This may increase your blood pressure 😤| Cloud Core.

Newsletter • 5 min read

In the spirit of Blue Monday (January 20, said to be the most depressing day of the year), I wallowed in melancholy by taking a straw poll of IT ops guys. The question:

What were your biggest IT ops headaches last year?

Here are the results 👇

The biggest IT ops headaches of 2024

The ticket tornado 🌪️

IT teams and the Cloud Centre of Excellence were buried under an avalanche of tickets and support requests.

The meeting circus 🎪

It was like a 3-ring circus with IT juggling to attend every Monday stand-up. There’s only so much time in the day, and they needed to get actual work done, too. 

Snail-like responses 🐌

Despite all the juggling, application teams still complained that waiting for IT responses was like waiting for a snail hitching a ride on a glacier. 

Process labyrinths 🔍

Many IT processes still involved manual steps from runbooks, and it felt like there was lots of duplicated effort. There was a desire to automate more, but the organisation seemed to have hit a ceiling in what could be implemented.

Self-service desert 🌵

Agile application teams wanted to limit their dependency on IT, but there was friction because they didn’t have sufficient self-service capabilities.

Skills cliff edge 🧗

There was pressure to leverage platforms and increase automation but not enough time or resources to enhance associated skills.

Change management governance saga 🎭

Change management and approvals were handled in long, drawn-out weekly meetings

Vulnerability whack-a-mole 🔨

Fixing vulnerabilities felt like a game of whack-a-mole, where issues popped up faster than they could be dealt with. 

How to ease IT ops pain this year

The right platform engineering approach can make a big impact. Essentially, when IT and the Cloud Centre of Excellence are struggling to keep up with the organisation’s digital needs, moving to a platform approach and leveraging automation can help free up capacity and effectively scale IT operations.

To give you an idea of what can be achieved:

¡   100% automated provisioning – meaning processes that took weeks can take 30 minutes

¡   User-friendly self-service portal for apps teams – where they can self-serve with simple queries like “Provide an Azure sub with AKS installed”

¡   Automation library – that helps close the skills gap by simplifying the process of setting up self-service operations

¡   Cross-team automation – SuperMaestro lets you combine automation logic from different teams, so you can easily integrate automation assets into seamless workflows across infrastructure delivery, lifecycle management and cost optimisation (instead of having ticket chains)

¡   Security-by-default automation – so vulnerabilities are fixed as quickly as they’re discovered

¡   Automated approval pipelines – where change management governance is handled through automated workflows that collect and present information such as cloud costs and architecture diagrams

This whitepaper looks at how companies are effectively implementing IT self-service through platform engineering. It’s worth a quick read.

Data protection: The next 5 years

While we’re looking ahead, it’s worth taking a moment to consider data protection trends.

Yes, it’s a turbulent time. But there are many clear signals that let us paint a realistic picture of the direction of travel between now and 2030. Stricter regulations, groundbreaking technologies, the rising demand for data sovereignty…the clues are all around us, and we’ve consolidated them in this blog.

It’s complete with a prepper’s to-do list so you can start on changes ranging from policies and AI ethics frameworks to data sovereignty compliance tick-lists.

As always in business: where there is a challenge, there is also an opportunity. Your competitors face the same challenges: Do it better and make it a competitive advantage. 

From infrastructure to AI

How do you unlock value from AI in a sprawling and complex IT estate?

Swiss Post gave an interesting webinar alongside Microsoft and Nordcloud, where we discussed this question. We covered modernisation strategies, the ‘art of the possible’ and transforming monolithic apps to microservices.

Lunching at your desk? Why not listen?

📺 Watch the on-demand replay here

📢 Cloud quote of the month

“It was incredible to see such a positive shift in performance from Day 1. This project showed how Google’s AI capabilities for e-commerce deliver impressive quality, accuracy and efficiency.”

It’s from a nice e-commerce success story

📰  What we’ve been talking about this month

🍿 The TikTok ban that wasn’t – the US play by play

🔎 Factuality leaderboard for AI models

🧠 Brain implant lets man with paralysis fly a virtual drone by thought

🤖 The UK government is progressing with all 50 recommendations in the AI Opportunities Action Plan

💡 How much energy do LLMs use?

🗓️ Some dates for your diary

Events

🇫🇮 6 Feb – Tivi Cloud & Data Center Expo, Helsinki

This year’s focus is on InfoSec, green IT and cost-efficiency. Indrayudh Ghosh, Nordcloud’s Global Head of Platform Engineering Services, will be speaking. Stop by and say hi. Learn more here.

🇩🇪 20 Feb – OpenSearch Project München Third meetup, Munich

Join us at the Nordcloud office for interesting chat and networking. See you there?

Cloud training

  • 4-6 Feb – Virtual: Architecting on AWS. Register here.
  • 11-13 Feb – Virtual: Cloud Operations on AWS. Register here.
  • 20 Feb – Virtual: Google Cloud Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure. Register here.
  • 24-26 Feb – Virtual: Developing on AWS. Register here.
  • 25-27 Feb – Virtual: Advanced Architecting on AWS. Register here.
  • 4-6 March – Virtual: Architecting on AWS. Register here.
  • 11-13 March – Virtual: DevOps Engineering on AWS. Register here.
  • 17 March – Virtual: AWS Technical Essentials. Register here.
  • 18-19 March – Virtual: FinOps Certified Practitioner. Register here.
  • 18-20 March – Virtual: Security Engineering on AWS. Register here.
  • 25-27 March – Virtual: Cloud Operations on AWS. Register here.

🎧 Something to listen to in the home office

This cheesy motivation mix has helped banish the January blues.

Thanks for reading.

Happy New Year (I can still just barely get away with it!), and see you next month.

PS. Did you miss last month’s newsletter amid the holiday rush? We had a nice cloud Christmas tale. And before that, there were some swipe-worthy GenAI insights.

Edward
Ed MaineCMO

Get in Touch.

Let’s discuss how we can help with your cloud journey. Our experts are standing by to talk about your migration, modernisation, development and skills challenges.

Ilja’s passion and tech knowledge help customers transform how they manage infrastructure and develop apps in cloud.
Ilja Summala LinkedIn
Group CTO
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