Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part II BranchCache

In the last post I introduced the idea of breaking the secure transport layer between cloud provider and employee with the intention to better deliver those services to employees using company provided infrastructure.

In short we deployed a server which re-presents the cloud secure urls using a new trusted certificate. This enables us to do some interesting things like provide centralised and shared caching across multiple users. The Application Request Routing (ARR) module is designed for delivering massively scalable content delivery networks to the Internet which when turned on its head can be used to deliver cloud service content efficiently to internal employees.… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part II BranchCache”

TDD for Mobile Development – Part 1

TDD for Mobile Development – Part 1
1. Unit Testing of Platform-Specific Code in Mobile Development.
2. Portable IoC (Portable.TinyIoC) for Mobile Development
3. Mobile Test-Driven Development – Running your unit tests from your IDE

jenkins-tests

This post aims at exploring the best practices in terms of code quality and testability for mobile development.
It is part of a series that talks about Unit and Integration Testing in the Mobile space. In particular, I focus on Android and iOS.… [Keep reading] “TDD for Mobile Development – Part 1”

Cloud Strategy – do you need one?

Today’s organisations demand that their services perform better, cost less, are more reliable and offer greater flexibility than ever before. With high quality and quickly evolving consumer technologies, the expectation of IT services in the workplace is that they now reflect the same calibre of tools available to people outside of the office.

With common perceptions that business IT capabilities are too far behind, many departments look to acquire and provision cloud services themselves, without involving the IT organisation.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Strategy – do you need one?”

The FIM User Experience

A recent post by my colleague Jamie Skella “What UX Isn’t” started me thinking about how UX applies to FIM. Throughout my career as an Identity Management Consultant, I’ve seen projects reach a point in maturity where stakeholders are walked through the tasks an admin or user will perform in the portal, and the average eyebrow height in the room rises exponentially.

Those of us working with Microsoft’s identity products for a while, are used to seeing the glitz and glamour of the Sync Engine console, previously the only interface available with the product, so when the FIM Portal was introduced with FIM 2010, it gave a “user friendly” interface to work with.… [Keep reading] “The FIM User Experience”

AWS Web Architecture 101 – Lessons Learned

This blog discusses some of the lessons learned in implementing a Web Architecture with RDS. We walk through some key elements and highlight some gotchas  to be mindful of.

Scenario

The components for this scenario include:

  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with a public subnet and a private subnet.
  • ELB for  Web Traffic
  • IIS Web Server instance
  • MS SQL RDS instance
  • Jump box for management connectivity

One of the first implementation considerations in AWS is how you will setup your network.[Keep reading] “AWS Web Architecture 101 – Lessons Learned”

The changing role of the CIO

With the growth and commoditization of computing resource, and the inevitable introduction of cloud computing, both as a software, platform and infrastructure services, the Chief Information Officer’s role will change significantly over the next two years.  Cloud computing provides incredible agility for those organizations equipped to utilize it, Business Process Outsourcing is providing increasing levels of workforce flexibility, and with the commoditization of design and development resources, how does this rapid ability to affect change effect the CIO?[Keep reading] “The changing role of the CIO”

Office 365: To Federate or Not to Federate… that is the Question

Yesterday, Microsoft released a new version of their ‘DirSync’ utility (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn246918.aspx) which up until yesterday provided a basic ‘copy’ of your local Active Directory accounts (Active Directory Domain Service or ‘AD DS’) from your premises to the MS Cloud directory (referred to as ‘Azure Active Directory’) for Office 365 (and other Cloud apps such as Team Foundation Service (TFS Online).

This blog is written for those considering moving to Office 365 (or have moved to Office 365) but haven’t identified any other application in the organisation apart from Office 365 that requires Active Directory Federation Services and SAML/WS.Federation… [Keep reading] “Office 365: To Federate or Not to Federate… that is the Question”

Ideal Workloads for Cloud

Working in the fast changing world of IT, sometimes is good to stop, take a breather and reflect on where we are and how we got here. Cloud computing is certainly no exception and has had an enormous amount of hype over the past 5 years, but has it lived up to the promise?

Looking Back

I and many others at PDC 2008 listened to the announcement of Azure and the follow up communications as Microsoft went “all in” on the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Ideal Workloads for Cloud”

AWS Cloud Architecture Essentials – The Commodity

AWS Architectures start at the heart of many businesses, customers.

The foundation and principles of AWS have been built on Amazon, a company that was envisaged to be the most customer centric company in the world. “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.” – Jeff Bezos

These types of requirements are inputs into an ethos that pervades, that underpins the Architecture of AWS.… [Keep reading] “AWS Cloud Architecture Essentials – The Commodity”

Azure AD and the Progression of Microsoft Identity and Access Management

Defining Microsoft IDAM

The words ‘Identity and Access Management’ (IDAM) mean different things to different people – and a lot of confusion still reigns about what this area represents to an IT department. However, it’s generally agreed that a good corporate IDAM policy can drive down cost, increase security and provide significant user experience benefits to approved applications as they are introduced to an IT environment.

These improvements can broadly be categorised into the following areas:

Single Sign On (usually abbreviated to ‘SSO’) – a user provides a single factor (99% of the time a password) and gets access to not just one application but a suite of applications after authenticating once without being prompted again for credentials.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD and the Progression of Microsoft Identity and Access Management”