May 2024

Welcome to our May newsletter.

I have noticed LinkedIn posts from the conferences being hosted by Public Cloud Providers. It’s the Atlassian Team event this week in Vegas - it must be the season.

These updates prompted two encouraging thoughts. The first is that COVID-19 restrictions are in the past. It’s great to see the big, in-person conferences back in force.

Second thought is that the competition between Public Cloud providers - Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) - is terrific for consumers. Each of the providers is competing on location, tools, services and price and that has to be beneficial. I think innovation thrives through competition, and in many areas of technology, there isn’t much competition. What do you think?

Whichever providers you choose, with their respective strengths and advantages, the basics of architecture and security need to be right to leverage the benefits.

I am interested to see how the cloud market progresses - hopefully the competition continues at pace.

Mike Clarke, Founder Wire8 Digital

Public Cloud

Public Cloud isn’t new, yet we are seeing a wave of activity lately. Some of the wave is Early Adopters improving their cloud posture, and the rest is the Majority climbing aboard. The wave of activity has some themes.

Architecting for success - architecting for cloud is different to on-prem, and most Cloud Providers publish helpful material to make the difference as obvious as possible. New users have the chance to do it right first time (see below for Partner for speed). We are also seeing some?Early Adopters?improving their architecture - they may have moved quickly to the Cloud - not quite “lift and shift”, but not far from it, so for them, the re-architecting work is to bring cost and operational efficiencies.????

Security from the start?- while most organisations understand that security principles are constant between on-prem or cloud, for many, the execution for their cloud footprint isn’t quite where it should be. Recent headlines about cloud breaches have heightened the awareness that there's no room for complacency. A strong security stance is important and there is a lot of activity in this space.

Partner for speed?- this is like the African proverb -?if you want to go far, go together. Each public cloud provider has specialist Partners who support best practice in architecting and building cloud environments. Maybe this wasn’t the case as few years ago, but now we are seeing customers partnering to accelerate their move to the “best” reference architecture (right first time).

Cloud Centre of Excellence?- a Cloud CoE has been a standard recommendation, but many customers haven’t seen the value - it hasn’t delivered for them. Our observation is that often the team is less CoE, and more Cloud Ops. CoE’s are being replaced with an expert Partner, to take advantage of thier experience, and are including access to Cloud Security skills.

Horses for Courses?- a “cloud-first” principle is commonly used, but we are seeing organisations learn from difficult experiences that some applications will not return an ROI if they are lifted and shifted to the cloud. In practical terms, understanding all elements of a complex application gives a good idea of whether it is a candidate for Cloud migration, or it should remain on-prem until end-of-life.

Multi-Cloud?- the concept of using different Public Clouds to manage costs and resilience is good in theory but difficult in practice. A pre-requisite is expertise (internal or Partner) in each of the Public Clouds, and an understanding of how to “de-couple” the workload from the proprietary Cloud tools. We see this as something that works for large-scale implementations, but any cost opportunities can soon be consumed in smaller scale environments.?

Welcome Sumedha

Sumedha Mukherjee has recently joined Wire8 Digital, and we asked her a couple of questions about her interest in Cyber Security.?

Q1. What drew you to Cyber Security?

A1. I was drawn to Cyber through my love of technology and helping people. Knowing that I am making a difference by protecting people and organisations is exciting. I can keep learning as the threat landscape evolves and because of that, no two days are the same.

Q2. What have you learnt from your Masters Degree in Cyber Security and Digital Forensics?

A2. My Masters has taught me the multi-dimensional nature of Cyber Security and how user privacy is paramount, now more than ever. Through my research on privacy law and the effect of its obscurity on users, I've learnt how important managed services really are to fill those gaps in privacy awareness. I plan to continue research into user privacy and AI's ingestion of Cyber Security concepts.

Q3. What attracted you to join Wire8 Digital?

A3. Wire8 Digital caught my eye as a young company making their move in the Cyber Security space. I felt a connection to the culture which I really like. In addition to our shared appreciation for Crowdstrike, their passion for the work they do, and the value they want to offer customers was clear from the beginning. I am beyond excited to be a part of the team.

Stay tuned for upcoming newsletter updates from Wire8 Digital.

Thank you!

- The team at Wire8 Digital