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

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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Event Storming

Event Storming is a workshop-based approach to migrating a monolithic application to a microservices architecture. It follows a series of steps to assess the monolith, discover events, and identify actors who use the system. The final step of grouping these insights will help to inform an effective event-driven microservices architecture. The rise of Microservices has […]

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Introduction to Serverless Architecture

Is ‘Serverless’ just a new buzzword or is it a way to considerably reduce cloud operational cost for suitable applications? Watch this video by our senior consultant, Thomas Smart – where he provides an introduction to Serverless to help you determine whether it is relevant to your organisation. Read more about it on Thomas’s blog […]

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Protecting Personal Data in Serverless Cloud

Introduction In our previous blog post, we learned about Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and the additional regulatory requirements that it carries. We covered three common requirements of PII regulation: Tracking Access; which talks about being able to audit who is accessing sensitive data, when they access it and where they access it. Protecting Data; which […]

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