Most conference weeks, I come home with a notebook full of “we’ll see.” This time I came home with a notebook full of “I want to try that.” I spent two days at NetApp INSIGHT 2026 in Las Vegas, and a lot of what I saw sat right where I live: AI infrastructure, agents, and…
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Business Continuity Planning: The Third Thing Backup and DR Don’t Cover
I sat in on a recovery once where every system came back exactly on schedule. Servers up. Data restored. Identity revalidated, clean. The IT team should have been taking a well-earned victory lap. Instead the building was still dead quiet, because nobody could take a customer call: the phone system routed through the data center…
The Sovol M1D: Backer Report
I am, by nature, an even-keeled, patient man. Thirty years in IT will do that to you: you learn that most things get fixed by staying calm and working the problem. I have even twice been awarded the “cool under pressure” award at the company holiday party over the years. And yet here I am,…
Azure vs. AWS vs. Google Cloud for Small Business
A client called me last year with a question that made me pause before answering: “Should we be on Azure or AWS?” I asked what they were actually trying to do. Turned out the answer was “run QuickBooks and host a WordPress site.” Neither of those needed a cloud platform decision at all: they needed…
Backups vs. DR: Why You Need Both
I’ve sat in more than one post-incident review where the room genuinely believed they were covered, right up until the moment they weren’t. Backups were running. Reports were green. And the business was still down for two days, or in a few cases weeks, because nobody had actually thought through what happens after the data…
Cloud Computing Explained: Which Parts Actually Matter for a Beginner
Somebody asked me at a church picnic earlier this summer what I actually do for a living, and when I said “I build cloud architecture for large companies,” I watched their eyes do that thing where they’re still smiling but have already left the conversation. I even got a “that sounds interesting.” I don’t blame…