Reaching for the Cloud

Honest Microsoft cloud insight, without the marketing noise.

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Reaching for the Cloud is a fortnightly newsletter for architects, technical leads, and IT decision-makers working in the Microsoft cloud. Each issue takes one topic, develops an argument, and gives you an honest view of where things actually stand, without the marketing gloss. The Microsoft cloud moves fast. Not everything that gets announced matters. Not everything that matters gets announced. This newsletter tries to tell the difference. Written by Richard Hogan, Global Chief Architect in IBM's Microsoft Practice, with over two decades of enterprise technology experience across Financial Services, public sector, and beyond. Published every two weeks. No spam. No sponsored content.

Featured Issue

The Agent Doesn't Pay For Being Wrong

An AI wrote a brutal post-mortem about its own failure during a debugging session. Every line in it maps directly onto failure modes that vendor research from Microsoft and IBM has been describing since 2025. This issue takes the post-mortem as a starting point and develops the architectural and operational playbook for closing the cost asymmetry that sits underneath every agentic AI failure.

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