The unglamorous work that keeps everything running: operations discipline, monitoring, maintenance windows, and the daily practice behind systems that don’t fail, from a career running them.
Business ContinuityIranian drones struck Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain in 2026, and AWS now says the Bahrain region can't be recovered. Why defense analysts call data centers key terrain, why cloud redundancy didn't save everyone, and how a…
Contracts and AgreementsA big-name hosting vendor missed our payroll, and paying the penalty to leave was the cheapest fix we had. Here are the rules I took from years on the buying side of IT, from small vendors to exit clauses to…
Digital TransformationIn the late 1980s I spent six months in Las Vegas as project lead on the water district's SCADA system, flying home every weekend. I walked through casinos constantly and never placed a bet, and the contrast between those two…
Digital TransformationA hard constraint will hand you a solution you would never have picked from a list of options, and the solution is often better than what you would have chosen freely. We had a floor tile buckling under a live…
Disaster RecoveryWhen a vendor has been working on your problem for a week without a theory, that is your signal to bring in somebody else. One firm spent a week on a slowdown that had stopped our business. A second firm…
Business ContinuityA tested system and a proven system are different things, and most companies say covered when they mean tested. I built a disaster recovery site over several years with no budget and no headcount, tested it regularly, and never once…
Digital TransformationIf you are the person who gets called every time something breaks, the problem is not your availability. The escalation logic lives in your head and nowhere else, so every call has to reach you. Writing that logic down on…
Digital TransformationThe valuable half of an on-call schedule is the part where you are not on it, and that half only exists if the boundary is real.
Digital TransformationModernization gets sold as an opportunity and it almost never arrives as one. It arrives as a bill, when a vendor stops supporting something or a platform can no longer be upgraded.
Digital TransformationBefore you fund a project to modernize an aging system, find out whether the failures are coming from the software or from the hardware underneath it. We had an old system breaking constantly and running slow. Nobody rewrote a line…
IT OperationsThe first time you outsource a capability is usually the last decision you get to make about it. I built a private cloud, my team had no hours to learn the technology, so I hired a firm to run it.
HiringThe best hire I made in thirty-three years produced no story. The resume was accurate, the interview matched it, the background matched the interview, and the work matched all three.
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