Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Every finance person I know lives in the same loop approaching the end of the month, quarter, or fiscal year. Leadership wants to know where the financials will land (most times before the close has occurred). CS wants customer margins. Someone on the People team needs each department’s AI spend for an OKR review, and they need it quickly to make business decisions. Each answer sits in a different tool or a different spreadsheet, and I bounce across all of them several times a day.

You are mid-investigation, chasing a spike or pulling a number for finance, and you hit a term or a workflow you need to look up. You should not have to lose your place to find an answer. Guide lives in a fixed spot in the left sidebar, always one click away. It opens a panel on the right side that sits beside your page instead of covering it. Your chart, filters, and time range stay exactly where they were. Nothing gets rebuilt and you keep the thread of what you were investigating.

The compliance question isn't "are we using a private cloud?" Rather, it’s "does our private cloud actually do what compliance requires?" Private cloud has a reputation for solving compliance problems that it doesn't always deserve. The logic seems straightforward: keep data off shared public infrastructure, maintain more direct control, and satisfy the auditors.

Splitting one big pull request into five smaller ones doesn’t automatically make review faster. It just moves the complexity from the diff to your head, unless something keeps track of the order for you.

To deploy an application we haven't seen before, we need two things out of its repository. One is a Dockerfile that builds it. The other is a service definition saying what runs, which ports it listens on, which databases it needs, and what environment variables it expects. Customers arrive with a git URL, and we figure out the rest. We even do the tricky task of generating a Dockerfile if it doesn't already exist in the codebase. We've built a solution for this twice already.

Feasibility is a prioritization question that comes before strategy. The five-question check produces a "now, later, or fix blockers first", before anyone touches a target architecture. Strategy earns its place once feasibility returns "now." Feasibility comes before strategy. Before anyone designs a target architecture, builds a runbook, or commits to a multicloud operating model, the question is whether the migration is the right move now, and what would make it fail.

Hyperscale providers are nothing if not consistent in their temptation of enterprise IT buyers. They bombard leaders with a simple message: migrate to the public cloud, shut down data centres, and enjoy both financial savings and operational agility. However, as UK enterprises have scaled their digital footprints, a more nuanced reality has bitten. Public cloud costs have swollen.

The 14 Cloud Security Principles from the UK's National Cyber Security Centre form the primary framework for UK public sector cloud procurement and, increasingly, for private sector regulated workloads. Any credible cloud security case in the UK context has to address these principles explicitly. For organizations placing workloads on sovereign cloud specifically, the mapping matters more than for general cloud procurement.

We are thrilled to announce an update to our Excel Add-ins, bringing expanded support for popular cloud services and databases. The release introduces new objects, fields, API capabilities, and authentication options for BigCommerce, FreshBooks, HubSpot, NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, Zoho CRM, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.