Category: General Architecture

Cloud Strategy – Locating your Disaster Recovery Site

One topic that has been coming up a lot recently, when comparing cloud based software systems, is the location of disaster recovery (DR) or secondary data centres.

Whilst the first step is helping the business to understand the need for a secondary hosting site, be it:

  • a DR site activated in a major failure / disaster or
  • secondary sites servicing active customers in parallel to the main site

the next step is ensuring the business isn’t then bamboozled with false promises from vendors.

Moving from a single point of failure architecture to one that can easily scale out and handle failure is no small task. Continue reading “Cloud Strategy – Locating your Disaster Recovery Site”

Assessing the quality of a website

This blog is a starting guide, for business people, to help them get an understanding of whether their website is designed correctly.  It is not exhaustive but hopefully one in a series on this topic.

Note that this blog is my personal view, as are all my blogs, however they are based on nearly two decades of experience in the IT industry.

Although nearly every client I deal with has a need for a website it is interesting to observe that many of them do not have an understanding of whether their website is fundamentally “good”.

The problem is that most people are not familiar with what makes a website “good” or “bad”.  Some even believe that as long as it ticks all the boxes for what they wanted in a website then its a good website.  Some go by the wisdom of the HIPPO’s. (Highest Paid Person in the room’s Opinion) If they say it should have a purple background with yellow text then that’s the right way to build the website.  This is why we see a lot of websites talking about the technical details of a product which are hard to read and totally useless to consumers who simply are trying to find a solution to a problem or idea quickly and efficiently.

Continue reading “Assessing the quality of a website”