Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Hard Truths IT Must Learn To Accept? (cio.com)

snydeq writes: "The rise of shadow IT, shortcomings in the cloud, security breaches -- IT leadership is all about navigating hurdles and deficiencies, and learning to adapt to inevitable setbacks," writes Dan Tynan in an article on six hard truths IT must learn to accept. "It can be hard to admit that you've lost control over how your organization deploys technology, or that your network is porous and your code poorly written. Or no matter how much bandwidth you've budgeted for, it never quite seems to be enough, and that despite its bright promise, the cloud isn't the best solution for everything." What are some hard truths your organization has been dealing with? Tynan writes about how the idea of engineering teams sticking a server in a closet and using it to run their own skunkworks has become more open; how an organization can't do everything in the cloud, contrasting the 40 percent of CIOs surveyed by Gartner six years ago who believed they'd be running most of their IT operations in the cloud by now; and how your organization should assume from the get-go that your environment has already been compromised and design a security plan around that. Can you think of any other hard truths IT must learn to accept?

Comments

People matter most, and there aren't enough

[bfwebster]

The single biggest predictor of project success/failure is the quality of the people involved.

However, most firms are bad at recruiting and maintaining top-quality people. Often, they chase the best ones away, resulting in the Dead Sea Effect.

Finally, "In starting a new software program, all the important mistakes are made on the first day." (The Art of Systems Architecting, Maier & Rechtin). ..bruce..

Re:The Cloud is your enemy.

[Darinbob]

If you don't care that all your data vanishes and can never be recovered, then the cloud may be a good idea. But most companies don't fall into that category.

I agree that being an absolutist is bad, and often I see the cloud being used as an absolutist solution to downsizing IT staff and resources. The flaw is in not thinking when the latest buzzword is worth adopting or not. There are not many uses where the cloud works, because of the security concerns, not just security of keeping eyes away but security of keeping the data intact.

If you do use the cloud, do not use it as a substitute for having backups. Make your own backups and have them stored off-site. Always have a plan on what to do when the cloud service fails; can you switch to another service quickly, or rely on slower local computers? Even if the internet goes down for several hours, you should still be able to get work done locally, phone calls can be made, products can be shipped, etc. Believe me, from experience it is annoying to be stuck without access to your own data and documents that you thought were local, while waiting for the local telecomm company to fix the lines that got cut.

(Yes, DARPA researched networking protocols as a way to route around problems, but the modern internet sometimes seems like more of a loose collection of star networks)