Cloud

OK let’s not mention how long it has been since I’ve blogged. Just sit back and enjoy my website refresh and let’s move on ….

Amongst the craziness of my life now I’m full-time at Microsoft, I tweet the occasional #CloudAdvocateLife moment to give you some insight into the highs and lows of my day. Here I can expand a little more on the work I’ve been doing and how I maintain my work/life balance and my mental health. Today, let me catch you up on how the Cloud Advocate role has unfolded so far.

For most small businesses reading this article, I�ve lost them with the headline. A Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) is likely to be something they�ve never heard of, let alone considered. Yet more small businesses are becoming Cloud-friendly, especially with their adoption of Software as a Service applications. Funny thing is, some security-focused IT professionals would never consider using Cloud services without a CASB.

I had the pleasure of spending some time with a company called Forcepoint, in Austin, Texas, as a Tech Field Day delegate. David Coffey (VP Research & Development) says �How do you secure things that you don�t own or manage?� IT Pros understand that challenge. Traditionally we�ve focused on securing the devices that you use and the networks that you access. We�ve put firewalls between your PC and the Internet and we�ve prevented you from using random USB sticks. Today�s challenge for IT is ensuring security from your iPad in an airport lounge, to corporate data in the Cloud.

The email subject read: The biggest announcement since Apple removed the headphone jack.

How do you break it to a group of friends that you�re leaving them, after 12 years?
We were just honest.

After 12 years of trading, Tony & I announced that we would be graduating from the international Computer Troubleshooters franchise, effective 1 Oct.

I use the word graduating intentionally. The Computer Troubleshooters group has been with us since we started our own business in a new country, pre-kids, without the support of our corporate technical peers and hoping that we could make this work financially to be our primary source of income. We�ve learnt so much in that time about business, about tech and about each other.

For small businesses, Cloud solutions seem to deliver innovation, productivity and profitability with ease.

You don’t have to sit around and wait for the “I.T. guy” to install something on a server, then install something else on your computer. It’s all enabled by just signing up to a service in your web browser and entering your credit card number. The secure access, reliability and backups are all handled behind the scenes.

As part of the?Tech Field Day Extra?crew at?Interop 2016, I got to sit in on a great presentation by?Avi Freedmanfrom?Kentik.

I?d?never heard of them, which is not surprising given my Australian-based SMB world, but I sat with an open mind as Avi talked about Enterprise (and larger) networking concepts. It?s always so great when a presenter makes it ?real world? enough that you can see the benefits, without necessarily understanding all the tech under the hood. Seems that the world is hearing about Kentik though as their customers already include yelp, Pandora, Box, and openDNS.

As part of the?Tech Field Day Extra?crew at?Interop 2016, I got to sit in on a great presentation by?Avi Freedmanfrom?Kentik.

I?d?never heard of them, which is not surprising given my Australian-based SMB world, but I sat with an open mind as Avi talked about Enterprise (and larger) networking concepts. It?s always so great when a presenter makes it ?real world? enough that you can see the benefits, without necessarily understanding all the tech under the hood. Seems that the world is hearing about Kentik though as their customers already include yelp, Pandora, Box, and openDNS.

Warning: This is an opinion piece and quite honestly, a rant. You have been warned.

Our business has been supporting the technology needs of SMBs for 12 years now, after we stepped out of the corporate world. The early years were comparatively easy � a business wanted I.T. support, we�d upgrade a server or two to newer software and bigger hardware and the addition of remote monitoring and management tools consolidated our efforts across our customer base. Nothing really extraordinary there.

Sometimes it�s great to sit down for a presentation with no preconceived ideas. It makes it interesting to listen to a guy up the front in a company t-shirt, who you�re not viewing as the �Vice President of Marketing & Product Strategy�. The title doesn�t actually do justice to Neil Holmquist from Spirent Communications.

The internet would tell me that Neil has a 15 year career with Spirent, beginning as an engineer. It would also give me a ton of information about the telecommunications testing company itself, founded in 1936 and listed on the London Stock Exchange.

As a ‘partner’ in the ‘channel’ (just imagine the air quotes), I’m going to stand on my soapbox and have a little chat about the role that we play in making software & hardware companies successful. Yeah, that totally sounded conceited, but follow along with me here.

There are so many facets to this chat that this post won’t be published in its original form. It’s going to take time to organise these thoughts into a logical sequence that flows, because the partner relationship is not a simple conversation.

The Click to Run software manages the streaming of the installation of some Office products and a virtualised environment to enable different versions to run side by side on a Windows computer. If this software gets its ‘knickers in a knot’ (technical term), you might come across some issues with your next Office software installation. Don’t remove this component if you think you’ll only ever use msi based retail CD installations.