Readers of my blog might have noticed my tagline that said “The revolution will being at the NIH on July 4th 2009” has been changed to one about pearls of wisdom and observations about cloud computing.
At the beginning of 2009, I set the goal of changing the Web Interface used by my organization to launch enterprise applications to one that was more secure and had more function.
Over the past year and half this goal has lead my team on a journey way beyond anything we imagined. We have learned a lot about authentication, security scanning, web customization, configuration of certificates, and our last hurdle will be integrating smart card authentication.
The revolution did begin on July 4th last year, but it wasn’t a shot heard round the world, it was more like a stealth attack (nothing nefarious). The infrastructure is in place, and over the next year we will use a simple set of principles to expand how applications reach users securely.
I have learned from this experience that iterative review processes are important to executing large scale changes. Ask a lot of questions and make sure there are no misunderstandings due to process or vernacular. Reduce complexity and strive for simplicity in the architecture and design.
And most importantly, constantly re-evaluate the situation and stay focused.
If I had it to do over again, I would have added some consulting time to the acquisition.
In the coming weeks I will post more about new application delivery platform and the lessons we learned.
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