My Blog

After 20+ years working as or along side architects, I do have a good sense of what it takes to sew a good IT architect. I tried to put down my thoughts in a series of videos to help mentor people who are interested to have a career as an IT architect. This is the 1st video of the series:

Recently I gave a talk on the topic of evolving threats in the manufacturing and retails industries. The main focus is impact on the rise of IoT and industry 4.0 and the impact on cybersecurity. Most cybersecurity measures are focused on IT systems, but with a lot of automation and autonomous robots, we need to relook at our cybersecurity measures. here is a link to the youtube video I created:

Recently I spoke at an event for Nutanix and am encouraged by the interest in the building of Private Clouds. I started on this journey in 2015 mainly focusing on IaaS, but as the technologies improved, so has the evolution of what we can do in a private cloud environment.

A few of the really key benefits is to be able to shift workloads seamlessly between the public cloud and the private cloud. Key enablers for this to happen is the implementation fo security groups and the ability to deploy Kubernetes workload. Sure we could do this with layers like OpenShift or Tanzu, but I think Nutanix Karbon gives us some nice Kubernetes management with minimal overheads if you are running a Nutanix HCI. The same goes for Nutanix Flow, which help with the implementation of security groups so that we could duplicate our security structure without the traditional way of configuring firewall rules for on-prem deployment.

Recently, I am also exploring Nutanix Xi Leap which simplifies backup and recovery (although not available in Asia yet). With all these advancements, I am hopefully for the future of more hybrid clouds in the enterprise.

If you are curious about these technologies, you can take a test drive here -> https://www.nutanix.com/one-platform

Hybrid cloud is here to stay. So what is a hybrid cloud? A hybrid cloud refers to a mixed computing, storage, and services environment made up of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and a public cloud—such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP)—with orchestration among the various platforms. Using a combination of public clouds, on-premises computing, and private clouds in your datacenter means that you have a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Many organisation have started to realised that going full public cloud might not be the most cost effective route especially if you have a steady workload that requires minimal elasticity or burst capabilities.

What has changed to make hybrid or private cloud more attractive? Well, in recent years, some of the Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) players like Nutanix have introduced capabilities that have long been exclusive to the public cloud like Security Groups and native Kubernetes deployment (without the need to set up a host operating system).

And with more and more standards being developed, I think many organisations can now start to be more fluid in the movement of their workloads and this in turn drove the adoption of more private cloud/hybrid cloud approach.

I will be speaking on this topic at the next Nutanix Economic Advantage Summit at Marina Bay Sands on 20 April 2021. See you there!

On 31 March I was invited to be on a panel hosted by the Cloud Security Alliance to talk about Cloud security in the age of the hybrid clod. I spoke on some of the key changes to the environment and things to look out for from a technology angle. My fellow panelist also spoke on their experiences and it was a good session to see the different perspective.

You can watch the session here : https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/10415/468936

Had a short interview on CNA Radio to answer questions on the Singtel Data Breach.

Link can be found here: Asia First – SingTel server hack: How did it happen