A Curvium Manifesto
As the UK just went to the polls for the 2024 General Election, we thought it would be timely for our first blog post to present our own manifesto.
The Curvium Manifesto
The IT Sector needs change.
Complexity, fragility, and operational management challenges have plagued our networks, IT infrastructure, and the solutions that secure them for too long. Skilled IT practitioners have been architecting, building, testing, deploying and supporting these end-to-end environments for decades, enabling businesses to succeed and grow, silently grappling with mind-bending and ever-increasing complexity that can be difficult to comprehend.
We don’t believe this is really anybody’s fault. There are so many factors to consider. Factors like organic growth, “differentiated” vendor solutions, the never-ending stream of next-generation technology, contradictory management philosophies (insourcing vs outsourcing anyone?), customisations, scope-creep, evolving requirements, staff churn, you name it; even just keeping the lights on can feel like a significant challenge in itself, let alone planning for the future to enable business growth and efficiency. IT started out to make our lives easier, but is now considered a burden. It doesn’t have to be like this.
We believe we can improve your day-to-day experience working in IT, and help to get your evenings and weekends back, whilst at the same time providing the digital foundations that allow the companies we support to thrive and grow in highly competitive marketplaces.
For decades, we have worked in many IT disciplines and have seen the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, across different verticals and different technical domains. Sometimes requirements force us into technical corners or push us along paths we wouldn’t voluntarily choose (whether we should just say “NO” is the topic of another post) but acceptance of this while sticking to a simple philosophy is the way to survive and thrive.
This philosophy is based on a process of simplification, evaluation, and evolution.
Simplify
You’ve probably all heard of the KISS principle and Design Thinking? Every business requirement we address and design choice we make has a ripple effect on the quality of the IT system, the people that operate it and the business that uses it. Our philosophy starts with the idea that we should always strive to simplify, accept when we cannot, but always keep our principles in mind. Sometimes, we cannot avoid using complex solutions, especially in an end-to-end multi-vendor, full-stack infrastructure environment, and controlling the potential for spiralling complexity is what simplicity is all about. This approach to simplification means, not activating features and protocols unless they’re truly required, avoiding and resisting “snowflake” exceptions, resisting the temptation to fix application issues with infrastructure band-aids, striving for consistency in our design and operational practices and being wary of vendor solutions that hide great complexity via abstractions. This is a way of thinking.
We must reduce fragility, reduce risk and the knock-on effects of mitigations and poorly thought-out fixes, which bring about increased costs, decreased agility, long issue resolution times and a host of other undesirable outcomes. Simplification helps us to avoid the perception that IT is a hindrance to the business it supports, rather than proving it to be the enabler it should be.
Evaluate
We need architectures and systems that we can measure and evaluate at all times, and this should be a consistent practice. Our chosen infrastructure should be able to provide us with the telemetry and data points that enable constant observation of its behavior, helping us analyse and troubleshoot when things break (we know things always break) and accurately predict when we might need to augment or refactor what we have built as requirements change. We must be able to assess, at a regular cadence, whether the architectures we designed and deployed to meet today’s requirements still meet those business and technical requirements at some future point in time. We need to baseline and measure consistently in order to do this systematically.
Evolve
We will always need to refactor and rethink our infrastructure as things change, always in the face of the socio-economic demands of our businesses and customers. Hardware and software generations come and go, application requirements shift and technical innovations appear at seemingly exponential rates. If we’ve simplified our architecture as best we can and modernised our operations on top of this foundation, we will have time to assess how things need to evolve and stand some chance of actually implementing change seamlessly and successfully, allowing us to deliver the best experience to our organisations, helping them not just to keep up but to get ahead. IT should be the ultimate enabler, not just a worn-out cliché. And we didn’t even talk about AI yet! We’ll save that for another post.
Our Commitment To You
We believe that what really matters is building Trust with our customers by always Doing The Right Thing. The foundation of our principles comes from many decades of collective experience building IT Infrastructure environments, as buyers and end-users, at System Integrators and many years working for Networking Vendors. To us, this means we can put this to work consultatively, helping you pick the best and most appropriate solutions, from the right vendors, always conforming to a defined architectural pattern, allowing you to implement a permanent cycle of Simplification, Evaluation and Evolution.
We are Curvium.
Come talk to us and we’ll help you build the infrastructure of the future