Author Archives: Sean McDermott
The Difference Between Methodologies and Disciplines
Determining the right kind of cloud-based solution for an organization’s IT needs is — appropriately enough — unclear. The nuance of need within any company can be profound; even competitors within comparable industries and having comparable needs (sales support, for … Continue reading
Getting Biz and IT in the Same Boat is Key to Service-Centric IT
The idea that IT should be built to improve business performance is nothing new; we just shared our take on it in last week’s post. In the past few years, management and tech teams have reached an uneasy truce. The brainiacs … Continue reading
The Five Drivers for Service-Centric IT
It sounds buzz-wordy, but there’s a definite need to delineate between the IT of old, and today’s implementations, which wisely have a much sharper focus on business needs. IT used to kind of run the table. The tech experts could … Continue reading
We Really Don’t Know Cloud … At All
Consider the cloud. We’re talking IT not atmosphere, and cloud computing, cloud-based IT, or whatever catchphrase is currently circulating has made it the most ubiquitous and “du jour” term in our industry. People with little understanding of development, programming or … Continue reading
What’s Keeping the Government Up at Night?
Recently at a local event, AFCEA DC took a poll and asked one questions, “Which area of emerging tech below will be more important to your Department, Command, Service, or Agency?” Click here for the results. While not scientific, there … Continue reading
Cloud for the Non-Techie
While I’m pretty sure that my family has no idea what I or Windward do, I’m 100% sure that they have no idea what Cloud Computing is. Occasionally they see what I’m reading or overhear a phone conversation and give … Continue reading
Microsoft Beefs Up Private Cloud with System Center 2012
As reported by Wired today, Microsoft Pitches Private Cloud to IT with System Center 2012. Microsoft’s System Center 2012 is available today as a Release Candidate, the last milestone before a final release. Along with Hyper-V and Windows Server, the upgraded … Continue reading
Clouds Bumping Up Against the Mountains
InformationWeek Government posted a very interesting (albeit brief) article in last week titled How to Build a Government Cloud. So infrastructure services on Apps.gov–virtual machines, storage, Web hosting–aren’t exactly the on-demand, subscription-style services that come to mind when we think … Continue reading
Heading Deeper into the Cloud
An interesting article was quietly posted in eWeek.com, based on are research from CompTIA. The article, Businesses Headed Deeper Into the Cloud: CompTIA Report, states: Momentum behind the cloud computing movement continues to accelerate as businesses move from limited deployments to … Continue reading
Transparency in a Cloud Era
Recently Krishnan Subramanian, a analyst and researcher wrote an article on Cloudave.com titled Loss Of Control And Transparency In The Cloud Era. Krishnan discusses the reality that moving to the cloud does not reduce your risk out outages to zero. … Continue reading