Foundations are so vital with most buildings. No less so with the extension of any organisation towards use of the Internet and the Web. It is a big deal when a company has a public face in any way and no less so than on the Web. Foundations used to be formed in this regard by employing Web-savvy developers, specialists in the various requirements of having a website, and a web master, to oversee it all and manage the critical tasks such as security monitoring. They would be competent in security, protocols, web servers, and the workings of web sites and the architecture behind them. Nowadays it would need to include expertise in the Cloud too. Yet is this being eroded? Is it taken for granted nowadays that the Web is deskilled. A technically minded enthusiastic teen can set themselves up in the Cloud and Chat GPT can guide them in producing a web site. Why then bother with employing specialists.
The danger of venturing into the Web from the safety of the corporate enterprise intranet is that mistakes are very public. Search engines pick up your expired links. Anyone can click those links and many know how to set up a script to click them repeatedly or worse and possibly overload your servers. It is not a safe place. Errors can be detrimental to the company reputation. Excessive errors, not managed but allowed to continue, can even result in loss of indemnity insurance and mean the company can lose its ability to operate.
Finding skilled developers with sufficient foundational knowledge might be a challenge but lack of awareness of this need, and naivety among even the director level managers of a company might threaten the foundations of maintaining a public Web presence, an outward face in the cyber world. The Cloud won’t solve it. It is an internal issue of the architecture of the IT dimension of an organisation no matter its size.
It is vital to follow normal practices. The knowledge required to roll your own architecture and maintain it and provide skills to maintain it is too great today. The whole Web community is designing how things are done and providing the solutions necessary for an organisation to use the Web in today’s world. The developers need to keep to this script. There is safety in numbers. It is well that a script prompter exists for all to use which is AI. More than just the developer forums exist today. We can ask our favourite forum but ask our favourite AI too. This keeps us easily connected with the hive mind needed to produce and maintain a Web presence whether on prem or Cloud. The users of our Web facilities out in the wild are owed an easy and gentle experience that does not alarm them or fray their nerves. More-so their business and personal interests must not be put at risk when they interact with our organisation online. To ensure this we all the more need to follow industry practices and not try to do our own thing.
The Cloud too is a party, a stakeholder, when we use it. Loose ends which can be wilfully exploited online or unwittingly tripped over, these can damage other users of the Cloud and if allowed to go unmanaged might even cause the Cloud provider to refuse us their services.
We need to keep an eye on our foundations. To ignore this might leave even the better developers at a loss to make good on the loss of a sound bed rock on which to build the company outward online face. That would not be good for the reputation of the company and the trust of its clients and customers, and other stakeholders affected.
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