MDB Weekly is a multi-format, weekly summary of information from the past week in Modern Digital Business. It's available as an article, an email newsletter, and as a LinkedIn newsletter. It will be published weekly on Mondays.

First Up: New Course Launches Tomorrow!

How do you keep your private data safe in the public cloud? Is it even possible? In fact, your data and your application are likely safer in the public cloud than in your private data center. 

Introducing, the Basics of Cloud Security course!

This course will show you, at a high level, the guiding principles and policies you need to understand to keep your cloud-based and cloud-native application safe and secure.

This course is designed for technical executives, managers, and leaders that want to understand, at a high level, how to build a safe and secure cloud application. It’s also for cloud architects and senior developers that want to understand how to communicate basic cloud security principles to your company’s executives and leaders.

This is an email course, available from Atchison Academy. It is delivered as a series of emails, one lesson per email, one email per day until the course is complete.

February 28th is launch day!

Check it out — Launch date is Feb 28

Last week’s top story: Agility Vs. Complexity in Cloud-Native Applications

One of the main motivations for using cloud-native application methodologies is to simplify our applications and their infrastructures. Cloud-native methodologies are designed around creating larger and more sophisticated applications without unduly increasing the application complexity.

And central to everything is agility. Our companies must be agile to meet and exceed the expectations of our customers, our shareholders, and the abilities of our competitors. Companies without agility are doomed competitively.

Simplicity…and agility. We need them both. Yet, there is a vicious cycle that works against this philosophy.

In a previous article, I discussed the tradeoffs between choice and complexity in building cloud-native applications. As a result, we tend to give our cloud-native service teams the ability to make their own decisions. By giving teams the ability to design, develop, and operate their services in ways that make sense to them, you increase their power. After all, teams that make their own decisions are innovative teams.

However, that increased choice came with a cost—complexity. As you enable teams to make independent decisions, they begin to make independent decisions—independently. The result is more complexity in your IT infrastructure. Complexity leads to a reduction in the ability to innovate rapidly. Complexity leads to stagnation. It’s the opposite of agility.

For a company to be agile, we must allow teams to make the necessary choices to accomplish their goals. Yet agility requires choice, which leads to complexity. As a result, complexity leads to reduced agility.

It’s a vicious cycle.

How can we keep agility in our company culture without sacrificing simplicity and heading toward IT Complexity?

Read the full article online

Finally: Missing out on insights?

choice vs. complexity concept

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I hope you enjoyed this edition of Modern Digital Business weekly. If you enjoyed this, check out other formats available, including email. All versions are released weekly on Mondays.