Rethink and fresh ideas are the best. I cherish discussions and insights that are shared/learned from other industries, history, and peers as we discover new truths. Truths mind you, that just became true or finally true, and others that were formerly true.
An insight that I have seen from working in the cloud and immutable movement of software is that truths have a funny way of shifting the entire superstructure that is cybersecurity and customer delight in products. These technologies open a vast blue ocean of technical and human potentials that simply did not exist before they were invented. More so, as we begin to create greater complexity through the joining of these new technologies we invite whole new thinking.
I and my peers have been dead center on this transformation. I had the privilege to help design, build, scale, secure, audit, certify, and extend the largest and most successful (and some not so successful) cloud service providers and leading Silicon Valley. A fact that has been ever growing and the insight shared here surrounds connections.
Resources are dead
In the days of data centers and the architectures that surround them, the servers and base OS were critical and all that mattered. To the point that we used to count the number of servers in a data center. We used to check the systems meticulously and so on. As we moved to the cloud we abstracted (digitized) the hardware, and continued to do so. To the point that we have now digitized the data center, the server, the operating system, all of the software running on it, and the data within it.
Today resources are not the key factor, but instead the config files that generate these resources. We can deploy these “resources” anywhere in the world, on any platform, in a container or on a system. We can scale it to a million systems or have no systems and still achieve the same function.
These resources no longer account for our intellectual property (IP). They still represent juicy targets for attackers and demand safety and integrity, but we no longer count these systems. There simply isn’t a point – they are mass produced, a commodity, and the point of inflection is actually at the config and design vs. where we installed them – is that even a phrase valid today?
Long live the connection
How our technology communicates however is the unique factor and the most valuable element in a connected, immutable, and digitized world. Knowing and managing these connections with safety, integrity, and authority is the new frontier of successful ventures. This means risk, cybersecurity, and consumer delight demand we have trust and confidence in these pipes (if you will allow such a crude term for these connections).
Strategy to adopt for those seeking the best customer experience:
- Establish clarity in connection points between your resources and your partners
- Define and establish clear configurations and standards for these connections
- Deploy automated validation and quality checking for every connection in real-time
- Auto-fix any errors or poor performing connections – push to functions / lambda as soon as possible for all end-points
- Connections must begin from the customer experience and work backwards, ALL analysis must begin from their perspective and then drive out the value chain in reverse
Work backwards, create the value chain against the connections, and then establish the highest integrity to serve your customers.
Distribution and connectivity trump resources
Your house can be beautiful, but with no roads or access … well, it’s just a house giving no value.