The Register Columnists

Chris Tofts

Contact Mail Follow RSS feed
Chris Tofts has worked on archaeology in more than 200 data centres. He has served as a scientist at HP Research Labs and is the UK's first board-level chief mathematics officer - at Concinnitas. Chris is visiting professor of Computer Science at Swansea University.

The biggest British Airways IT meltdown WTF: 200 systems in the critical path?

One of the key principles of designing any high availability system is to make sure only vital apps or functions use it and everything else doesn't – sometimes referred to as KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). High availability or reliability is always technically challenging at whatever systems level it is achieved, be it hardware …
Chris Tofts, 5 Jun 2017
The Red Queen

Management's agile, digital (insert buzzword here) strategy ossifying? Blame the Red Queen

"In our country," Alice told the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, "you'd generally get to somewhere else – if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" the Queen replies. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get …
Chris Tofts, 17 May 2017
Mouse photo via Shutterstock

Of mice and migrations: How a rodent's DNA maps to architectural complexity

Managers of enterprise systems are being bombarded by messages touting the supposed benefits of cloud for cost reductions and greater IT “flexibility.” Bosses are pressured to, for instance, develop a hybrid solution of off- and on-premises systems: the difficult stuff is left in the company’s private cloud, and the rest …
Chris Tofts, 8 May 2017
cloudy spaceship illustration. photo by shutterstock

This easy one cloud trick is in DANGER. Why?

Legacy, or technical debt – call it what you will – has always been a major challenge to techies looking to move forward and never more so than now, as you're being asked to shift data centre software to the cloud. Possibly the biggest challenge in dealing with legacy is identifying who “owned” an application when it was …
Chris Tofts, 9 Mar 2017

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2018

Cookies Privacy Ts&Cs