IT Services at Christmas

Andrew Fryer a Technical Evangelist, specialising in data center and all things data. When not blogging and making screencasts in the office he can be found presenting at various IT Professional events across the UK including TechEd, Tech Days Online and IT Camps, IPExpo and SpiceWorld VMU

Ed and I have been doing quite a few events in the run up to Christmas and we often need to explain the different kinds of cloud service. So imagine you wanted to move Christmas to the cloud.

Christmas as Infrastructure. Basically you have your usual Christmas and apart from letting your partner do the cooking nothing really changes - you still have to do all the administration (like washing up!) including patching planning for high availability and disaster recovery.

A more sophisticated approach might be just take the family to the relatives and let them worry about all the preparation, the cooking washing up etc. However this means you are giving up some responsibility as well (as well as the remote control for the Tele). The question is can you do a better Christmas yourself e.g. automatically scale for when extra guests arrive like your daughters new found love and the in-laws?

If you want a totally managed experience you just use off the shelf applications like Office 365, Dynamics , Azure data science tools (azure ML, NRT and Data Factory). Now all you have to do is look after the family (your users) and it’s all sun sea and sand, you just pay for the stuff you use and rent your lounger by the minute!

As IT professionals we typically aren’t very good at giving up control of stuff. However while traditions are important at Christmas, they don’t really have much place in a modern IT department (apart from the parties of course) so in 2015 look hard at what you are doing and focus on how to be relevant rather than everything as there simply isn’t time to do everything.

Artwork by Andrew Fryer