Cloud Systems

There was a time when there was no "cloud" and all business systems ran on physical servers that we often housed in an on-premises data center.  Today, many companies have no physical servers, at all, and run everything in the cloud. However, even more companies are somewhere in between.

Rather than having a cloud always, or even a cloud first, mindset, I am of the cloud when it makes sense mindset.  While cloud systems can offer benefits such as scalability, accessibility, reliability, flexibility, reduced maintenance and increased performance, cloud solutions can also be very complex and unpredictably expensive. 

When I was hired as Director of Technical Services for IMA Financial Group, one of the first major projects I supported was to build a data warehouse in AWS and then migrate the company's data, from multiple databases, to the new data warehouse. While the Business Analytics focused on cleaning up, defining and consolidating the data, my Infrastructure team and I were focused on building out the infrastructure and setting up secure connections to our new AWS tenant. The architecture of the implementation included setting up a persistent VPN from the production data center to the AWS tenant. We then built an Active Directory (AD) server and connected it to the IMA AD forest. After a complete AD sync, we then built 3 SQL servers in a High-Density cluster. Finally, we built a SQL reporting server.

As IMA's data warehouse grew, it became obvious that the data warehouse architecture, with a SQL reporting server, was not going to meet the long-term needs of the company. After many discussions, the IT Leadership team determined that Power BI would be a better data reporting and analysis solution. As such, it made sense to build a data lake architecture in Azure and migrate the data from AWS. This proved to be the most cost-effective solution that facilitated a better connection to Power BI. Rather than a "lift and shift" migration, we determined the best solution would be to build-out Azure SQL Managed Instances to build the backbone for the data lake. Also, as we were already utilizing Microsoft Entra for Access and Identity Management, we didn't need to migration the AD server. Once the new Azure environment was built, we used Azure ExpressRoute to connect the AWS tenant to Azure. Once everything was built out and connected, the Infrastructure team handed the project over the Business Intelligence team so they could start mapping and migrating data.

I have extensive experience and expertise in Microsoft 365, for multiple companies. From on-premises to cloud migrations, to greenfield builds, to business-to-business tenant migrations, I've just about done and seen it all. 

Check out this page for more details.

My first exposure to the cloud, as we know it today, was when I was selected to manage support for the Beta test of VMware Cloud Director. At the time, I was a Technical Support Manager for VMware, located in their Broomfield, CO support center. Having already been deeply exposed to the concepts and components of virtualization, the cloud seemed like the next logical step, but on a larger scale and on someone else's hardware. 

During the Beta test, I was responsible for a global team of Technical Support Engineers that we hand-selected by their local leaders to provide technical support to customers participating in the test.  Upon the successful completion of the test, the members of the Beta Support team and I were recognized for our contributions to the successful test by senior company leadership. To this day, VMware Cloud Director is an important product in VMware's portfolio.