Hank Marquis

Making Change Management Your Cloud Computing and DevOps On-Ramp

April 9, 2013 Hank Marquis Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Positioning standard changes as automation on-ramps requires validating and optimizing cross-process workflow, especially in response to user requests. This is required even more with PaaS and DevOps. Success with standard changes also requires recording and evaluating usage, successes, and failures. For these reasons, your change management process should administer standard changes. Using standard changes shows opportunities for automation and reduces risks at the same time. Standard changes can free your resources for other strategic tasks as they reduce costs and improve service quality and customer satisfaction.

PaaS for Application Management

February 26, 2013 Hank Marquis Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is where you’ll find the full promise of cloud computing. I say this because cloud computing (and most legacy IT infrastructure too) exists for one purpose: to deliver software applications to users. We don’t run huge data centers because it’s fun — we do so to host applications. All that compute, storage, and networking exist to make software features available to users, and PaaS makes it far easier, faster, and cheaper to do so, and do so well.

Understanding PaaS Market Confusion

February 21, 2013 Hank Marquis Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market is maturing. There are many PaaS service offerings now, so many are getting confused about what PaaS is and isn’t.

We can get some help from the internationally accepted NIST definition of cloud computing (pub 800-145). NIST defines PaaS as the capability “to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider.”

5 Steps to Improve Cloud Computing Financial Management

January 31, 2013 Hank Marquis Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Recently, cloud computing has put the pressure on IT to match the “free and unlimited” cloud offerings. A key benefit of cloud computing is the ability to pay-as-you-go, and successful IT leaders know that usage-based IT can quickly become more expensive than what it replaces.