Digital Promises on Digital Infrastructures at Scale

‘But where do we start?’

The security of your SaaS cloud solutions starts with the review of three major areas.

“Project Zero Trust” is a business novel by George Finney.

What are the real challenges in cloud security these days?

Model Context Protocols (MCP, see my post on their security) are the new glue between humans, chatbots, and old school IT.

A café order between a customer and a waiter turns out to be the same pattern behind APIs, contracts, and IT support tickets: request, promise, delivery, acquittal.

Power has a bad reputation, but no group survives without exercising it — from combat leadership to IETF standards, understanding it precedes resisting abuse.

If you are in security and not fully on top of AI risk, you want to look at MCP now, as this is going to be popular and risky.

Let’s look at a practical example from one of my clients.

Power does not automatically flow from those that have it to those that are influenced by it.

What do a laptop, a smartphone, and a smart thermostat have in common with a browser, a database, and a data center?

From braking a car to autoscaling a website to a fighter pilot's OODA loop — every control system runs on feedback, and 'agile' just means a faster loop.

Computers are terribly reliable, in general.

Infrastructures are nice, but the applications that they enable are where the value of information technology is.

I have found that no discussion on risk is going to lead anywhere if it does not make clear who suffers from it.

How does vibe coding work in the real?

Power is a concept that is widely used and ill defined.

Het nationale sentiment is negatief over de afhankelijkheid van ‘big tech’.

As we mature processes, they come within reach of actual automation.

Detection I should have acted on the first signals more aggressively.

Every digital system reduces to three entangled elements — storage, networks, and processors — mapped through two simple diagrams for how data moves.

Most digital infrastructures are meant to communicate or coordinate, or are in support of other digital infrastructures that communicate or coordinate.

Five elements of cloud security Historically, IT security started with infrastructure security.

How cool would it be to let an AI do some of the grunt work in analyzing the risk of applications and services.

How to fix the WiFi?

The international arena has many actors that can influence digital infrastructures.

Who is really doing Zero Trust?

In 2005 I visited my father in France.

Risk is the flip side of value.

Consumers of digital infrastructures benefit from not running them themselves, but having a provider who serves more consumers do it for them.

What do roads, airports, the internet, the electricity network, and a search engine have in common?

A diagram of a phone, a speaker, and the cloud encodes real architecture decisions — where data lives, who's responsible, and how cloud-native complicates it.

Here is the draft design of the graphic novel version of this book, which may or may not happen..

One of the key aspirations of Digital Infrastructures at Scale is to equip you with the tools to shape and drive change in your professional environment—especially when your goal is to lead a transformation.

A trained LLM is just software needing a lot of RAM — tracing AI infrastructure from training data to 'Inference as a Service', the same as any other cloud model.

Building Our Own Cloud Kootwijk: Rethinking Digital Sovereignty In the Netherlands, we are currently engaged in a heated debate about the undesirable dominance of big tech, particularly over a significant portion of the digital infrastructure of the Dutch…

Zero Trust Architecture is an approach to better cybersecurity.

A while back, I introduced my take on deployment diagrams for cloud and devops infrastructure.

Cloud-native software development enables new practices.

Public cloud migrations come in different shapes and sizes, but I see three major approaches.

Cloud is too important to leave to technical people.

Getting to value quickly has value in itself.

Does security in the cloud ever bother you?

Here is a high-level overview of the SaaS provider business model and some of the strategic options that are in there.

Mapping AWS EC2 onto the nine blocks of the Business Model Canvas, from customer segments to cost structure, to see what actually makes an IaaS business work.

Even in a cloud world, reducing server count is a lofty goal in itself.

One of the big projects I was working a while back is directory services for identity management.

Podcasting has its own digital infrastructures, for example in hosting them.