Is Enterprise IT More Difficult To Manage Now Than Ever? 241
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.
Cloud (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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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.
It's the security of the infrastructure that matters. A company is rarely going to lose their shirt because someone found their marketing material in cyberspace, two weeks before it would be released. Of course your mileage may vary.
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The cloud is cheap, but so is stashing one's valuables in a box underneath a bush by a park bench as opposed to a safety deposit box. As intrusions become more brutal (where sensitive data like employee bank accounts and HR records just doesn't go to the bad guys, but gets posted for the world to see just out of spite), the cloud solution that worked in 2010 has a good chance to destroy a company due to lawsuits in 2015.
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Sales and Marketing may have more information to give than accounting. Just remember they hold the cards to all future sales while accounting just has the past. Of course your mileage may vary.
Re:Cloud (Score:4, Informative)
Most cloud providers are orders of magnitude more secure than company IT.
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Well, for some companies anyway...working for a network security company I have confidence in our network.
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Fair enough, YMMV.
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It depends. We hope they are more secure, but we have no idea if they actually are. Lack of data breaches doesn't indicate future performance.
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Lack of data breaches doesn't indicate future performance.
It doesn't guarantee future performance, but it certainly indicates it. In general, past performance is the best indicator of future performance.
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Before Sony got hacked, they hadn't had a big breach. Past performance means little. The scale of Sony Breach is largely unprecedented. I reject your assessment on the grounds that "best indicator" is a meaningless phrase, and probably completely untrue. Best indicator are the perpetual steps being taken by IT staff to secure the data. I can assure you, from the little I know about the breach ( which is very little) I can assure you that the data was not secured properly.
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Before Sony got hacked, they hadn't had a big breach.
They had a big breach in 2011 [reuters.com]. They had other smaller breaches as well.
I can assure you that the data was not secured properly.
Duh. Thanks for your brilliant hindsight.
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I thought the Sony Playstation Network had a big breach with millions of user account details and credit card information stolen.
Re:Cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
This. A million times this.
Getting so sick of the same old sub story about how the cloud is insecure, as if it is some rule of nature. The cloud will be as secure as the cloud vendor makes it.
The idea that sensitive data is more secure in-house than in the cloud, just because it is not inside your four walls, is not rooted in reality. It might make you FEEL more warm and cozy that the data is in your four walls, but does your company have all of the latest enterprise application level firewalls and IPS devices? Does your company have a well-staffed dedicated 24/7 SOC IN ADDITION TO a 24/7 NOC? Does your company have a defined IOC sharing procedure with it's peers?
So which has a better chance of having the resources needed to secure their environment - your tiny little IT shop with it's cash strapped budget, or an enterprise cloud vendor that has all of the above? My money is on the cloud vendor.
Re:Cloud (Score:4, Interesting)
You IT security is only as good as your control of the hardware!
I dont care if it is Windows or Linux, if someone other than the company personal can get to the hardware they can access your system and all the data in it. When you outsource your services to a data center provider you are trusting there security, there hiring practices, and there employees. Ill tell you right now, having worked for several of the BIG data center providers, most of them dont do a background checks. I have worked with many that were felons and in three cases worked with people convicted of credit fraud as well as hacking.
How many CIO's/CTO's/etc ever investigate the data center provider to determine there hiring practices and who has access to the hardware they will be storing the virtual machines on?
IT people say is it insecure because we know that #1) the person making the decision does not understand technology and #2) s/he simply went with the lowest bidder.
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There are standards such as ISO 27001 that are independently audited that can prove if a cloud provider is following the right security practices. I would seriously doubt your IT shop is ISO 27001 compliant. Amazon is, Google Apps is, as are many other cloud vendors.
The whole cloud boogeyman has to die. It is foolish, short sighted thinking. Moving applications to cloud is an opportunity for enterprises to finally do things PROPERLY in IT for once instead of cobbling together systems on shoestring budgets w
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But that's exactly his point. All organizations have sensitive data infrastructure these days - most do not have IT staff competent to actually manage it once everyone's connected to the internet. And the staff they have was getting cut to the bone before IT got outsourced to the cloud. So, unless you're as tech savvy as the cloud majors, your data's likely to be less secure in house. Of course, that assumes you're a big enough target for hackers to take an interest in you. If Sony can be cracked, you
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Actually they will. AWS and Azure don't offer a security service. But there are cloud providers that do and will act against unusual traffic.
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Not in my experience ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That depends on what sense you mean. Most cloud providers seem to have decent integrity but wasn't there a story here a while back where a company lost control of it's control panel to a group of black hats?
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Most cloud providers are orders of magnitude more secure than company IT.
No....
I would agree that most cloud providers probably have a better handle on security than corporate IT. Simply because if they have a breach they basically lose their whole business. As such, it's made a priority and has a decent budget.
However... Because cloud providers have more than one customer, all it takes is one of them doing something illegal for your data to be subject to search and seizure. From a legal standpoint, the corporate data is actually less secure....
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So you are saying that [Citation Needed] has jumped the shark?
"cloud" = "someone else's computer" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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If you're smart, you don't assume the cloud is secure, and you don't store anything that's sensitive there. But that assumes the people making decisions are smart. I'm not saying the cloud providers shouldn't care about security, on the contrary, since users should be watching for breaches they should be trying that much harder.
Re:"cloud" = "someone else's computer" (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm in IT, but not in a CIO type level. However, I take the view that our data is NOT secure, even after I have made painstaking effort to assure that it is actually secure. Why? Because invariably, I am wrong whenever I assume that I am secure.
The result is that I am always securing, making more secure, ensuring existing policies and procedures are up to industry best. I also realize that is never good enough. The weakest link in all of the security I employ is always the people. Always.
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As always, security is not a line-item. You cannot purchase "security".
I prefer to measure "security" as "how many people can successfully attack X".
If fewer people can successfully attack X after a change then that change has made X more secure.
If more people can successfully attack X after a change then that change has made X less secure.
So moving anything to "the cloud" will result in it being less secure. In almost every instance.
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To add on this, even if I did everything right with my infrastructure, I know our data is not secure because my users aren't.
I mean, 40% of them have a hard time finding a file they've been working on unless it's on the top of Excel's or Word's "Recent Documents" list. A lot of people don't even know where they're putting stuff.
Tons of them do the "I'll just email this file all over the place" instead of working on the one on the network. Same goes for USB sticks and personal devices, etc. People who kno
bring back the green IBM 3270 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I think text consoles, though secure, are dead. Instead, for a network that has to be secure, keep the machines on an isolated subnet (no traffic in/out except to the domain controller, the app server, and a RDP/terminal server.) That way, private data is secured, but people can hit the Web and do what they want, and data can't leak into the RDP link. Best of all worlds.
Another idea is putting the data behind Citrix. Internal machines will still need to be secured, but the machines are more of glorified
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I'm still using green screens. They try to force me to the GUI, first by pointing out the functionality. I out of that they are denying me those functions in terminal, so of course the GUI is better. They really just don't want me running macros to pull details on 5,000+ accounts when I'm asked to.
Yes, that's it.
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For work use, a 3270 terminal does the job well, especially for point of sale systems. Just a terminal is pretty secure, as most likely the serial term servers are not connected to the Internet, and physically tapping the RS232 cable would require physical access.
I would agree that now, having a 3270 emulator is a clean way of doing things. However, I wouldn't be surprised for an intruder to be able to use a RAT on someone's Windows box to slurp the user's password and use the 3270 via remote. If this wa
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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.
That's cute.
And I suppose when the new 29-year old social media hipster junkie walks in the room and introduces themselves as your new CEO, I'm curious how you're going to propose your new-and-improved hiring mantra.
Or are you gonna just tell him to get off your lawn too..
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Nah man. If he's a hipster, we'll just tell him we're using stuff that's obscure and the potential employees have probably never heard of them. I don't think that z/OS or IBM i are going mainstream anytime soon (well, not to the consumer world...)
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I know that I'm getting old and been in the industry too long when this idea gets me all excited inside. I honestly believe that you'd see huge gains in productivity with the focused work environment that the old serial terminal provided. Not to mention that the keyboard is orders of magnitude faster than anything requiring the mouse for most tasks. Where do I sign up for this?
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Ah yes Nostalgia Blinders!.
Guess what it is 2014 and I still have to work with 3270 mainframes. And it good old time.
1. New regulations means we need to add more and more to the screens. 80x24 gets filled fast, adding new screen pathways makes the program more cumbersome to use.
2. Bulk Imports are ugly. Using screen scraping to load bulk data because it is locked down where you can't access the data directly.
3. Changes are scary, one mistake effect the full work load.
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You poor thing. I just spent two weeks working with an IBM 5250 on our AS/400..so I may feel some of your pain....
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But the auto mechanic lets you drive your own car.
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You're equating users being able to really *use* their own machine as bad, and that locking down the machine is similar to what a mechanic does.
Is it more difficult? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Maybe I'm lucky but I've only seen that where I work after all the basics are taken care of. With all of the tools and services available these days, I'd assume that the basics like data integrity, telephones are *locked down*. If your basics are causing trouble, you are definitely doing it wrong.
I think more and more IT is becoming a manager of services, instead of a manager of servers. When there are companies out there making the basics easy to manage, then you can afford the time to get the Like but
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Services run on servers.
Users access services that are running on servers.
I keep getting marketing literature from companies promising that. But it never seems that they can deliver on their claims. Instead, it's just another service that needs to be maintained.
Just PATCHING systems includ
Re:Is it more difficult? (Score:5, Insightful)
IT can be completely different, depending on organization structure and people involved.
I have worked in companies where the IT department always had stuff in testing and stayed ahead of the game, not just putting out reports, but workarounds when it became time to roll major upgrades out. I've worked in other departments which were purely reactionary, and the only thing they really did was fight fires with every purchase being under an emergency budget. I've seen the spectrum in between the two extremes.
The problem with IT's reputation is that it is a cost center, and a highly visible one. IT also has a lot of factors, some at opposed ends. For example, if a sales guy demands that he is able to store confidential un-announced products on his personal laptop, how does one answer that demand and still preserve security? The exact answer depends on the organization [1].
IT has always had that pitfall of the new and shiny, be it internal wikis that were deployed, then just sit there, untouched for years, to the cloud, to business social networks, to internal chat mechanisms, and so on. It takes both technical and social expertise to take all the noise and clamor from vendors busting down the door and create a usable, secure setup, while keeping in budget.
The one most important factor is reacting to change. Flexibility is crucial. For example, even though individual machines with drive arrays work well, moving to a SAN in the data center [2] is a necessary move for most applications. Similar with moving from racks of physical hardware to a VM infrastructure [3]. Network-wise, the future will be about dealing with edge devices (IoT stuff), and perhaps even having a separate WAN that is shared among companies that uses leased lines so that business transactions run on a separate network than the Internet.
[1]: One organization would give the sales guy the middle finger. Another would just allow him to email the plans to customers and call it done. In between would be a company laptop with decent FDE on it (BitLocker + TPM), and so on.
[2]: Pick your protocol. iSCSI is the cheapest to implement, but FC is decent, as it is most likely a separate fabric so if the network goes down, your drives stay up. Ideally, if you have compute nodes (like ESXi machines), you have everything boot from the SAN.
[3]: Again, this varies on application.
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IThe problem with IT's reputation is that it is a cost center
Next time a manager points that out to you, ask them where it comes from. Oh look it comes from Accounting and they are a cost center as well. Oh and so is Marketing,
There are lot and lots of examples where IT was divided off the business and the department began billing all the other departments for the work preformed. In every one of those instances IT becomes one of the biggest profit centres in the company. It is amazing what happens when the IT department has to be paid for the services provided.
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collaborative tools are kind of a double edged sword... there are thousand of packages claiming to be collaborative tools and only a very small percentage of them focus on what really makes collaboration possible. Collaboration requires communication and without out that if you have a geographically diverse team then you suffer.
I work with people from all over the country every day and because they are comprised of many different companies {that we purchased and gobble up} there are multiple packages out th
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It isn't just IT. Management fads seem to be everywhere. People go where the incentives are. If doing something akin to internal marketing gets you a promotion, guess what you're going to do?
Consulting companies pay artists and designers to work on powerpoint presentations, or at least to teach their consultants how to design snazzy slides and arm them with a mountain of templates. That all happens off the official bills but obviously the cost gets baked in. They do it for the same reason that ads alwa
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Given that IT itself doesn't typically get to decide what services the company expects it to provide, I'd say you've pretty much nailed it with that quote - IT (at least the externally-visible aspects of it) has become superficial and vacuous, with the decisions made by idiots who can't tell "shiny
I'm even older. (Score:2)
>> 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.
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Question doesn't match (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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My favorite conversations always happen after the executives have a nice lunch w/a vendor.
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I doubt it was new then, either. Businesses don't like to spend money, and IT gets classified as a cost center.
Then your IT department needs to become a business partner and enabler. That's the tact we've taken, the vast majority of our costs are in projects, and we let the business drive those with us helping to steer them, if someone complains about IT spending we ask them which of their projects they want us to defund. We recently completed an acquisition equal to about 40% of the size of the company, w
Well duh (Score:2)
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?
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Seriously, do they even have an IT group?
Yes, they wear the red shirts of Engineering.
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Actually, I am more interested in their network security. All of their data leaks seem to be inside people more so then the network itself was compromised.
CIOs are reaping what they've sowed (Score:2)
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
tools are better (Score:2)
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 pr
Corporate is a Captive Audience (Score:3)
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.
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... You are measured by the budget that you consume. ....
Mod parent up insightful!
Magical (Score:3)
There are many more good questions now (Score:3)
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".
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Our worksite bandwidth isn't constrained by the circuit, it's the firewalling. We are one of the top ten targets in the universe. Given that, I'm not slowed down by external access, but by internal firewalls. We have to protect against internal threats also.
A production server requires three instances - production, test, and development. Days to implement, weeks to approve. We have to actually know what it will be expected to do before we can request it.
I'm currently using around 120GB of storage, of w
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I'm not saying that all corporate IT is dysfunctional, just that you can't pull the "Oz sitting behind the curtain and terrify the locals with your awesomeness" crap any longer. You need to have real answers to the very legitimate questions that are brought in by the commoditization and democratization of technology.
Sony ... (Score:2)
No. Sony knows it is.
The best technology has been at home for years (Score:2)
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 g
CIOs need to learn... (Score:3)
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.
Meh... the more things change... (Score:2)
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.
Wrong premise (Score:2)
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.
My take on this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
IT has to accept new realities (Score:2)
IT is a vaccine (Score:2)
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 "ou
YES, but it's not the devices, it's the cloud. (Score:2)
Diffused decision making (Score:2)
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 decision
Yes it is. (Score:3)
LCARS 3.0 was a disaster.
The problem has never changed (Score:3)
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.
Re:YES !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
But ... (Score:2)
- 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?
---------------
SlashDot should be so much better then this.
Re:But ... (Score:4, Insightful)
We used to be called experts. Now we're virtual janitors.
Re:YES !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes!
All of you get the hell off my lawn!!!!
Re:YES !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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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 m
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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.
Re: (Score:2)
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 esse
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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.
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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
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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
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These are the type of companies that buy BMC products. Bloated and expensive must mean it's better, right?
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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 r
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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
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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
Re: (Score:2)
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 [merriam-webster.com], 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.
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Where's your enterprise data now?
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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