Thoughts on Tech

Category: Thoughts (Page 3 of 5)

Discussions around technologies and concepts

Buy it or Build it?

Software has evolved hugely over the past 10-20 years, moving from MS-DOS based command line entry, to C# based Windows Apps, to Web-based apps utelising Adobe Flash, and now everything is all about serverless apps and microservices. One things has stayed true though, a good app drives efficiencies in any business – the question is, do you have to build that software from the ground up to give yourself that edge over your competitors, or does buying off the shelf do the job?

Continue reading

A screenshotting tool, a review? Really? YEAH!

So over the past few years I’ve mixed between both Windows and Mac for daily work drivers and home use. I have a standard app for browsing the web, I have a standard app for writing documents, and I have a standard app for writing code however one thing that has always bugged me is that on Windows I either used Greenshot or the built in Snipping tool to take screenshots, and on Mac I just used the native app, but both of them I found frustrating to use, step forth Snagit!

Continue reading

GSuite upping their game

A couple of weeks back, Google announced huge changes in their GSuite platform to try and compete in the collaboration space vs the Office 365 behemouth, but also to try and compete with business going for ‘best of breed’, such as Zoom, Slack & Box amongst others. Have they gone far enough – and how does it stack up against its competitors?

Continue reading

Remote Working: How to Avoid Micromanaging

One of the big challenges facing many leaders within IT (and I’m sure other industries too) is adjusting their management styles to suit when you’re not ‘seeing’ your staff/colleagues on a day-to-day basis. Its very easy to assume they’re not working as hard just because you can’t see what they’re doing. So how do you avoid falling into this trap?

Continue reading

Apple WWDC 2020

I have a feeling this could be the lowest hit post of this year – but I’m not bothered. Apple’s events always manage to wow even the most hardcore of IT geeks (me included) and my interest was peaked a little more with rumours around iPadOS and the potential of Apple switching from Intel to ARM-based processors.

Continue reading

VeeamOn 2020

As a loyal Veeam customer, and a lucky attendee at VeeamOn 2019, it’d be a shame not spend some of my spare time watching their keynotes and breakout sessions this time round. So it’s time to don some green, and watch some Veeam*

*This is not Veeam’s slogan, but it totally should be!

Continue reading

Diversity and inclusivity in the workplace

I have read a number of harrowing, horrifying and humbling articles over the past 3 weeks or so, since the terrible murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. I am, as a white British man, not the right person to sit here educating others on how to treat everyone equally and fairly. I can honestly say, the last few weeks have been an education and a real history lesson, not the ones I was taught as a youngster. It has however, given me time to reflect and realise how I’ve rarely worked in a properly diverse work environment, and how I’d like to change that in the future.

Continue reading

Unified Endpoint Management: Workspace One

In my day job (yes I have one outside of blogging – thats why I’ve not blogged for a while!) I’ve been spending some of the lockdown time looking at various products for unified endpoint management, which is the new marketing term used for device management. In particular I’ve been really impressed with Workspace One. This post is going to serve two purposes, firstly as a brain dump for my thoughts, and secondly for you guys to understand a little bit about what it can do with no marketing bias.

Continue reading

VMware Cloud on GCP, now they have the big three

Anyone who follows my blogs know I’m quite a fan of VMware Cloud on AWS and my employer Stagecoach have been a happy customer for almost 2 years now. During that time VMware have strengthened their relationship with AWS, struck a deal with Microsoft for VMC to run on Azure and now as of this week they have announced Google Cloud VMware Engine, the same tech stack on the final of the big three’s cloud platform. So what does this mean for the customer?

Continue reading

The layered approach to monitoring

Many moons ago, monitoring was as simple as spinning up a Nagios instance, or Solarwinds if the business you worked for was a little ‘flush’ with cash. It did exactly what you wanted, allowed you to monitor via SNMP or WMI, and it gave you a simple graphical interface for each ‘node’ that you looked after. Over the last few years though, there is far more to monitoring. Its an area I have an interest in, so I thought I’d document some of what I’ve seen recently.

Continue reading
« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Sam Akroyd

Theme by Anders NorĂ©nUp ↑