Cloud Adoption: laying foundations for business agility.
When a company has to scale up their operations quickly, it’s a simple, inexpensive process for cloud adopters; a process that can even be automated. Tasks that traditionally took weeks...
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Involve your team in digital transformation, leverage data and grow your business.
If you invest in a new digital platform, but your team isn’t trained on using it correctly, its value is severely diminished. For example, your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform...
Digital transformation: first steps toward sustainable growth
Technologies like cloud computing, AI (Artificial Intelligence) personalisation and automation are the foundation of the world’s most successful companies. But these technologies are now essential to survival for any business...
How do we manage cybersecurity in the COVID-19 remote work era?
Over the last twelve months, industry surveys consistently found that between 70% to 90% of companies have radically expanded their work-from-home programs. If your organisation is like the majority, some...
Women and Leadership at Versent: Nicole Devine
This blog post forms part of our series, ‘Women and Leadership at Versent’. Nicole Devine is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Versent. Though her career spans over 20 years working with technology, Nicole began...
Managed cloud services should be more than just reactive
Managed cloud services continue to be a major growth industry, and it’s not surprising when you consider the rate of cloud adoption. Not all cloud service providers are created equal,...
Women and Leadership at Versent: Andrea Milner
We sat down with Andrea Milner, GM Finance, to chat about her work, leadership values, a career-defining moment, and some advice she would leave for anyone also wanting to make...
Women and Leadership at Versent: Isha Marwah
Isha Marwah is a Principal Engineer at Versent Australia. We sat down with her to chat about a typical day in her life, her leadership philosophy and some great initiatives...
Harnessing AWS best practices with the Well Architected Framework – Cost Optimisation Pillar
At Versent, the AWS Well-Architected Framework is used to help our customers build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and cost efficient infrastructure possible for all types of applications. The framework...
Re:Invent 2020 keynote recap – our view of all the top announcements
Re:invent has well and truly started and we’ve had plenty of awesome announcements come out of Andy Jassy’s keynote today. The two announcements that resonated with me were: Babelfish for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL –...
Cloud-based Identity & Access Management: build or buy?
Which approach is better value long-term? Identity and Access Management – IAM – is an essential part of every organisation’s efficient online operations. The question is, should you build your...
5 ways to reduce your data platform costs.
The team at Versent have compiled 5 easy ways - leveraging existing AWS Redshift features - to significantly reduce your run costs.
What is Enterprise Data Management?
Why is it important? How do I go about implementing it? If you’ve asked yourself any of these questions, or even if you’ve never come across the term “enterprise data...
Modernising Legacy Platforms to expand growth opportunities
Businesses of all sizes and types are constantly looking to create new or optimize existing revenue streams by evolving their systems and processes to increase efficiency, decrease cost and improve...
Should you consider Well-Architected and what does it mean?
Wherever you are in your cloud journey, it is important to always ensure that your workloads are running optimally. There are many factors that contribute to a well architected environment....
AWS Account Structure Strategies
This post was originally published on the Stax blog. Organisations typically need a multi-account strategy to support the requirements of running their AWS ecosystem. It’s important to set up the accounts in a...
Your business ecosystem will never be the same again
Whether we like it or not, we are all connected. COVID-19 has demonstrated with ruthless efficiency the fact that what happens in one corner of the globe can impose a...
Ping Identity names Versent APAC partner of the year
Ping has named Versent, a Melbourne-headquartered technology, managed services and PaaS provider, “Partner of the Year” for the Asia Pacific market.
Versent delivers John Holland out of the data centre and into Amazon Web Services (AWS) in record time
Infrastructure and property company John Holland made a strategic decision in 2017 to move onto Amazon Web Services (AWS), in order to make its ICT spend more efficient and move...
VERSENT NAMED LAUNCH PARTNER FOR AWS OUTPOSTS IN AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND
AWS OUTPOSTS AWS Outposts is a new fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any customer datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for...
How to harness AWS best practices with the Well Architected Framework
Versent is now an AWS approved Well Architected Partner, and we have built a dedicated practice to offer our customers AWS Well-Architected Reviews, that is completely complimentary. At Versent, the...
Let’s talk about Sex(ism)
Last night Versent hosted the Men Championing Change (MCC) oversubscribed meetup where “Everyday Sexism” was discussed. Everyday sexism occurs in both formal and casual settings and can be something that’s...
Was it that bad? Tales from a Versent Iteration Manager…
If you’ve had any experience working in technology, this scenario probably rings true and I know there’s some of you out there who drag your feet into that meeting room...
How to get your data project right when you go cloud native
Understand your data When doing ETL/Data projects, it is really important that you figure out what your data is. How it is structured, how it gets modified, how frequently it...
Why I will get on my mountain bike and ride 650kms for mental health and TourXOz
This Saturday, 1 June 2019, I will join 10 of my Versent teammates, and 50 others to ride 650kms from Hann River Road House (outside of Cairns) to the top...
This My Architecture Live Series @ AWS Sydney Summit : Versent’s Migration Factory
Versent was asked to take part in the “This Is My Architecture” series at the 2019 AWS Sydney Summit. The series focuses on unique architectures that solve real-world customer problems....
My first ever AWS Summit Sydney 2019
I’d heard the hype around AWS Summit, and now I can understand the hype to be true. This week, I joined 14,000 other humans in fast-moving cues and with an...
HOW AN AUTOMATION FIRST ETHOS CREATED ‘ALARM BOT’
Every monitoring improvement, however small, that the Versent Managed Services (VMS) team learn along the way now gets fed into these recipes, further developing Alarm Bot. As some of you...
Being a woman in tech on International Women’s Day
Purple and white balloons, home-made scones, pav and hot cross buns set the scene for our morning tea fundraiser to celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD). Before we ravished the amazing...
BALANCE FOR BETTER
Balance is not solely a women’s responsibility, nor is it only faced by women. Laura Brandon, Senior API /Microservices Engineer, Versent Today marks International Women’s Day, a global celebration...
GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR SPRINT WITH THE 3 AMIGOS
Have you started a planned sprint only to realise hidden dependencies? Thought your stories were adequately analysed, and realised mid-sprint that they were not really sprint ready? Relax, you are...
Why and how to do DevSecOps
Security and DevOps terminology arguments, and how they relate to IT Transformation. I have a long running dispute over terminology with my boss. He is a purist and is trying...
TOP 25 “BEST OF THE BEST” SESSIONS FROM AWS RE:INVENT
My 2018 was rounded out by recapping some of the highlights from AWS re:Invent for some of our customers. Now we’re in 2019 (happy new year everyone), and I’m sharing...
The subtle theme you might have missed from Vogels’ keynote at AWS re:Invent and other key learnings
As an engineer neck deep into AWS thanks to my role at Versent, I could not have been happier to head to AWS re:Invent – one of the largest tech...
Your “sur-thrival” guide to AWS re:Invent
On the long dusty road to any new event, several things always cross my mind. 1. Who is going to be there? 2. What type of new people will I meet?...
How to negotiate like a four year old girl
It’s 4pm on a school day. A little girl is meandering about her dad’s general store and she asks for a chocolate snack and the response she gets is a...
DevSecOps – the what, why and how
I have worked in the security caper since the early 2000s in various capacities inside enterprises and vendors, and in other IT fields for 10 years or so prior to...
Keep your head in the clouds with your feet on the ground
Australian organisations are forecast to spend $5.6 billion on public cloud services in 2019. By 2020, local public cloud spend will reach $6.6 billion, and hit $7.7 billion by 2021,...
Lessons learnt from going serverless
Versent recently started working with a large telco to help build and deploy APIs and microservices. Our customer was very clear about what they needed the new microservices to deliver:...
Three talks, three security conferences on three continents in ten days!
Notwithstanding the excessive time spent on a plane and having to adjust to several different time zones; I definitely had my work cut out for me during this time as...
How we became #7 in Australia’s LinkedIn Top Startups
Deciding to join Versent was all about timing. When I met the founders of Versent for the first time, the business was just a year old. Their passion for starting...
Women Who Code
I recently presented a talk on serverless to the Women Who Code community held at the Versent Sydney office. Women Who Code is an international non-profit organisation dedicated to inspiring...
Never be too big to ‘sweep the sheds’
Three years ago, I left my cushy corporate job and took a chance on a one year old start up. Why? Maybe I was a little crazy, but mostly, I...
How you can benefit from the AWS Well-Architected Framework
AWS is great at giving you the building blocks for your cloud implementation. In fact, we often use the metaphor of building a house to explain how you can –...
We live and breathe a culture of learning – here’s why
As an AWS premier partner, Versent is always upskilling our team in the ways of AWS. We most recently achieved 100 AWS certifications via the Amazon Web Services Partner Network....
Don’t be a fail whale – secure your containers!
I was pretty stoked to be invited to talk about container security and participate in a panel discussion… I’m not going to lie, it is always a little daunting to...
Has your digital transformation actually been a success?
Like me, you’ve likely sat through project status update meetings where month in, month out we’re told our program is ‘green’ until all of a sudden one day, it’s ‘red’…...
Patch Your S_it with Amazon Systems Manager
You can patch your EC2 systems and run SSM in a few easy steps. But first, why should you use SSM? It’s a fully managed service It’s integrated with IAM and Cloudtrail provides access...
What is the best way to easily ingest data into a Data Lake?
Why you need a Data Lake is a topic that has been discussed at length. Today, I want to answer a commonly asked customer question – “What is the best...
The art of unlearning
The #1 skill to have in the 21st century is to “learn the art of learning” The team at Versent was slated to join a new client on a micro-services...
How DevSecOps meetups can help to uplift the technology industry
Last week, myself and the Versent security team attended the inaugural Sydney DevSecOps meetup. I was excited to see 70+ people in attendance, from a range of industries and a...
AWS Re:invent 2017 Recap – The Security Version
I would like to share a recap from AWS re:invent 2017, focusing only on the security releases from the conference. Release 1: AWS Private Link Features: 1) AWS Private Link allows...
My re:invent highlights
The first thing I noticed, and perhaps the most exciting, was how much of a focus there was on machine learning. From Werner Vogel’s keynote speech (for those of you...
Evolution of “trust” in the world of cloud
Long before cloud and data centres, everyone had their personal servers to host their websites, applications etc. These servers used to be in a “server room” on a particular floor...
Taking the ‘right’ risks and reaping the benefits
We are beyond the early days of the internet where everything security was viewed as in terms of firewalls and network appliances. Security solutions have extended beyond a binary outcome...
The Importance of Feedback
It hurts, right? We expect software to give us the right feedback, and at the right time. As developers, we do write good documentation or the correct log messages at...
The Life of a Versent Employee
Allow us to introduce ourselves. Founded in 2014, Versent began life as a small tech start-up with around 20 team members. Fast forward to today, and we’ve grown our team...
The Psychology of Risk
I work in the professional arena and on a daily basis discover, analyse and make recommendations on risks that exist in organisations. But I am frequently dismayed by what I...
Mental Health: IT is a big issue for the industry
The first step to helping prevent this is acknowledging that it is a problem in the first place, and reducing the social stigma surrounding mental illness. Encouraging people to open...
Heroes and Villains and the time in-between
The Hero As a managed service engineer you are often rewarded with praise for successful implementation of a change or delivery of an improvement idea. On occasions, you “save the...
The Road towards a Secure User Experience
Working in security, at times I feel like I am living a double life – one as an “all-knowing” consultant, the other as a hypocritical human being who makes mistakes...
Curate, Not Inspect
The good news is, tools to detect, inform and report are getting better, so are the adoption of the processes. From Sonarqube to Selenium, from Agile Testing to DevOps. However,...
How Data Contributes to a Virtuous Growth Cycle
In fact, a recent survey cited in the Harvard Business Review found that 63% of firms plan to invest more than $10 million in 2017 (compared to 24% in 2012)....
Soft skills in a hard industry; the professional value of personal growth
It is often easy to identify our own technical inadequacies and what specifically is needed to remedy those inadequacies because they are readily apparent to us. If you can’t figure...
Hackers Are People Too
For those who didn’t see it, the early section dealt with Steve at University and I think gave a glimpse of how the roots of the IT industry based in...
Service NSW celebrates a win at The Identity Excellence Awards
The annual event held in Chicago and hosted by Ping, receives nominations from outstanding companies such as Netflix, Adidas, Cisco System and many more. A huge congratulations to all winners! This...
AWS Account Strategies for Enterprises
After you have rushed out and created that first AWS account, to gain an understanding of AWS and play with Lambda! It’s important to take sometime and decide how many...
Consumer Privacy
Around 10 years ago, a couple of mates and I had a bright idea that we could (perhaps singlehandedly) transform the face of electronic banking. We put together a prototype...
Versent on The Meteoric Rise From 0 to 130 in Under 3 Years
On asking if they could have predicted such rapid success James offered: “I don’t think we could have tipped that we would win BRW Fast 50 and lodge number 7 in that”...
The AWS Security Landscape Evolution
These are questions which were easier to answer five or so years ago, when organisations typically owned one cloud (AWS) account. The AWS account only had one kind of server...