Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

Some years ago I interviewed a CIO of a Fortune 500 IT vendor as part of an Integration Improvement project. His responses helped shape the goals and roadmap of the project, as business drivers and goals should always be taken into account in how one models the architecture and integration space.   The interview gives a great view of IT management business drivers in the integration space.  Company identifying information has been removed. Question: How is integration? -- Almost everyone at our company is an expert on Information Systems. -- Our culture - everyone (department/division) believes their own numbers and requirements and doesn't believe anyone else's. Words like "mutual understanding" or "common terminology" didn't exist in the past. The reason there is no real enterprise integration because of how the company is running. Each unit built their own systems. The other units came to IT and said "buy this for us or build t...

Israel is under frequent, as frequent as every 10 minutes, rocket attack from Gaza.  While the Iron Dome rocket interception system has become famous as a technological marvel in the defense of the country, there are other technological marvels of note as well. The first step of any civil defense system is getting the civilians out of the way or under cover.  Israel has a network of neighborhood bomb shelters, building bomb shelters, and (in new construction) a “hardened room” in every private residence and on every floor of every office building.  When air raids were measured in hours or tens of minutes, all of these were adequate together with a nationwide network of air raid sirens. But modern circumstances have brought two new problems: - Rocket attack warnings are measured in SECONDS.  Fifteen seconds in towns near border regions, and 90-120 seconds in the center of the country. - As the country has suffered suburban sprawl, built malls and cinema mega...

An Architect Friend sent me this extended architecture question... I recently joined a company that provides business consulting (via many MBAs) services related to sales and marketing .  Most clients are large pharma companies . In addition to consultants, there are business process outsourcing teams (offshore) that do operations (like incentive plan management, report distribution, etc.)   There is also BI/reporting group that creates BI/DW solutions (custom ones using template approach) for large clients .  Plus there is an Software Development group (SD) . Over the years the Software Development group of the company created various (10+) browser-based (.NET/SQL) point-solutions/tools to help consultants (and eventually some head-quarters users) perform specific tasks. For example: - Designing sales territories and managing the alignment of reps to territories - Custom ETL-based tools to perform incentive calcu...

Recent revelations from the U.S. have informed the public that conspiracy theorist fantasy's are all too real, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been installing taps at key Internet points to absorb vast quantities of email and Internet traffic. As IT professionals, publically available information (no inside information or secret information is utilized in the preparation of this article) and an understanding of the Internet as a series of routers and servers, we understand that “taping key Internet points” means copying streams of Internet traffic via router configurations and having monitoring software installed on email servers and the like (directing copies to the government monitoring servers). The NSA isn’t secretly tapping into some sort of vast Internet cable bundles.  Rather they’re walking into AT&T, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Internet backbone and primary service providers, and installing software on their routers and servers as well as installing NS...

Today a top law blogger freaked out after realizing that their emails can be read and monitored... "The owner of (a encrypted protected email service that just shut down) tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too.  There is no way to (blog) without email. Therein lies the conundrum.  What to do? ...the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how "clean" we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I don't know how to function in such an atmosphere. I feel (unclean), knowing that persons I don't know can paw through all my thoughts and hopes and plans in my emails...  They tell us that if you send or receive an email from outside the US, it will be read.  (And many emails inside the US are accidentally picked up by those capture engines.)  If it's encrypted, they keep it for five years, pr...