Christian Wickham

192

Christian Wickham 's Posts

There are many people concerned about new technology ‘stealing’ jobs, but in reality it is just changing the types of jobs that people have. A particular example is remote telemetry and the effect on jobs. For centuries, society has been challenged by technological changes that have an impact on jobs,… Continue Reading Remote telemetry and the effect on jobs

The problem with backups Legacy approaches to backup in the IT industry are largely focussed on performing a backup of an entire server. This means that multiple backups will contain a full copy of the Windows operating system, and other files that will never need to be restored. Follow this… Continue Reading Backup for cloud

Security is a rapidly moving beast – faster than any other facet of the technology industry. We are in a constant battle with everyone from hackers to script-kiddies, from targeted data theft attacks to Denial of Service. Our security teams and network administrators are playing catch-up with the malicious operators.… Continue Reading Your security is obsolete

We have all had it before – something that has been around for a long time, and we have no idea if it is important any more – but no-one will take the ownership to declare that it can be disposed of. This is where the Scream Test comes in.… Continue Reading The Scream Test

Skills evaporation is a blight that affects many businesses, particularly monolithic large businesses and governments. Skills evaporation will happen when good people leave a business to pursue better opportunities, taking knowledge with them – but also the culture of the remaining people is that their skills are reduced by the… Continue Reading Skills evaporation

In the new economy, innovation and creativity is highly desirable, emotional intelligence and adaptability are more important than ever. But, has the education system kept up? Is it true that education makes us stupid? Are we being educated out of innovation, or is innovation being educated out of us? Education… Continue Reading Educated out of innovation

How much does it cost to manage your data? In an early job, I was making a projection to purchase more disk to expand capacity on our Exchange mailbox servers. At the time, disk was relatively expensive, and the capacity that I had projected for 3 years would have also… Continue Reading Save Money – by buying more disk

Strategy is a word that is often over-used so much that it has become poorly defined and understood. You can have a ‘strategy’ to buy your groceries before you buy alcohol … it can be a ‘strategy’ to start a meeting on time… the term has become watered down and… Continue Reading The Hallmarks of a Strategy

Through my study of AWS and Azure, I have found that one challenge is in understanding the terminology difference, particularly as my own background is in VMware technologies. So, I have created this little chart that compares the three.Obviously, there is no direct one-to-one mapping of the product offerings, but… Continue Reading Azure Vs. AWS terminology

As you may realise from this blog, I’m a Principal Consultant – and that means not only do I work with customers, I also need to lead other Consultants on their journey in consulting. I work with some exceptional and smart people, but the top 5 “rules” for consulting can… Continue Reading Top 5 rules for consulting

Corporate culture can be formalised, or it can be “this is the way things are done here” lore that defines how people act, react, make decisions, and deal with problems. The impact of corporate culture on a business can be significant to the way that corporate culture in IT projects… Continue Reading The importance of understanding corporate culture

Microsoft used to have a realy great approach to product naming – think of Windows, Outlook, Word, Exchange, etc. – but recently, their naming imagination has disappeared into a confusing mess of extended terminology, which to make things even harder, Microsoft have been changing frequently. Wouldn’t you like some of… Continue Reading Office 365 terminology clarified

I recommend that all businesses perform a paper exercise of running a BCP drill, as a way to tease out the conceptual and procedural issues related with planning for business continuity. It can be a desktop process of running through the BCP plan, and it helps to have a critical… Continue Reading The BCP Drill

It has finally happened – many years ago, when I worked at VMware, there were internal rumors of a rebootless upgrade being worked on since vSphere 5.0. And now, with the release of vSphere 6.7, you can upgrade the hypervisor without rebooting. What happens is the hypervisor will re-load, without… Continue Reading VMware rebootless upgrades are here!

The old Waterfall methods of project implementation are less able to cope with a dynamic and changing landscape. The approach to front-end a project with planning, scoping, preparation, and documentation are often at the expense of taking the lessons learnt about previous failures – from project postmortems. There is huge… Continue Reading Premortem for project delivery success

Are you retaining a backup for 10+ years? Can you still use the data? How useful are your backups? A necessary burden Backups are a necessary task for all businesses. A hundred years ago, if there was a fire at a business, then everything would be lost – a paper… Continue Reading How useful are your backups?

DNS is the fundamental signpost of the Internet. Your ISP or internal IT systems will provide DNS services to allow your computer to resolve names to IP addresses. Even though your DNS services may be enough to meet your needs, there are potential problems that may drive you to want… Continue Reading Alternative DNS resolvers

We learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes, but it is better to learn from other’s mistakes, because you don’t need to suffer. In many encounters during my career, I have learnt from the failures that occur during disasters. The disasters in disaster recovery may not… Continue Reading Disasters in disaster recovery