Cyber Insurance Requirements: The Security Controls Insurers Now Expect
A few renewals ago, a client of mine, a regional accounting firm with about sixty staff, forwarded me their application with a note about the…
MDR vs. EDR vs. XDR: What Your Business Actually Needs
Every few weeks, a CEO or managing partner forwards me a vendor proposal for managed detection and response, or one of its close cousins, with…
CI/CD Pipeline Setup: A Practical Guide for Growing Dev Teams
The first CI/CD pipeline I ever inherited was a single Jenkins job called “build_final_v2.” It had 41 shell steps, three hardcoded passwords, and a comment…
Hybrid Cloud vs. Multi-Cloud: Which Strategy Fits Your Business?
About once a quarter, someone in a leadership meeting asks me to settle the hybrid vs multi-cloud question once and for all. It usually comes…
Virtual CIO Services: What a vCIO Does and What It Costs
I have written proposals, service pages, and sales decks for managed service providers for a long time now, and no line item causes more confusion…
Co-Managed IT: How an MSP Works Alongside Your Internal Team
A few years ago I sat in on a kickoff call that showed me exactly what co-managed IT looks like when it works. A 300-person…
Staff Augmentation vs. Outsourcing: Which Model Fits Your Project?
Every engineering leader eventually runs into the staff augmentation vs. outsourcing question. Usually it lands in Slack late on a Thursday, sent by someone in…
Legacy System Modernization: Refactor, Rebuild, or Replace?
Every few months someone puts the same slide in front of me. Three boxes, three verbs: refactor, rebuild, replace. The sponsor wants me to point…
SOC 2 Compliance: A Practical Guide for Service Companies
Every few weeks I get some version of the same phone call about SOC 2 compliance. A founder or operations lead at a services firm…
DevOps Services: What They Include and How to Measure ROI
Almost every company that hires me for DevOps services opens with the same question: “What are we actually paying for, and how will we know…
