations it's interesting to see a number of subjects that run as common threads, data and cloud is at the core of much of the thinking as most of the contributors feel that both better understanding and a growing maturity of these technologies and what they can deliver will see them continue to dominate as topics throughout the year. Background on the guests; Chris Evans - Chris is a well known and respected industry analyst who can be found hosting the excellent Storage Unpacked podcast as well as some fascinating analysis, particularly on the enterprise storage market, on his website architecting.it. S

One of the biggest technology changes of the last 5-10 years for consumers as well as businesses has been the growth in the use of Wi-Fi. Today we almost feel it is our right to be connected to high performance, resilient and reliable wireless infrastructure so that we can remain online doing everything from updating social media to carrying out conference calls, the demand for wireless is endless. Wi-Fi also presents us with new challenges, its complex nature, amount of devices and speed of growth are making managing and delivering reliable and enterprise-class wireless increasingly difficult, how then do we look to ensure the quality of our wireless networks to meet these business mission-critical demands? That is the topic of this week's podcast as I chat with Roger Sands, CEO at Wyebot. Roger has 25 years' experience in the IT industry with the last 15 of those spent working in the Wi-Fi space, in that time he has seen a huge growth in demand and of course a massive growth in complexity and challenge of

There isn’t a day goes by that our IT security isn’t under threat, been tested or questioned, it is a continual headache for organisations of all types, from ransomware to targeted attacks the issues are constant and of the highest priority to most of us. Sadly, there is no magic button that takes away all our security woes, building IT security is difficult, multi-faceted and multi-layered. Earlier this year I read a great series of articles from a friend of mine over on Solarwinds Orangematters community site, this series looked at the importance of taking multi-layered approach to security and building a Security In-Depth Strategy, since reading those articles I thought it would make a great podcast episode. Well, this week here it is, as I’m joined by Becky Elliott an experienced IT professional who, based in the US, has worked in some of the most secure infrastructures you will see, as well some places security was a little more “loose”. Currently Becky is working as a freelance consultant and blogger

IT loves an acronym and a trend, but eventually many of them do start to evolve, become more accessible and businesses start to deploy them and publicise the benefits, then another and another before finally the technology starts to become more commonplace and increasingly companies want to investigate the potential benefits to them. Roll back 7 or 8 years, Cloud found itself in that position, but today Cloud is the norm and becoming standard practice in businesses of all types. Over the last 12 months I've started to see this increasingly with another trendy tech acronym IoT. On this week's Tech Interviews we ask why? And try to discover what is driving the uptake in IoT projects. To help me to do this I'm joined by Mark Carlton, Solutions Architect for IoT and Edge at Arrow ECS, he joins me to share his experiences of the last 18 months, and how he's seen the IoT space evolve. On this week's show we discuss; What is IoT The importance of understanding business value The importance of connectivity Sens

Whenever I speak with those tasked with deploying enterprise technology one of the most common challenges I find they have is finding a way to compare what they are doing with others in similar roles. How do you best find and deploy new technology? How do you encourage open dialogue in your business to identify needs and opportunities? How do you learn more about what technology is available? And how do you ensure you are not seen as the IT department who always says no? These are all real challenges and finding out how others deal with them is not easy, especially when you are already very busy delivering the IT you have. In this week's podcast, recorded at the recent NetApp INSIGHT event in Las Vegas, I wanted to explore this topic with people who actually deliver IT for a living. Donny Lang, Sr. Systems Administrator at GDC, Christopher Olsen, Solutions Architect at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Matthew Underhill from Alfred H. Knight. All three had differing challenges, but all took very similar a

Increasingly automation is becoming a way of life in IT, tools that take repetitive or complex tasks and simplify them by automating much of the work they require are increasingly popular. They also have real value for many organisations, it frees up resources, improves the time of delivery and reduces risk of errors that often come when humans deliver repetitive tasks or ones they have to deliver quickly or under pressure. One such tool is Veeam Availability Orchestrator (VAO) which provides the ability to automate the testing, documentation and invocation of a business recovery plan. Last week at NetApp INSIGHT in Las Vegas, Veeam announced a new update to this product, version 3.0. As someone who has always been a fan of this tool and ones like it for managing such a complex process as DR, I thought it would make a good podcast, so I caught with Alec King a Vice President of Product Management at Veeam, to discuss the new release and also its first attempt to enhance a 3rd parties DR capability by integr

A little while back I wrote a blog post inspired by a presentation by a friend of mine, Michael Cade, at Cloud Field Day 5 back in April ,where he talked about how Veeam were developing their workload and data portability strategy. This really struck a chord with me as it closely mirrored a lot of the conversations I was having, across businesses of all types, as they looked to develop more data-centric strategies, that focussed on ensuring that their data was where they needed it when. It appealed so much that I’ve wanted to get it into a podcast episode. This week myself and Michael finally managed to get our diaries together to do just that. For those of you who’ve not heard Michael on the show before, he’s a Global Technologist at Veeam and a well-known face in the IT community and always a great Tech Interviews guest. On this week’s show we cover; • The portability why • Why cost isn’t the only driver of public cloud • Portability and a data-centric strategy • Portability use cases • Putting our “back

When it comes to keeping up with the latest IT industry trends, the good, the bad, the things to keep an eye on, how do we even begin to get started when the industry is so large and diverse? There are, however, lots of places we can go to find different opinions and views, vendor events, blogs, briefings or even Podcasts. One other avenue open to us are analysts. Recently major analyst firm, Gartner, published one of their Magic Quadrant reports, this one focussed on the storage industry. As always these reports reflect really well on some and not always so well for others. I was discussing this recently with a friend of mine from storage vendor NetApp, it was a really interesting chat and I thought it would make a great podcast. So, this week, I'm joined by Greg Knieriemen, Chief Technologist at NetApp as we replay our discussion for the benefit of the Tech Interviews audience. *What analysts do *Types of analysts and their differing value *Changing view of analysts from skepticism to appreciation *The

There is no question that our IT systems are critical to the operation of the modern enterprise, its ability to meet ever-changing demands and do this quickly means our IT stack continues to grow and evolve into an ever larger and more complex beast, which presents a constant challenge to Enterprise IT teams to ensure our systems continue to perform as needed, remain secure and available to deliver the outcomes our enterprises need. When we used to have half a dozen servers, a small network and some storage, monitoring and managing these systems was relatively easy, we could have the management platform of our choice, providing our IT team with alerts and data and using their skills and experience they could quickly turn this into useful and actionable information. However, today, when we have dozens of virtual machines, systems, complex networks that are not only in our datacentre but in multiple locations including of course the public cloud. The environments no longer generate a handful of metrics, they

Teams, Zoom, Slack, Webex, the list of platforms that are now commonplace in organisations and changing the way we work together and collaborate continue to grow. These applications are not only providing a conference platform for hosting meetings but are also replacing some of our traditional communications methods such as voice, video and increasingly becoming the standard message exchange application, slowly starting to replace email as a day to day tool. As we adopt these tools, how many of us have considered the risk these platforms pose to the security of our data? How do we track the voice and video communications that these platforms provide to ensure that we are not leaking sensitive data? Do we understand how the platform is been used, are there patterns of usage that should concern us? These are the questions we cover on this week's podcast as I'm joined by Devin Redmond, Co-Founder and CEO of Theta Lake. Devin has a long history in data compliance, governance and security and now with Theta Lake

The world of infrastructure is changing rapidly, the way we use and access data is driving significant change in the way we design data infrastructure to deliver at scale, with flexibility, openness and portability. One such shift is the increasing adoption of open database technology, back in episode 88 I spoke with Patrick Callaghan of Cassandra on this topic. it was a popular episode and the use of such databases is continuing to grow. With that in mind, I wanted to revisit the topic and take another look at what open source databases mean, what their place in the enterprise is and how to take those first steps to explore the value of open source database in your business. To help me investigate this topic, I caught up with Peter Zaitsev founder and CEO of Percona, a company who specialises in open source databases. I chatted with Peter a couple of weeks ahead of their Percona Live event in Amsterdam, a 3 day event focussed on the open source database market and how to get the best from it. In the sh