Thomas Smart

About Thomas Smart
Thomas is a Lead Consultant at Sourced with over 18 years of experience in delivering digital products. He gained a passion for evangelising Serverless architecture through his enthusiasm for cloud and entry into the AWS Ambassador programme.
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Posts by Thomas Smart

How to Craft a Watertight RFP for your Regulated Enterprise

Creating and Assessing Cloud Adoption RFPs Cloud adoption presents many challenges, particularly for large, regulated enterprises with entrenched processes and systems. Selecting the best cloud partner to support the journey is also difficult. The complexity of cloud adoption makes it hard for procurement teams to articulate exactly what’s needed then interrogate vendor proposals.  We’ve developed […]

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Security In The Cloud

Introduction The pervasive “aaS” (as a Service) models introduced by cloud computing, combined with the use of declarative infrastructure-as-code and controls-as-code has radically altered how we think about securing enterprise environments. For those of us who have been in the field for some time, adapting our security reasoning the public cloud requires not just a […]

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Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2023 | Key Announcements and Insights

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the key announcements from Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) re:Invent 2023, highlighting the latest advancements in cloud technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML). It offers insights into AWS’s strategic direction and the implications for cloud computing in the coming year. AWS re:Invent 2023, the much-anticipated annual event, […]

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CTRAG – A Walkthrough

Cloud adoption for financial services is well underway globally, and with the impending release of the Cloud Technology Risk Assessment Guidelines (CTRAG – currently in draft) the central bank of Malaysia is moving to ensure that both Institutional and Neo banks under its jurisdiction are provided with clear and updated guidelines as they embrace the […]

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Protecting Data using S3 Object Lambda and Amazon Comprehend

Introduction On our website you will find a two-part blog published on the protection of sensitive data, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), in the cloud. The first, focused on the nature of PII and associated regulatory requirements, and the second looked at how a serverless architecture can aid compliance.   Much of the guidance in […]

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Service Choreography for Modern Applications

Introduction On a high level, most typical applications consist of workflows that process tasks. Within each workflow are steps performing actions on the tasks. In modern applications, these steps are typically implemented as container services or serverless microservices.  If we use an analogy to help understand this, then the application would be an organisation such […]

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The Singapore Budget 2022 – Implications and Opportunities in the Digital Sector

Introduction In Singapore, the national budget is shared with the public every year. It includes a revenue and expenditure report for the past financial year, covering revenue from taxes, fees and other charges. The expenditure makes transparent the operating and development cost of the Singapore Government. This report is also forward-looking, providing expectations and the […]

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AWS Data Transfer Charges for Server and Serverless Architecture

Published by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Senior Consultant Thomas Smart and Associate Consultant KangZheng Li, in collaboration with AWS, provide an insight into AWS data transfer charges for server and Serverless architectures. In this blog, the authors uncover some hidden truths essential to accurate cloud cost estimations with the development of two key insight visuals. The first […]

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Crafting a Data Breach Plan for Small to Medium Organisations in Regulated Industries

Introduction 2020 was a busy year for cyber-security with 3,950 confirmed data breaches. Varonis and the Ponemon Institute calculated the global average cost of a data breach to be $3.86 million – rising to $4.24 million in 2021. It is apparent that many companies are struggling to develop sufficiently robust systems that protect from cyber-security […]

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The Evolution of Testing in the Age of Serverless

Introduction As organisations adopt microservices for rebuilds and new applications, many will realise that the established ‘Test Pyramid’ approach to testing is considerably less effective than it was with traditional applications. The Test Pyramid emphasises unit tests that focus on the application’s individual functions and code. These comprise the bulk of this testing strategy, reflected […]

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