Sam Akroyd

M365 – what to look out for

July 22, 2021 / Sam Akroyd / 0 Comments

I see many customers looking to move their entire document and communication to Microsoft 365, and although its a wonderful platform with a list of benefits as long as the eye can see. There are some things to look out for. Hopefully in a few months / years I’ll be able to look at this post and all will have been resolved, I guess we’ll see….

Moving from Customer to Vendor

July 2, 2021 / Sam Akroyd / 0 Comments

It’s 2021, my 15 year anniversary in operational IT. I decide to make a bold move – a complete change career wise. I step away from the customer world, away from the day-to-day severity one calls, away from leading a team, and away from pretty much everything I’ve learnt – or have I?

VMware have changed their licensing model – why should you care?

May 19, 2021 / Sam Akroyd / 0 Comments

For as long as I can remember vSphere was what VMware was famous for. Just a mention of virtualisation and everyone mentioned ESX, ESXi or VMware’s name. Obviously times have moved on, competition has increased and VMware’s portfolio has diverisified somewhat so it looks like the commercial team decided now was a time to modernise their purchase options. This is just a few of my thoughts as to why, from a customer perspective, I find this pretty useful.

Lifting and shifting documents to Microsoft 365? What’s the best approach?

May 11, 2021 / Sam Akroyd / 0 Comments

Its the most popular cloud collaboration platform worldwide and most businesses are heavy users of the Microsoft stack. Whether that be Office 365, the collaboration suite, or M365 the end-to-end stack including security tools, etc we’re all familiar. But talking to ex-colleagues, and other IT folk, people use it for Teams, Outlook and the office suite, but rely heavily still on other platforms for document storage and the general feeling is because of the complexity of migrating those documents. This article is to go over the various options to fully utelise the platform that your business is already paying for….

So he’s disrupted the car industry, is Elon about to do the same with Internet Access?

April 23, 2021 / Sam Akroyd / 0 Comments

Starlink is fast becoming a frequently mentioned term, and rightly so. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space exploratory arm has a side hustle launching little satellites all over the world in order to provide Internet access to those on the ground. Is this just another of Elon’s crazy ideas, or is this a practical option going forward?

JML, joiners, movers and leavers. How to make it work well in your business

April 12, 2021 / Sam Akroyd / 0 Comments

If I had a £1 for every time someone used the dreaded acronym JML during my career then I wouldn’t need to work anymore. Its usually followed by “… is rubbish” or preceded by “We need a better process for….”. The reality is, understanding who is joining your business, who is moving roles or departments or who is sadly leaving your business is a challenge. Here’s my thoughts on how to make this process slick(er)

Server Provisioning & Configuration Management: A Checklist

March 4, 2021 / Sam Akroyd / 0 Comments

Fully automating server infrastructure for most is the holy grail for a majority of sysadmins (or whatever the modern day job title is). Not having to click through a wizard, manually apply IP addresses or patch a machine, is attractive for anyone who has sat around as Microsoft’s latest patch update trickles through your virtual NIC. But are you doing it for the right reasons, and are you making sure you are getting the most value out of your automation?

Getting Started with Ansible with VMC on AWS

February 9, 2021 / Sam Akroyd / 0 Comments

A few months back, I had some fun playing round with Terraform with VMC on AWS. It’s fair to say, I caught a bit of the old automation bug, so this time I thought I’d play around with Ansible. This is how I got myself started….

Orchestration for end user devices? Really?

January 14, 2021 / Sam Akroyd / 0 Comments

For years, just about every marketing department for any software company has been going on about automation and orchestration. They are pretty much the ultimate buzzwords and I can’t thing of a single sales pitch where one of those words weren’t used. But I’m struggling to think of a pitch where either of those words have related to desktops and laptops. Well ladies and gentleman, that is about to change…

What does modern day CCTV look like?

January 3, 2021 / Sam Akroyd / 0 Comments

Having worked in IT for a number of years, I’ve come across various dumb CCTV systems used to assist in securing physical buildings, but with AI and machine learning becoming commonplace, has video surveillance finally gained some intelligence?