This article delves into risk management, drawing parallels between climbing protection systems and IT testing methods. Ultimately, the goal is to maximize risk reduction benefits while minimizing associated costs and efforts, skillfully combing different types of Climbing Anchors or Tests.

Large cloud and microservices solutions are challenging due to their dynamic and distributed nature. A holistic observability platform, integrated into DevOps and augmented by GenAI, can help to handle the operational and security challenges introduced by the EU’s CRA and the USA's CISA regulations.

A lightweight comparison between IT consultants and mountain guides, highlighting their shared challenges and roles. Both navigate complex terrain, guiding clients through unfamiliar activities, and discussing risk management, trust, and approach.

Re-use is one of the most iconic "holy grails" in the IT industry. However, as any seasoned software architect knows, achieving successful re-use depends on the context and requires careful consideration of several key factors. To validate the correct choice, we must evaluate re-use against clearly defined value drivers that

Product Engineering and Component Business Modelling (CBM) combine to create innovative solutions that meet changing customer needs. Author successfully implemented this approach for a client in the railways industry, leading to a valuable commercial platform.

One thing that I find remarkable about current IT Industry best practices is that we daily use the closest thing we have available to a Time Machine. If this was more widely known to students, Computer Science education might appear even more cutting edge than it now is (and "Great

Business Platforms are characterized by a system context that includes multiple integration points (APIs) with different systems. In complex solutions, the number of integration points increases, and an effective way to document them becomes critical for the program's success. I will focus here on some key aspects to effectively design,

Modernizing applications towards a cloud-native approach, that breaks monolithic components into multiple smaller microservice, leads to a rise in complexity in managing the IT Infrastructure operations. While each microservice becomes simpler and potentially more scalable, the number of moving pieces to be managed drastically increases. The traditional approach of the

Data in applications has a powerful gravitational pull, so transforming and modernizing applications is heavily impacted by existing data. Digital Transformations have focused on enabling new cloud applications and frontends but remained connected to existing transactional backends (see also). This kind of approach highlighted potential issues in handling traffic load

Cloud usage has steadily increased in recent years, with most enterprises adopting cloud solutions to deliver new applications and migrate workloads out of proprietary data centers.  However, application modernization towards the cloud has not yet started for a lot of mission-critical systems and workloads. What's slowing this down? reasons for

Successful business platforms and architectures need to handle change and evolution gracefully. A good problem domain decomposition, documentation, and versioning of Business API and Entities, ideally using Domain-Driven-Design (DDD) principles, help evolve the functional side. But there is an additional need. The choice of the Database platform and how to

Business enterprise platforms are complex systems with an ecosystem of many internal and external integrations and dependencies. Modernizing these kinds of applications requires a divide and conquer approach, with a transformation program composed of multiple steps, ideally performed in an Agile way.  But, how to proceed? Let's see how Domain-Driven

In a complex climb or on a mountaineering expedition the goal and the map (see also) to achieve it are essential but are not enough.  On top of these, a set of trade-offs and decisions need to be handled to successfully and safely get to the goal, such as: how

Handling dates and timestamps is a very common, almost basic necessity in any program or application. It might seem to be something basic and uninteresting, but from my passion for history and through my experiences in designing IT solutions for the Travel and Transportation industry, I found it a non-trivial

Digital transformations, and also the recent experiences in the post-COVID world, stress the importance of IT and Architectural solutions to achieve business agility in the enterprise world. Here, I want to highlight my experiences in defining architectures, in the light of the IBM Cognitive Enterprise perspective.   Building the Cognitive Enterprise:

Personally, I am interested both in history and hiking in the mountains, and I love using available maps to better understand and orient myself. I am often involved and asked about the technical aspects of Cloud Technologies, and I get this question both from IBM Colleagues and from Clients.  Since