Thoughts on Tech

Month: March 2020

Enabling Microsoft Teams en-masse for your Business

With the WFH being the most used acronym on the Internet over the past few weeks, and challenges a lot of IT departments are facing, I thought it would be useful to explain for the Office 365 users amongst us how to enable Microsoft Teams for all your users and create those teams quickly whilst ensuring it’s done in a controlled manner.

Just to call it out here, but the scripts here aren’t my work, and I’ll link to where I found the golden nugget of information.

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Security. Eggs in one basket, or a multi-vendor, layered approach?

Having recently engaged with a number of large vendors around our end-user compute estate, it made me think about the pros and cons of using a vendor full security stack as opposed to buying ‘best of breed’ from a variety of vendors. Obviously there is the stategy of security the data, forget about the endpoint, but for certain industries, this isn’t always the best fit.

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Coronavirus IT Checklist

With most businesses sending their staff home, I thought I’d put up a very quick post to share a few thoughts, and ideas for smaller departments or those without a Coronavirus Task Force. I’m happy to keep this up to date with any suggestions from you LinkedIn or Twitter folk for anything that I’ve missed, so throw me some suggestions! I’m going to include a few companies that have reached out to me over the past couple of weeks with useful free trials of their software which could be helpful.

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Public Speaking Experience

I’ve been fortunate over the past 18 months to speak at a variety of events, from on-stage at VMWorld, to talking to CxO level at a Chief Wine Officer event to presenting in front of Stagecoach‘s very own Senior Leadership team. Each event had its challenges; different formats, different topics, and different audiences but all of them were very rewarding.

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Are collaboration products being fully adopted outside IT teams and businesses?

Anyone who knows me, or has ever talked to me about the collaboration space, knows its an area of IT I’m quite excited about. Over the past 10 years we’ve all seen products such as Slack emerge and dominate the market, Hipchat disappearing under the weight of Slack and then the powerhouse of Microsoft enter the scene with Teams. But who is using these tools in anger – is this just used in development houses and in the IT domain, or are enterprises seeing adoption and value with all their staff?

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Is Multi-Cloud the way forward for big enterprises?

Most enterprises have been, for the past few years been preaching about migrations to various public and private clouds, taking their workloads out of self-run, or partner-run data centres. From my experience, similar technology stacks would be used in each of those datacenters, whether that be Cisco networking technologies, HP storage, Dell compute, the list of common vendors goes on and on. Moving to the cloud allow enterprises to stick by that mantra, if of course they commit to a single cloud provider.

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SplunkLive! London 2020

This week I’ve been lucky enough to free enough time to attend SplunkLive! at the Intercontinental Hotel in London. I’m a big advocate of getting out of the office, and away from the work ‘bubble’ to educate myself on product developments, and networking with other like-minded individuals to see what their focus is on, and of course – what technologies they are using.

Data is key nowadays, and how businesses use that data, to thwart a potential attack is very interesting. What is more interesting for me though is how we can use the masses of data to add value back to the business through data analysis.

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VMware Cloud on AWS: Windows provisioning using Terraform

I’ve been fortunate to work closely with VMware and in particular, the UK-based VMware Cloud on AWS team, over the last 18 months or so. Stagecoach were one of the first businesses in the UK to adopt it as their cloud platform of choice alongside AWS and so we have forged a strong relationship with their team, in particular Nico Vibert. I tell you this as some simple promotion for his website, because a good percentage of this code was his. If you’re into Terraform and VMWonAWS then head over to his website.

Goals:

  1. Terraform connectivity to my VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC
  2. Clone existing vSphere template to singular VM
  3. Clone existing vSphere template to multiple VMs
    1. Dynamically name the VMs
    2. Dynamically name the machines in Windows
    3. Assign an sequential IP to each VM
    4. Join to an Active Directory domain
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