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Is Enterprise IT More Difficult To Manage Now Than Ever?
colinneagle writes: Who's old enough to remember when the best technology was found at work, while at home we got by with clunky home computers and pokey dial-up modems? Those days are gone, and they don't look like they're ever coming back.
Instead, today's IT department is scrambling to deliver technology offerings that won't get laughed at — or, just as bad, ignored — by a modern workforce raised on slick smartphones and consumer services powered by data centers far more powerful than the one their company uses. And those services work better and faster than the programs they offer, partly because consumers don't have to worry about all the constraints that IT does, from security and privacy to, you know, actually being profitable. Plus, while IT still has to maintain all the old desktop apps, it also needs to make sure mobile users can do whatever they need to from anywhere at any time.
And that's just the users. IT's issues with corporate peers and leaders may be even rockier. Between shadow IT and other Software-as-a-Service, estimates say that 1 in 5 technology operations dollars are now being spent outside the IT department, and many think that figure is actually much higher. New digital initiatives are increasingly being driven by marketing and other business functions, not by IT. Today's CMOs often outrank the CIO, whose role may be constrained to keeping the infrastructure running at the lowest possible cost instead of bringing strategic value to the organization. Hardly a recipe for success and influence.
Instead, today's IT department is scrambling to deliver technology offerings that won't get laughed at — or, just as bad, ignored — by a modern workforce raised on slick smartphones and consumer services powered by data centers far more powerful than the one their company uses. And those services work better and faster than the programs they offer, partly because consumers don't have to worry about all the constraints that IT does, from security and privacy to, you know, actually being profitable. Plus, while IT still has to maintain all the old desktop apps, it also needs to make sure mobile users can do whatever they need to from anywhere at any time.
And that's just the users. IT's issues with corporate peers and leaders may be even rockier. Between shadow IT and other Software-as-a-Service, estimates say that 1 in 5 technology operations dollars are now being spent outside the IT department, and many think that figure is actually much higher. New digital initiatives are increasingly being driven by marketing and other business functions, not by IT. Today's CMOs often outrank the CIO, whose role may be constrained to keeping the infrastructure running at the lowest possible cost instead of bringing strategic value to the organization. Hardly a recipe for success and influence.
True.
I work in client computing. What 15 years ago was wandering around with an Office CD is now making sure that App-V Office works on non-persistent virtual machines while settings get captured by a third virtualization service. And making sure that last decade's mouse and keyboard would work has become making sure that users can get into systems from any device, anywhere, over VPN, to the aforementioned virtual systems, without them ever locking themselves out, needing to get to the password reset portal, or making sure the help desk doesn't overload their call volume. Even the proliferation of multiple monitors has left you upgrading Citrix clients and thin device firmwares, all of which connects to another byzantine layer of abstraction.
Wait, what? The filer is out? How many people are down?
The cost of the Cloud is cheap. And for IT, we just say "not as secure, but if you're okay with that, go ahead" and when the Cloud services fail, or get breached or whatever, the CIO can simply say "not my fault, that was your choice". The real cost is hidden.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
force everyone to work on green phosphor , don't hire or pander to the kind of dumb-ass that needs clicky pointy and autocomplete and facebook/twitter/tumblr updates on the side. raise the bar. work will get done.
I can't answer if it's more difficult, or simply more challenging.
Increasingly, there seems to be more and more push for internal social media and the like.
There's clearly much more desire to see badges awarded for participating in discussions in Sharepoint than there is on having reliable servers.
So all the funding goes to the sexy mandates, with the apparent assumption that the stable boring stuff happens by magic and doesn't need funding.
Sometimes I find myself shaking my head, because when internally it becomes glitz over substance and functionality, the marketing idiots have screwed us all.
It is mind boggling to me that everyone seems to have gotten hoodwinked into thinking a "Like" button provides more benefit to the company than the things which keep corporate data intact.
It's like IT has become superficial and vacuous, and the decisions are being made by idiots who don't know which parts of technology add value to the business/support core business activities and are necessary.
I've seen "new collaboration tools" deployed in organizations that I immediately think "how the hell does this help me do my job, or improve anything in the company"? In some cases, I still don't have an answer.
But I've seen companies spend a lot of money on systems which add no real value, and which just siphon resources from things which do.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
These have happened to me:
"Why do you need that $700 enterprise-grade AP? Just use the $69 linksys one like I do at home!"
Monday: "Support my new iGadget. Now." Tuesday: "We need encryption/security/firewall/2FA to meet PCI/CJIS/SOX requirements".
"Cost saving measure by centralizing printers!" By next month everyone who has the authority to ask for a personal printer again has one.
"Make an SSID without a password so that we can use our Chromecast."
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
>> Who's old enough to remember when the best technology was found at work, while at home we got by with clunky home computers and pokey dial-up modems?
I'm even older. I remember when the best technology was at home, on our personal computers. From there, PCs started invading the workplace...finally breaking up a lot of the control held by an iron-fisted, non-innovative, mainframe-based IT department.
It seems to me that the question asked in the headline doesn't quite match the summary:
"Is managing IT harder now than it used to be? I think it is, and I offer as my support that IT executives are not as influential as marketing executives!"
In a lot of ways, IT management is probably easier. The technology is better and more reliable. We have a new generation of cloud management and MDM for all kinds of things. Managing an IT department is hard, but it's always been hard.
But I think what you're really getting at is, businesses don't want to spend money in IT. The reality is, they never did. I've been working in IT for a couple decades now, and the whole time, there's always been budget issues where upper management is saying, "Do we really need to buy new workstations? Didn't we just buy new workstations 7 years ago?" Sure, a couple decades ago, they were saying, "Didn't we just install the terminals 7 years ago?" but the concept was the same. I doubt it was new then, either. Businesses don't like to spend money, and IT gets classified as a cost center.
Sure, "the cloud" makes it all a bit worse, since now clueless executives can say, "It's all this stuff supposed to be free now? I have a Dropbox account that I use for personal stuff, and it works great, and it's free. Can't we just put all of our servers in the Cloud like Dropbox is?" But is it new that marketing is driving business decisions more than the IT department is, or that clueless executives want to replace everything with whichever buzzword-heavy technology that they've recently heard about? Nope. That's pretty much the deal.
You would have problems managing a distributed, literally mission-critical computing infrastructure too, if it was constantly getting hit by phaser, photon torpedo, and 'weapon of the week' fire, not to mention entities that don't respect fire/air/vacuum-walls. Seriously, do they even have an IT group?
After years of insisting that the rest of the organization exists to make the CIO's job easier, it's great to see the 'revolt of the masses' moving away from the one-size-fits-all/everything-Microsoft-regardless-of-the-security-cost solution to stuff that makes the individual more productive.
The complexity of everything makes the IT job harder, but "I can't be bothered to learn new things" response to the user demand for alternatives is ultimately self-defeating.
As a side observation over the last 35 years in the business, systems that support multiple platforms/clients/etc tend to be a lot more reliable than those that support a single configuration. The unwritten and often unknown assumptions about the execution environment (client or server, etc) are latent bugs even in a monoculture. (I'm certainly old enough to remember how much software broke in the move from 32 bit to 64 bit; anyone who coded as if integers and pointers are same size/interoperable got all the problems s/he deserved!)
We say things like that, but then we also say things like "We can't seem to attract talent."
I wonder if forcing our staff to use 8 year old locked down computers, blackberries from 2005, and draconian email access/other rules are related.
Perhaps requirements have increased. Your users in your enterprise might demand mobile support and whatnot, but at the same time, the tools are getting better and better.
For example: you need a server? well, it used to take months to get your server in the datacenter up and functional. Now, it is a matter of instantiating a new VM in your private cloud.
The impact is even more dramatic for small companies. Want to make a web application? create an account in azure or amazon or any other cloud provider, and just deploy your app in a few minutes. Email, storage, databases, backups, version control systems, project planning tools, ecommerce sites, you can set any of that stuff up in a few minutes with a few clicks, often for free.
If anything IT, particularly for small businesses, has been simplified to where it is a cheap commodity and just a few clicks away.
And as such is a juicy target for all the hucksters. Home users can switch if they get pissed off at one brand. And nobody really needs Facebook anyway. But sitting at your desk at work, you will use what they tell you to. And when the people selling crap to corporate IT discovered this, it was game on for thousands of dollars per seat for licenses. And then there was the blow-back. Many BODs looked at the IT spending and realized that they were getting screwed by travelling salesmen. And they tightened the purse strings.
I worked in and around a few IT projects at Boeing back in the 1990s. Back when "The Web" was becoming viable for enterprise applications. But before vendors caught on that their precious "green screen" mainframe apps could be replaced for pennies on the dollar by a couple of smart people. But once they caught on, they convinced the (newly created position of) CIO that the only way to maintain corporate credibility was to be juggling a bunch of billion dollar development and procurement projects. You are measured by the budget that you consume. Finally, when the non IT management types started seeing the TV ads with the empty data centers, except for that one tiny rack in the corner that replaced it all, they cut off the blank checks, cocaine and hookers.
Have gnu, will travel.
I have found the Cloud to be a magical place. Come, come and join me in... "the Cloud."
Back in the days of dial up modems, green screen terminals and WordPerfect, there were not as many questions and difficulties because there were just so few valid answers. As technology grew to answer those questions, of course it became more difficult to manage simply because things got better. I recall connecting to some places at 300 baud -- when you can watch text download in real-time, of course you want a faster connection. With green screens and non WYSIWIG computing, you wondered why it was such a pain in the ass to get a document to look right and why the computer couldn't just show you what it would look like so you could not have to waste reams of paper.
Nowadays, when you can get a decently fast Internet connection that delivers realtime HD video for less than a hundred bucks a month, is it so weird to ask why bandwidth is limited at work? When many providers will give you gigabytes (or unlimited -- services like CrashPlan) storage space for free for something around $10/month, is it odd to ask why there is a storage quota measured in megabytes? When you see commercial websites that regularly update their UI, why is it so weird that people want to know why no effort is being expended to update some godawful internal tool that hasn't been touched in more than a decade?
Of course, there can be valid answers to the above -- your industry may have reporting requirements, retention requirements, backup requirements, regulatory requirements and/or a grab bag of other things (reliability, testing, etc) that make your costs for providing services very high, and the change process rather onerous. But it doesn't make the questions wrong, you just can't say "we are IT and we control" any more -- you likely need to be more well versed in your industry, or be able to communicate clearly why you still have legacy systems or how much an upgrade would cost, or how much a decent storage array and backup system costs to run.
A lot of these changes also show that IT is fairly well integrated into our daily lives, and it's no longer a "mystery" to a lot of people -- which is good because it opens the opportunity for better partnerships with company departments to do cool stuff. Rather than sit around waiting for someone to suggest a project, why not get out there and ask the departments in your organization what you can do to help them be better? Projects that are co-sponsored by departments that make the money or make the product you sell are much more likely to get funded, and far more likely to be recognized as "strategic" and "revenue positive".
The main problem is that most of the people making "IT decisions" do not understand the full impact of those decisions (or believe that they will not be held responsible).
Moving anything "to the cloud" simply means moving it "to someone else's computer". How do you judge their security?
What happens when one of their other clients is arrested for something illegal and the "cloud" computers get confiscated?
Anyway, from TFA:
Which will NEVER work. Spend some time reading up on the latest cracks that leaked credit card info. If you have to rely on "influence" you should look for another job. There will always be someone with more "influence" than you.
No. Sony knows it is.
Well, we're talking about enterprises, so it's only fair to bring up PCoIP. Even Amazon is on that bandwagon, with their Workspaces service (which we're building out an entire medical clinic with next month).
Where's your enterprise data now?
Who's old enough to remember when the best technology was found at work
For as long as I've used a personal computer (as opposed to dialing in to the school/work mainframe), I've had a better computer at home than at work. I had a color monitor at home while still using monochrome at work, I've had fast graphics cards (sometimes dual) at home while my work computer was using a cheap integrated card, I had an SSD in my home computer long before I got one in my work computer. There was a brief time when work had a better internet connection than my 56kbs modem, but ever since I got DSL and then a faster cable connection, I've had a better connection at home than at work. Instead of a fractional T1 shared among the office, I had 768 or 1.5mbit DSL... instead of a 10mbit dedicated internet connection at the office, I had a 25mbit cable modem connection.
It's only quite recently that work has surpassed what I'm willing to pay for at home -- now my office has a gigabit pipe to the internet and on my desk I have a 27" iMac (maxed out on CPU and RAM with a 1TB SSD) and two 27" monitors (in addition to the iMac display). My home environment is not even close to my work environment.
Not only that, but back then it was only 2-3 people in the IT shop. Today they expect you to do that with ... um ... only 2-3 people in the IT shop.
1) No computer ever be 100% secure. If it is, it's a brick with a power cord and a monitor.
2) One size NEVER fits all. A secretary, a programmer, a salesperson, a testing lab and a configuration management department all need wildly different configurations for security, login, admin privileges, et. al. As a CIO, your job, frankly, is to suck it up and give it to them. If you can't, you fail.
3) If you let the bean counters run the IT department, it's an automatic fail. This fail can be hidden for some years by the bean counters and they engage in the standard self-congratulatory circle jerks and self-defined measures of "productivity," but the lack of reality orientation *will* kill your organization eventually.
4) Never trust a newly minted MBA or anything they say, think or do. Ever. It's like putting a philosophy major in charge of line production on a factory floor. It's a *lot* like that. Good luck with getting anything done on budget and on schedule.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
the real reason to have a job; results. Not to say that every policy is reasonable ... let's not get out of hand about what having a job really means.
I did pass up a job opportunity when I discovered that everything was proprietary, everything was locked down and it was all "policy". It honestly sounded like getting the simplest things done were going to be a nightmare of request forms, meetings, etc. It's hard to get results when you aren't granted some level of autonomy as a professional, and being able to try things out and prototype.
Also keep in mind with the unemployment numbers where they are, anyone isn't going to have much of a problem filling a vacancy. The problem is going to be when the job market frees up again or when that hire gains enough experience, are they going to be out the door to somewhere with less administrative crap and bureaucratic oversight, taking their experience and institutional knowledge with them? In my office, it can easily take 3-6 months to being a new person up to speed to where they can start contributing -- not because they are an idiot but because they need to learn the codebase, the tools, the review process, the bug system, who does what, who knows what, etc. After they learn all that they become a lot more valuable, and after they have been doing it a few years, they are really valuable because of the human connections they make -- in addition to technical knowledge.
The More Things Change, the More They Stay The Same.
It's my general impression that the cost of any given IT resource has gone down at roughly the same rate the consumption of said resource has risen. This means that IT capabilities rise at the same rate as advances in storage/programming/processing power/etc., but the total complexity (and amount of IT resource to manage that complexity) has stayed roughly level.
I remember fifteen years ago, the "rule of thumb" for managing Enterprise Storage was approx. two administrators per Terabyte. (This was when a terabyte storage array was about the size of a pair of commercial refrigerators and took 4 3-phase power feeds.) Nowadays, the company still has two administrators, but they now have a Petabyte to manage, and their company makes productive use of every last scrap of that Petabyte.
I turned a down job offer from a MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR MEGACORPORATION (the hiring manager emphasized this point a half-dozen times during the interview) that refused to use an effective anti-spyware program because the smaller company made ONLY several million-dollars in yearly revenue, forcing their IT technicians to spend hours manually removing rootkits, viruii and other crap. If IBM made the anti-spyware program, no problem. Little company, forget about it. I've never seen a more elitist form of corporate dysfunction.
Companies need to take advantage of the same externally available technology that consumers do... it's not rocket science. The idea that a company MUST provide it's own infrastructure the same way it did 20 years ago is stupid. My company just last week turned off access to all dropbox type providers, and there's practically a line out their door of people asking for exceptions. To excel in business, you have to adopt good ideas, regardless of where they come from.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
All of this is missing a major point about the posted article:
- Is this news or a posted question to the readers?
Everyone knows that IT has become a huge house of cards and it isn't possible to give a real solid level of protection while using modern features and technology. The comments echo this fact.
So where is the news and/or where is the useful question?
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SlashDot should be so much better then this.
I have been in IT for about 10 years, so I am not sure I am completely qualified to say since forever, but I would say that the issue is we are now competing with cloud providers as to the expectation of our customers. For example, Gmail offers you 15 GBs for free and IT customers wonder why they only have 2GBs at work. Most cloud services have pretty amazing up times, and people wonder why your IT dept. can't do the same thing (no matter how well staffed it is). People are seeing the consuming of resources as free and then trying to IT accordingly.
If IT were easy and things never changed then anybody could do it. If you expect long term stability then you are in the wrong field.
We cycle users systems on a 3-4 year basis. Do most of our users have home systems that are far more impressive? Yes, and some of our users have a server rack of their own equipment at home too. That i5 Dell laptop with 8GB RAM, encrypted HDD/SSD, AV, log monitoring and reporting, etc; isn't likely going to perform as fast as the six core w/HT i7 you're running at home with a RAID 0 of new SSDs and a GTX 770, but it works well enough to get the job done. If your users are still using 8 year old hardware, there are probably other issues at play too.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
These are the type of companies that buy BMC products. Bloated and expensive must mean it's better, right?
File and printer sharing is easy. How much more complicated than that is up to you.
My management started saying, "THE CLOUD," over and over again, like consumers were saying, "iPad!."
I made damn sure that my objections were documented via email at every step as I cheerfully participated in assisted suicide.
Sure enough, about 8 months later (after management got a hands-on physics lesson about propagation delay), the cloud wasn't there. People were on my ass big time.
I called the cloud center and told them to, "Do that fail-over thing to the backup site in Oklahoma and stuff," and they said that the switch-over was included in the catastrophic failure.
I got myself a cup of coffee and one of the managers got in my face and demanded that we implement the backup plan.
I told him, "Sir ... our Plan B is Plan A."
So, they bought me some servers and stuff and I'm running things from my fucking computer room.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Not only that, but back then it was only 2-3 people in the IT shop. Today they expect you to do that with ... um ... only 2-3 people in the IT shop.
This. We've lost a lot of good people, they rarely get replaced, while new projects and systems keep piling on.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I don't know where you're at but we have no problem getting the people we need through our doors. If you're honestly going to turn down a position because your home hardware is better than what you get at work then you must not be too serious about the real reason to have a job; results.
I will absolutely turn down a position if they care so little about their employees and their productivity to give them substandard equipment. I am never going to sit around for a spinning disk hard drive to load my applications again, or deal with a computer with under 16 GB of RAM. If a company is going to complain about $1000 in yearly hardware purchases so I can have a new laptop every three years, two decent monitors, and noise cancelling headphones, how are they going to treat me as an employee? When I am approached for a job I take effort to notice the quality of the equipment I see their current employees using. I have never seen an employee with bad equipment treated well by their employer, and rarely see employees with amazing equipment treated poorly.
Perhaps you don't have trouble attracting employees, but if you treat your employees poorly you will have trouble attracting good employees. Most people have never worked at a company where almost all their coworkers are top notch, so they don't even know what they are missing.
And regardless of a company's respect of their employees, it is simply unproductive to give people slow hardware. Shaving $500 per year in hardware costs per employee is less than 1% of even a low paid IT worker. I have seen the result of 4 year old laptops that weren't even top of the line when they were new. It involves a lot of wasted time waiting for apps to load and dealing with constant crashes or reboots.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Imagine being a project manager who can't access her calendar on her phone. Instead she has to VPN in and use OWA. Imagine being forced to use 17 inch 3:4 displays.
I wouldn't take an IT job where the environment was old and busted. Why would anyone want to be a programmer for us knowing they have to use slow computers, work in a cramped cube, on a slow VM, with no support for their devices and no thought put into how they would like to work?
I don't expect a brand new PC every 2 years. I expect to use modern technology. That means I can get my email via activesync on my cell phone and not carry around a blackberry and my cell phone. That means having an IT department that rather than dictate, meets with it's customers (the employees) and finds out what they need to do their job. Then they figure out who to safely give them those needs within the policy defined by management. That means having management that is reasonable and listens to the needs of it's staff and IT.
So yes, I am going to spend 40+ (Let's be realistic more like 60+) hours a week working. I want that time to be enjoyable. If I don't get a nice workspace, nice computer, nice tools to do my job, etc then I'm going to find a job that gives me those things.
The problem here isn't the "new kids", it's the company for buying into crappy "solutions" which are proprietary and keep the IT department stuck supporting them for years or decades. For instance, look at Rational ClearCase. It's a complete piece of shit compared to modern DVCS systems like git or mercurial; it's slow as hell, requires full-time administrators to keep it running, and is a PITA to use, and lacks all kinds of modern features such as atomic commits. Maybe in 1989 it was pretty cool, but so were patent leather jackets. So why do companies still keep paying millions of dollars for this POS? Because management is stupid and believes the marketing BS from IBM/Rational, and also probably because they've based all their development on it and are afraid of change (even though CC is so shitty it's costing them dearly in development time because it's such a PITA to use).
If companies worked harder to keep themselves independent and not reliant on proprietary products that only aim to lock them in, they wouldn't have this problem so much.
The situation IT faces has some interesting parallels with that of vaccines, but multiplied to be exponentially worse. An ignorant subset of our society is convinced that vaccines are a Bad Idea. There are a lot of reasons for this we don't need to get into, but similarly to IT, one of the reasons is that vaccines became so ubiquitous and effective that what they save us from has become invisible. These days we are seeing spikes in horrible and preventable diseases because some people have an overriding "out of sight out of mind" component to their cognitive life. The same is true of IT.
IT is critical to any organization. It doesn't matter what organization you're talking about. Efficiency of IT can improve the productivity of every industry. It has permeated them all. I had lunch last week with a nice lady who works in a very large insurance company. This company has a fair number of employees devoted to answering certain kinds of email (negative ones) and a lot of time gets spent forwarding emails to the right person. She was lamenting that there is no way to do that automatically. "There is.." I pointed out, "It is called sentiment analysis and is a branch of NLP. It can probably do what you want with at least 80% accuracy. You would have to hire a computational linguist and pay them 95k a year to make it happen."
And that's the rub. It costs money. People who run large organizations rarely understand technology. That means they need to completely trust the CTO/CIO on every recommendation, because the CEO is entirely unequipped to themselves evaluate any such proposal. It's also the case that large corporations are under the laughably inaccurate opinion that people work harder to make up for being unproductive. That is to say, many think "well it has to get done, they are paid to do it, and it does get done, so why do we need to spend more money on tech"?
The application of technology is nuanced. It is not possible to directly quantify the gains in all circumstances, though the gains could mean an order of magnitude difference in productivity. It doesn't fit easily into a spreadsheet, a sharepoint page, or a powerpoint presentation. Thus, the pointy haired boss will remain impossible to convince.
Anyone with a credit card can buy IT services, throw a bunch of corporate data into them, and no one knows they did it. When that person leaves, and the boss suddenly wants that data, or legal needs it for eDiscovery, or IA needs data for the quarterly report only to discover all the data is in an non-SOX approved app with un-approved, undocumented access to a random collection of employees who all had read/write access...GAH! Need the revenue report for Q3? Okay, here, go to mega.nz...
Tell that to a creative who's debating between freelancing on his own or taking a steady job.
What the hell is a "creative"? Is it anything like a "grammatically correct"?
Well, since you can't read a dictionary, here you go:
Creative (noun)
1) one who is creative; especially : one involved in the creation of advertisements
2) creative activity or the material produced by it especially in advertising
I assume he was going with the first meaning.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
A lot of the technology itself has gotten easier, the products available are robust and fully developed. The difficulty is often as it always has been in the human side of the business. People in the past didn't have options outside of IT and we used to actually be able to say no when someone wanted to bring in their own device or use some outside service. IT didn't used to have much power, but now we have almost none. Businesses pay us because we are experts in our field, but then constantly make decisions that contradict our input. So what if marketing wants some cloud thing, since when should their desires matter in the equation? I long for management that says "I don't give a fuck what you want. Tell us what you need, we can define the solution if one is warranted." My job got easier when I stopped fighting the businesses on decisions, but now I know I'm not actually doing what I think is in the interests of the companies I work for, rather just bending with the wind so nobody actually has to deal with conflict.
I'll start worrying when the users can figure out how to automate a file copy on their own.
Or, more likely, the company's merged a few times, so most of the IT folks got fired. And now the 2-3 people remaining are in a different location administering systems they're not familiar with.
When my company switched Manhattan offices last year (after a string of takeovers and mergers), they mandated that all servers be located in a cheaper New Jersey location - including file servers for the local network. Even with a pretty good amount of bandwidth between the two sites, the file servers are now essentially useless. I've resorted to doing all work on local copies on my desktop machine and then copying them to the servers for backup whenever I think I've changed enough stuff for it to be worth waiting 15 minutes for the copy operation. It was either that or wait 10 minutes every time I wanted to recompile a Windows app I work on. I suppose they could've hosted my dev environment on a Citrix box in New Jersey - except that all the Citrix stuff they have is in Kansas City.
These are New York only servers, and the New York office has a mostly-empty equipment room that houses the routers, phone system, etc. The only reason these servers are in New Jersey is that there's nobody left in the New York office to swap backup tapes every morning (and I guess there'd be some cost to arrange for offsite storage of those tapes). But they're probably paying me more to do my own backups than any real solution would cost.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
If you're going to compare ClearCase to git and mercurial, it's flaming obvious you don't know the first god damn thing about CC. Slow? Stop using it like it's CVS (snapshots and/or across "T1" wan links from all over the place) Check your network and the PoS computer(s) acting as your servers. Pain to use? No more so than any other tool. If you bothered to learn to use it, it's no more complicated than anything else.
And every software house in the universe needs a dedicated admin to manage their build and source systems. Developers are hands down the worst idiots EVER at "configuration management", build scripts, and code organization.
LCARS 3.0 was a disaster.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you're going to compare ClearCase to git and mercurial, it's flaming obvious you don't know the first god damn thing about CC. Slow? Stop using it like it's CVS (snapshots and/or across "T1" wan links from all over the place) Check your network and the PoS computer(s) acting as your servers. Pain to use? No more so than any other tool. If you bothered to learn to use it, it's no more complicated than anything else.
And every software house in the universe needs a dedicated admin to manage their build and source systems. Developers are hands down the worst idiots EVER at "configuration management", build scripts, and code organization.
Oh look, a 5 figure ID slashdotter is angry at the 6 figure ID slashdotter/kid.
Should we get off your lawn?
They could kill IT in that 10-ppl company and might well get away with it. They probably would recreate an "online-app-maintenance" guy with much lesser influence and be done with internal IT with in-house developpers.
And in 2-3 years, they'll have removed all redundancy thinking it's bloat. They'll even have switched the one server from your RAID 10 setup that you started them with to be a RAID 0 with four drives because that's how the "online-app-maintenance" guy runs his home gaming rig. After 4 years, the company will lose everything.
While marketing will put forth a hundred short-lived ideas I do strive for stability, for things to be scalable and durable.
You're not a fuddy-duddy. You know what these ideas are that marketing is putting forth, and you know that they'd be good for a short time, but your job is to think long-term. You're protecting the company from baring its rear.
No, it's not harder manage. Just the hiring/promotion criteria for management in IT is largely based on your skills as a... programmer.
It's also hard for Tennis players to play Football.
Oh and all the bro-mance, patriarchy, social ineptitude left over from the last 30 years doesn't help much either.
Yes!
All of you get the hell off my lawn!!!!
I just got a very similar question, yesterday.
We're adding 350 workstations (and PoE phones) to our network - something for which we should be seriously looking at a Catalyst 6500 or a Nexus 7000, right? No, I cheaped out and got some Catalyst 2960s and a pile of SF500s. Total cost? $20000.
What's the first question they asked me? "Nowadays, I can get two terabytes of hard disk for $100. Why do we have to pay so much for our network ports?"
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
"I'm going to sit here and drink my coffee."
I.... am glad I don't have your problems. Really the user base has gotten too lethargic. An occasional day-long outage due to an arp spoofing attack that the cheap-ass prosumer equipment cannot block can do wonders for an IT budget. Of course that's a lot of firing/hiring musical chairs because they won't remember that you told them the crap stuff wouldn't cut it.
Have fun with that "backplane" capacity :-)
(BTW these days you'd be looking at a 6800 not a 6500 unless buying used, and the Nexus only if you've got some majorly complex things going on in the server room. Also we gave up on paying the cisco premium on the edge a while back, and have never looked back. While Cisco has been fiddling with SLA, other folks have made much cheaper alternate edge switches with fully adequate feature sets.)
Someone had to do it.
Assuming, by Enterprise, you mean Godzilla sized network, then it is a royal pain in the ass to maintain.
:|
Take the internal networks of a well known ( and very much hated ) telecommunications company. Depending on which data center you're visiting, you can have absolute bleeding edge state of the art money is no object hardware in one corner and state of the art circa 1975 banks of modems sitting across from it. Stuff that was manufacture discontinued before most here were even BORN.
It's so damn big it takes entire organizations to mange portions of it. The sheer amount of money required to update it to current standards would be staggering. Anyone remember Datakit ? Hahahahaha. . . . Still in use. Very much in use.
So, for now, while all your super high tech skills are handy, knowing the old school is still very much in demand.
Viva la X.25 !!!! lol
No, he's definitely right. Work/life balance is definitely a factor in retention. If you can't check into your home security cam to see if your dog is chewing on the sofa, that may be worth a couple hundred in salary to you, and tens of those little things add up.
Someone had to do it.
Why use backup tapes? Just use 3x redundancy and have files that are semi-stable replicate off the network.
Anyway.... that file copy issues sounds weird. Obvious the distance is adding latency, but if copies of reasonable files are taking 15 minutes there is just nowhere near enough bandwidth or you have a bad configuration problem. Assuming it is not bandwidth the operation is halting too often?
Would anyone in your company be interested in a free assessment?
Slashdot Beta sucks.
It is an acknowledged fact that the operating systems we use cannot be made secure even without end user interaction. They are just too complex. And yet we must trust them to do business. Even without the acknowledgement the proof comes weekly. Despite this we still use them, and worse - old versions of them that are a parody of secure code and known to be exploited.
We spend the end user's trust too readily. And we let them spend it greedily.
If I were the man I was five years ago, I'd take a FLAMETHROWER to this place! *
I don't post here much any more.
The problem with firewalls and antivirus is they all locking the door after the cattle are fled.
Your data will never be secure.
*Scent of a woman Great movie.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The problem has been the same since the PC first came out: users can "do things" with a PC/laptop/smartphone/tablet and think that "doing things" makes them an expert on IT. So when they come up with a "great idea for a new application", they can not and will not fathom the fact that it can take months or years to implement, is going to cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, and will be obsolete before it ever hits production due to changing business needs.
There is no cure for the "wisdom" of people who tell you how to do your job, or how their 14 year old nephew could write the application in a few weeks. They've made up their mind that you're just a lazy SOB trying to milk the company for money and a cushy job, and will never, ever, ever understand just how much effort goes into security, design, testing, porting, etc. To them, everything is "easy."
The real problem is that companies let such users and managers make business decisions based on "their gut instinct" instead of properly planned and projected schedules. Because heaven forbid you should ever tell the marketting manager that he can't have his shiny Sharepoint solution because it doesn't provide anything useful to the company that can't be accomplished with a properly organized set of folders on a shared drive/server somewhere.
No, they're the ones who sign for the budgets, and they're the ones who like the "shiny", so you're the one who gets stuck trying to make the shiny work with all the line of business systems that are actually important to the operation of the business.
And if you even hint that you can't do it, well, there's a company overseas that's promising to do it in a month as an offshore service, so you're fired.
Which, in a nutshell, is how the bean counters and their ilk get away with their bad business decisions: they constantly hold the threat of offshoring and termination over your head to beat Mr. IT into submission.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
A multi-billion dollar megacorporation can handle this at the network level, via. the systems group... I can understand them not being interested in a product from a small company. That small company is uncontrollable with only several million dollars in revenue that means one guy's interests control the company who is just now finding financial success. Does he decide to roll it into a life at a ski resort or does he decide to keep innovating? That's not dysfunction.
That being said there are plenty of large company anti-spyware, ... products including from vendors like Symantec, CA... And there are network security and monitoring tools which trap those sorts of things, by yes IBM.
As a 4 digit IDer, I agree that ClearCase sucks ass.
Perhaps the person is a developer. I normally running a VM, sometimes two or three. My machine has 20GB of RAM and it gets used.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Quit nouning adjectives. It's as annoying as verbing nouns.
The hiring manager told me that 90% of the job would be manually removing the crud from systems because anti-spyware and virus infections were frequent events. The last Fortune 500 company I worked for that had a virus outbreak was back in the 1990's. I guess Microsoft Defender isn't that good. I've never seen an IT shop so screwed up before.
The hiring manager also told me that the companies I worked for before -- Cisco, eBay, Fujitsu, Google, Intuit, Sony, and many smaller companies in between -- weren't real companies. This smug arrogance got on my nerves. He was shocked when I rejected his job offer. The job I did accept paid $8/hr more with benefits and has a network that's 20X larger than the "real" megacorporation.
2. Replace computer with identical pre-imaged computer.
This megacorporation doesn't have any extra pre-imaged computers. They do have a couple of loaner laptops for the executives. Everyone else has to wait two- to four-hours for the technician to clean up their system. Re-imaging a system is only allowed if Windows can't boot up and the data can't be recovered. The hiring manager conceded that an anti-spyware tool would fix many of these systems in 15 minutes. But that wasn't megacorporate policy.
Why use backup tapes? Just use 3x redundancy and have files that are semi-stable replicate off the network.
Who are you paying for the off-site storage, and how much does it cost? Tapes are cheap, and faster. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Buick full of backups tapes.
Also, the "off-site" storage often forgets the first rule of "backup solutions". I put that in quotes because there is no such thing. Nobody wants a backup solution. Everyone wants a restore solution. You want the simplest restore solution possible. With the world of tapes, you can configure a bootable CD with a tape, and the CD restores the first server image on the tape to the drive it's in. For roughly the time it takes for delivery, to read the tape, plus two reboots, you can have your primary back up and running. And that's if all the on-site is 100% lost.
And for me, I've found the value in backup tapes being that you have hundreds of tapes/copies. With good management, when someone comes in and says "4 months ago, an employee accidentally deleted a Very Important File that we now need to close the books." You do a few minutes of research, restore that one and only one file onto a USB drive, and run it over to the guy asking. With "redundancy" you have a working copy of today's files, but no ability to recover previous states. That's bad.
Learn to love Alaska
Tapes aren't faster than HDD backup. A Buick full of hard drives crushes a Buick full of tapes in terms of storage. Even better is a buick full of flash though then we aren't talking cheaper.
The simplest restore solution possible is running out of multiple data centers which are redundant to one another. Images are regularly taken down and restored on a continuous basis. Restoration is nothing other than what the IT operations group / systems does everyday to reallocate compute and storage.
I agree that's why you have the semi-stable stuff go to network backup. When they go after the 4 month old file that was semi-stable.
____
I think to advance this conversation we need to separate out an actual scenario. X amount of data, Y amount of retention, Z copies... I'm hard pressed to see any situation that tapes make better than something else. So paint me a stable picture for which
you believe tape helps.
I think you need to break apart 3 issues:
a) The manager not handling a problem well and using labor where they shouldn't.
b) What the best solution is for anti-virus
c) Why big companies can be reluctant to engage smaller companies
I'm defending (c) not (a).
Sony? They are like $60b a year in revenue and global across a ton of industries. The guy seems like an idiot.
I used to teach Sunday school. Need some lessons?
I didn't call anyone an idiot. Keep your flamebait away from me.
Everyone hates Clear Case, except for the joker above who clearly works for them. If the mvfs implementation which implements a recursive loop (don't ever blindly use find on an mvfs volume) isn't bad enough to convince someone, the lack of granular access control and the incredibly clunky interface should be.
You are mixing network gear vendors (HP Procurves, Netgear ?).
I think it's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Casteism
I know that. I was apparently not clear.
I have two choices.
1) Carry around my personal cell phone (nexus 5) and a blackberry that is 5+ years old (for work email).
2) Carry around my personal cell phone, and check my email via webmail because my boss will not allow activesync on personal devices.
3) Find a new job.
3 was a good answer.
Yes, we have three brands of edge switches (HP,Cisco,Aruba), Aruba wifi and Cisco routing. NAC is Extreme, Shaper is Procera. Integration is a pain sometimes, but we're well over the hump and now when a vendor walks in to sell us stuff they don't act like they own the place, and requiring standards compliance and interoperability tends to get us the better products in the ong run, IMO.
Someone had to do it.