Tech Interviews

Buzzwords are a constant in IT, Cloud, HCI, Analytics, GDPR are often bandied about and serious discussions are had, however not everyone is sure what some of these buzzwords mean, what the technology consists of and importantly what positive impact does it have on an organisation? Another contender to the buzzword Olympics is IoT or “The Internet of Things” what does that mean? What is a thing? And do I want things? When I heard that a friend of the podcast had taken on a new role as an IoT Solutions Architect It seemed like a great opportunity to get some IoT education for not only me, but also the Tech Interviews audience. So, on this week’s show I’m joined by Mark Carlton, now an IoT Solutions Architect at Arrow ECS and asked him to share what he’s discovered in his time in the role, how he sees IoT as a technology and how implementing it can deliver value to a business. We start off by trying to define what we mean by IoT and how like many a new IT trend, it isn’t really that new with businesses ha

GDPR has been a constant business conversation over the last 18 months or so, it's discussed in the press, on the news and social media, as well as a handful of episodes of this podcast. However, much of the conversation has focussed on what you should be considering and doing to take on the GDPR challenge, while very little has come from those who have already made great strides on their compliance journey. With that in mind, a few weeks ago I read a fascinating series of blogs from software company Veeam, this series discussed the 5 principles they followed to build their compliance program. As many of us are currently on our own compliance journey, I thought the opportunity to chat with someone who is already well down this path would be of real interest, so in this week's podcast I'm joined by Mike Resseler, Mike is a Director of Product Management but is also a key member of Veeam's global compliance team and has played a significant part in the way they have dealt with the challenges posed by GDPR. I

Cyber Security, be it how we secure our perimeter, infrastructure, mobile devices or data, is a complex and ever-changing challenge. In the face of this complexity where do we start when it comes to building our organisations cyber security standards. Well perhaps the answer may lie in standardised frameworks and accreditation's. If you think about it, one of the biggest challenges we have when it comes to security is knowing where to start, so having a standard to work towards makes perfect sense. That is the subject of this weeks show with my guest and colleague Jason Fitzgerald, as we discuss the value of a UK based accreditation, Cyber Essentials. Jason spends much of his time working with organisations to help them address their IT security concerns and one of the tools he uses extensively is a framework and accreditation produced by the National Cyber Security Centre here in the UK, Cyber Essentials. During this episode we discuss why such a framework is valuable and can help a business improve its

At the start of 2018 the technology industry was hit by two new threats unlike anything it had seen before. Spectre and Meltdown used vulnerabilities not in operating system code or poorly written applications, but ones at a much lower level than that. This vulnerability was not only something of concern to today’s technology providers, but also to those looking at architecting the way technology will work in the future. As we try to push technology further and have it deal with more data, more quickly than ever before. The technology industry is having to look at ways of keeping up and have our tech work in different ways beyond the limits of our current ways of working. One of these developments is storage class memory, or persistent memory, were our data can be housed and accessed at speeds many times greater than they are today. However, this move brings new vulnerabilities in the way we operate, vulnerabilities like those exposed by Spectre and Meltdown and how did they look to exploit operational lev

Recently I wrote a blog post in which I touched on the importance of availability, especially In a world were our reliance on technology is ever increasing, from the way we operate our business, to the way we live our lives and how digitally focussed businesses can no longer tolerate downtime, planned or unplanned, in the way they could even 5 years ago. The crux of that article talked about how crucial availability is in our modern platforms. So how do we maintain availability and mitigate against the evils of downtime? That’s simple, we build recovery and continuity plans to ensure that our system remain on, regardless of the events that go on around it, from planned maintenance to the very much unplanned disaster. But there’s the problem, these things aren’t simple are they? With that In mind the recent product announcement from Veeam of their new Availability Orchestrator solution, caught my attention and is the topic of this weeks podcast, as serial guest Michael Cade, Global Technologist, at Veeam,

As our IT systems become ever more complex, with more data, devices and ways of working, the demands on our systems and ensuring they are always operating efficiently grow. This in turn presents us and our IT teams with a whole new range of management challenges. Systems management has always been a challenge for organisations, how do we keep on top of an ever-increasing amount of systems ? how do we ensure they remain secure and patched ? and how do we cope with our users and their multitude of devices and ensure we can effectively look after them?. Like most of our technology, systems management is changing, but how? And what should we expect from future management solutions? That's the subject of this weeks podcast, as I'm joined by returning guest Dave Sobel. Dave is Senior Director of Community at SolarWinds MSP. As part of this role, Dave is also charged with looking at the future of systems management and what these platforms need to include in them to continue to be relevant and useful. Dave prov

If there is one thing that we can say is a certainty in the technology industry it is the constant state of change, how technology works, how we want to use it, where we want to use it and what we expect from it is constantly changing and in reality is ever more demanding. One of the things I like to do in my role is spend time looking at technology predictions and listen to ideas from those in the industry tasked with defining the strategic direction of their businesses, not to judge whether they are right or wrong (predicting things in this industry is so very difficult) but to pick out trends and areas that are of interest to the work I do and then at least be aware of it and keep a watching brief on how it develops. Keeping a watching brief gave me the idea for this week’s podcast as I catch up with two guests who produce an annual technology predictions blog and back that up with episodes on their own successful podcast where they look in more detail at those predictions. David Fearne and Richard Holm

One of the favourite parts of my role over the last few years has been my involvement in tech community, whether that's been working with advocacy groups like the NetApp A-Team, with local user groups like TechUG, presenting at a range of different community events or just answering questions in technical communities, all of these investments (and they are investments) have paid back, they've introduced me to great people, given me access to resources and expertise I would never have found normally and opened up great opportunities for travel and too develop some great friendships. One of the challenges with tech community is however its size and if you are new to it or even a part of it, it can be overwhelming and hard to know where to start? How do you find the resources you need, find out which events you can attend or find out who the leaders are that you can engage with ? Last year I was invited to get involved in a project called "Level Up", a project started by this week's guest on the podcast Yadin

Wanting to get the very best from your data and "extracting value" from it seems to be a constant conversation with technology and business leaders in pretty much any organisation, but what does getting value from it mean and how do we go about it? A couple of weeks ago I read a very interesting article from this weeks guest where he introduced the concept of Data Amplification Ratio, the basic premise of this article was that one of the key ways to get more from your data is to ensure that the datasets you have can be presented to multiple different systems and services all of which can add their own particular value and extract their own unique information from the data presented to them. I thought this article presented a really good insight in to the practicalities of getting the most from our data and wanted to get the author to share that insight for the Tech Interviews listeners. That's exactly what we do as I'm joined this week by Matt Watts, Director Technology and Strategy at data management comp

As organisations we can see the benefit of cloud and almost all organisations are taking advantage of it, be it a software service such as Office365 or backup and DR, the efficiency and simplicity of deployment of these kinds of services make them an attractive option. However, what we are not seeing, in general, is organisations moving 100% to a cloud-based IT infrastructure, this can be for many reasons, suitability, complexity and cost, for example. But our desire to take advantage of cloud services is not going to diminish, especially as we look at how to get the best from our data with analytics, business intelligence and machine learning , often the only practical way to access these services is via cloud. Recently I watched a video called “What it takes to get your data hybrid cloud ready” in which John Woodall, VP Engineering at Integrated Archive Systems, provided insights on how to prepare your data and infrastructure to operate effectively in a hybrid world. John covered some great informatio

One of my favourite phrases is that "those who make the most of their data, will be the success stories of the future" and I think that is echoed by our obsession with data as a new all-powerful resource for us to mine and exploit. But, it's not quite that straightforward is it? There is no getting away from the importance of security and privacy when it comes to our data. Be that keeping it from unwarranted access, data leakage or maintaining compliance with ever increasing regulatory requirements, maintaining our data in a secure environment is a primary concern. That is the focus of this weeks show, as I'm joined by Val Bercovici, a well-respected technology leader, who is today working on a new project with his start-up company Pencildata, a company who's mission it is to try to address this very challenge. In a fascinating chat with Val, we explore the growing tension between getting value from data while maintaining its security. We examine some of the interesting problems that come with A.I. systems

There is no doubt for many 2018 will be the year of data privacy, driven, in no small part, by the impending EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In my opinion GDPR has many positives elements to it, it's the opportunity for businesses to look at how they manage, secure and retain the privacy of data across their organisations and for too many of us, this is something that's long overdue. GDPR (and other regulations) however are not just a good idea, they are something that we need to comply with and May 25th 2018 is the date when GDPR becomes enforceable. With that in mind, what are some of the changes that we should expect? what things are no longer going to acceptable practice? and what are the things really that we should have in place by that date? This week we look at exactly that topic as I'm joined by data privacy expert and attorney Sheila FitzPatrick, founder of FitzPatrick and Associates and a globally recognised data privacy expert with over 35 years' experience in the data privacy fi

It’s the kind of thing us podcasters like to do this time of year, we like to take a bit of a retrospective view of the previous year as well as a look forward to the new, so not wanting to miss a trick on the Tech Interviews podcast, that’s exactly what we do in this episode. To help me to look forward and look back at the tech industry I’m joined by Analyst Chris Evans. We take a look at a whole range of topics, we discuss how a move to a more software defined future has not stopped the re-emergence of the importance of hardware. We also explore some thoughts around the development of hybrid cloud as more businesses look at how the data they hold on the edge of the cloud can take advantage of cloud compute that is within it. We also ask why some of the tech we expected to see progress in 2017, didn't. Of course we also look forward and ask whether 2018 will be the year for NVMe? How we expect to see the continued growth of scale out file storage and of course no look at 2018 would be complete without a

As we become more data-driven in our organisations and ever more used to the way big public cloud providers deliver our services, it is putting more pressure on internal IT to deliver infrastructure that provides this data focussed, cloud like experience, but where do you start in designing this next-generation of datacentre. That's the subject of this week's podcast, the last of the shows recorded at NetApp Insight in Berlin, where I catch up with two members of a fascinating panel discussion I attended at the event, Ruairi McBride and Jason Benedicic, they were part of a panel hosted by the NetApp A-Team which consisted of people who were not theorists but had practical experience of deploying next-generation technologies and working practices and as I know many listeners to this show are involved in developing their own next-generation strategy, I thought it would make an interesting episode. We cover a range of topics and begin by looking to define what we mean by next-gen the types of technology and me

There is no doubt that the amount of data we have, manage, control and analyse continues to grow ever more rapidly and increasingly this is unstructured data, documents, images, engineering drawings, data that often needs to be stored in one place and be easily accessible. However, this presents problems, how do you get all of this data in one place when it's not just TB's it 100's of TB's and made up of billions of files that need to be accessed quickly, how on earth do you build that kind of capacity and deliver the performance you need? Well, scale-out NAS may be the answer, in a world where we have these ever growing massive unstructured data repositories scaling out our NAS services makes perfect sense, delivering not only massive capacity but also taking advantage of scaled-out compute to give us the ability to process the billions of transactions that come with a huge repository. So for Episode 50 of the Tech Interviews podcast, it seemed apt to celebrate the big five-oh talking about big data stora

The IT industry is full of new trends, some you get, some you don't, one such trend, that until recently I didn't really get, was Hyper-Converged, why have I not gotten onboard? A good test with any new technology is does it solve a problem or improve the way I currently do things? Up to now with Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) I'm not sure it really does, is it helping me build a more automated, flexible, agile IT infrastructure? Is it helping me build a hybrid environment? Is it automating my IT environment so that my business gets the agility it wants? Not sure. What HCI does do well is simplify your hardware infrastructure, takes something that may have been installed in a full rack and squeezes it down into 2 or 4U in a single chassis, but is that enough? Not really. What's changed my view? The starting point is nothing to do with changes to the HCI hardware model or addition of some great new feature, it's actually and maybe not surprisingly driven by software, look at what Microsoft and VMware

I've discussed in a number of blog posts, as well as previous episodes of Tech Interviews, the importance of building a data strategy. The term "Data Fabric" is an increasingly common way of describing such a strategy, this was something I first heard 3 years ago at NetApp's annual technical conference Insight as they introduced their first ideas for building a strategy that would start to move them from a storage company to a data management company. When NetApp first discussed this three years ago, they were a very different company, accused of living in the past, a traditional storage dinosaur with no place in this modern world. But NetApp has changed, today they are moving headlong into a data management future. Surely then, as NetApp continue to change, their beloved ONTAP operating system can't still play a key part in building a data fabric. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that is the focus of this episode, as I'm joined by Justin Parisi, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at NetApp

One of the main components of any tech conference is the keynote sessions, these are the sessions that share the vision, set the context for the show and a good keynote is a vital part of creating the right atmosphere for those attending. What I wanted to do with these special shows was to try and grab some of the immediate reaction from those attending the events and the keynote presentations that come with them. Our first set of keynote reviews come from NetApp Insight 2017 in Berlin, getting the very latest in the data management field. As we come toward the end of the conference, day three provided us with the final general sessions including a fascinating insight into rocket science as Adam Steltzner, part of the Mars Rover landing team, shared the part data played in their work. Joining me in this final review from Insight is Jon Woan (@jonwoan) and Mick Kehoe (@mickehoe) providing their views on this session and as it was the final day, they also share their thoughts on what they'd heard throughout

One of the main components of any tech conference is the keynote sessions, these are the sessions that share the vision, set the context for the show and a good keynote is a vital part of creating the right atmosphere for those attending. What I wanted to do with these special shows was to try and grab some of the immediate reaction from those attending the events and the keynote presentations that come with them. Our first set of keynote reviews come from NetApp Insight 2017 in Berlin, getting the very latest in the data management field. We heard views about Monday's keynote yesterday (you can find that here Tech Interviews the Keynote Round Up – NetApp Insight 2017 Day One) What did Day two have for us? This time I'm joined by Scott Gelb (@scottygelb) and Adam Bergh (@ajbergh) to get their views as we discuss the announcements of new platforms such as HCI and the fascinating move to cloud services including a unique arrangement with Microsoft Azure. Enjoy and look out for day twos Keynote roundup.

One of the main components of any tech conference is the keynote sessions, these are the sessions that share the vision, set the context for the show and a good keynote is a vital part of creating the right atmosphere for those attending. What I wanted to do with these special shows was to try and grab some of the immediate reaction from those attending the events and the keynote presentations that come with them. For these first shows, I'm at NetApp's Insight conference in Berlin, where we expect four days full of the latest in what the data management industry are doing and hearing how data continues to be a focus for transformation for many of us. With that in mind, what did Monday's keynote session deliver? To find out, straight from the keynote I caught up with Jason Benedicic (@jabenedicic), Atanas Prezhdarov (@prezblahblah) and Mark Carlton (@mcarlton1983) to get their views on the key messages from the keynote and what they expected from the rest of the event. Enjoy and look out for day twos Keyn