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Corporate IT

Death of the Home Directory

May 12th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
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Well, when I say that the Home Directory is dying; I mean that it is probably moving and with it some problems are going to be caused.

As I wander round our offices, I often see a familiar logo in people’s system trays; that of a little blue open box. More and more people are moving their documents into the Cloud; they really don’t care about security, the just want the convenience of their data where ever they are. As the corporate teams enforce a regime of encryption on USB flash-disks; everyone has moved onto Cloud-based storage. So yes, we are looking at ways that we can build internal offerings which bring the convenience but feel more secure. Are they any more secure? And will people use them?

I suspect that unless there are very proscriptive rules which block access to sites such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and the likes; this initiative will completely fail. The convenience of having all your data in one place and being able to work on any device will over-ride security concerns. If your internal offering does not support every device that people want to use; you may well be doomed.

And then this brings me onto BYOD; if you go down this route and evidence suggests that many will do so..you have yet more problems. Your security perimeter is changing and you are allowing potential hostile systems onto your network; in fact, you always probably did and hadn’t really thought about it.

I have heard of companies who are trying to police this by endorsing a BYOD policy but insisting that all devices should be ‘certified’ prior to being attached to the corporate network. Good luck with that! Even if you manage to certify the multitude of devices that your staff could turn up with as secure and good to go; that certification is only valid at that point or as long as nothing changes, no new applications installed, no updates installed and probably no use made of the device at all.

Security will need to move to the application and this could mean all of the applications; even those familiar applications such as Word and Excel. Potentially, this could mean locking down data and never allowing it be stored in a non-encrypted format on a local device.

The responsibility for ensuring your systems are secure is moving; the IT security teams will need to deal with a shifting perimeter and an increasingly complicated threat model. Forget about updating anti-virus and patching operating systems; forget about maintaining your firewall; well don’t but if you think that is what security is all about, you are in for a horrible shock.

 

Big Data Values for All?

May 7th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
4 comments

The jury is probably still out on the real value of ‘Big Data’ and what it will mean to our lives; whether it is a power for good or ill or even if it is a power for anything is probably still up for debate. But there is one thing which is probably true, ‘Big Data’ will change data-processing for the better.

At present, you will find that the prevailing wisdom is that if you have Data to store, you should store it in a relational database but the ‘new’ data processing techniques which ‘Big Data’ brings to the party changes this or at least seriously questions this wisdom.

I know many applications that currently store their data into relational databases that could possibly benefit from a change of focus; these are often log-oriented applications which are only using one or two tables to store their Data and often the indexes to enable fast processing are larger than the data stored.

So even if you have no ‘Big Data’, you may find that you have more candidates than you realise for ‘Big Data’ processing techniques….and I suspect this is what really scares our friends at Oracle. For too long now, serious Data processing required serious relational databases and that road took us into the realms of Oracle; increasing costs and infrastructure complexity.

The problem is that re-writes show little immediate business value and the investment will take two or three years to pay-off; it is this that your RDMS account manager is counting on. Yet as soon as you start to factor in maintenance, upgrade and recurring costs; this should be an economic no-brainer for the IT Manager with foresight.

 

 

Archicultural….

May 1st, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
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It seems the more that I consider the architectural and technical challenges and changes to the Corporate IT world, the more I come back to the cultural issues which exist within many IT departments and the more I find myself feeling strongly that this is where the work really needs to be done.

Unfortunately it is pretty hard to buy a culture from a vendor, even though I suspect if Chuck could work out exactly how to do so; we’d have a product from EMC called V-CLT (or is that VMware?); so building a culture is going to be have to be an internal thing and that means it is going to be tough.

Too often the route into IT Management means either promoting excellent techies into management or sometimes promoting people into positions where they can do no more harm as opposed to moving people into positions which suits them and their personalities. I am sure that we can all think of examples of both; this is especially true in end-user organisations as the career paths are less varied than that of the vendor organisation. Vendor organisations have sales, marketing and other avenues for progression; they also have the traditional IT paths as well.

But all IT organisations are suffering from cultures which neither scale or are sustainable in the long term. There needs to be a long term shift which ensure that training and development are in more than just technical skills; there needs to be a move away from a hero culture that sees staff at all levels of an organisation regularly halving their hourly rates by working longer than their contracted hours, not taking leave and forgetting that you ‘Work to Live’.

Careers need to be thought of more than the fastest route to the top and when people find their natural level; this does not mean that they do not stop being valuable members of an organisation. Work on developing people horizontally (and you with the dirty mind can stop sniggering); I think that there is something relatively unhealthy when you find managers who have worked their way up through a team and only worked in one team.  Horizontal moves have immense value; I have learnt such a lot in the past couple of years running a test team as well as a storage team.

Horizontal moves will help to break down some of the siloed mentality; even if you do not believe in DevOps, moving people between these two disciplines even on secondment must have value.

If you have a graduate scheme in place, the natural roles that most graduates gravitate to are in development; make sure that they have a placement in an Operations/Infrastructure team. They will learn so much.

And if you work in management; you are doing a pretty hard job, make it easier on yourself by standing on the shoulders of giants and actually study the art of management and leadership. Most get to management by being good at something; being good at that something does not mean you know anything about management.

Politics, Practicality, Principles and Pragmatism

Apr 25th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

Many IT infrastructure decisions are made for reasons which have little to do with the capability of the technologies and very few are even made with due consideration of investment returns, long term costs and even fewer are revisited with the light of truth shone upon them.

So it is a wonder that any IT infrastructure works at all?

Well not really, as we have moved into a pretty much homogenised environment where all is interchangeable and pretty much all is good enough; the decisions are going to be made for reasons other than technology.

Many decisions are made simply are the grounds that more of the same is the path of least resistance. You have already learnt to love what you hated about a product and you are comfortable with it.  You might have grown close to the account team, they know all your favourite restaurants and sporting events; why change? And change is costly.

Of course, then you get the obverse; you have learnt to hate what you loved and the account team has grown far too comfortable. Perhaps there’s been a change in account manager or simply you decide that you’ve spent too much money with a company. Of course at this point, you suddenly find that what you have been paying is far too much and the incumbent slashes their costs to keep the account. But you’ve had enough and you decide to change.

Then you get the principled decision; the decision which could be based on the belief that open-source is the right thing to do or perhaps you believe the security through obscurity myth. Sometimes these look like technological decisions but they are really nothing to do with technology in general.

So have we moved to a market where the technology is pretty much irrelevant and why?

I think that we have and for a pretty good reason; you can’t manage what you can’t measure and quite simply, we are still lousy in measuring what we do and what it means. It means that all decisions have to made based on reasons which often have dubious links with reality.

For all discussions about metering and service-based IT; I don’t believe that we are anywhere near it. Internal metering tools are often so expensive and invasive to implement that we don’t bother.

And what is worse, we are often working in environments which do not care really care; who really cares if solution ‘X’ is cheaper over five years than solution ‘Y’ as long as solution ‘Y’ is cheaper today. Tomorrow can look after itself, tomorrow is another budget year.

So not only is measurement not easy; perhaps we simply don’t care?

Perhaps the only option is just carry on doing what we think is as right as possible in the context that we work in?

 

Thinking Architecturally

Apr 16th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

If you start an architecture with a shopping list of technologies that must be used; that architecture will be compromised. However this does not mean that you start working without an appreciation of the possible, obviously you need to be aware of limitations such as constants such as the speed of light and other real constraints.

But currently I see a trend from many, both vendors and users, trying to fix round-hole problems with square-shaped blocks. Not enough time is spent on the problem definition and truly understanding the problem; your existing tools may not be sufficient and although it may feel that it is more expensive to implement something new, at times it might be cheaper in the long-term to implement something right.

Also be aware of falling into the trap of implementing a feature just because you’ve made the mistake of purchasing something that does not fit your problem definition. If you’ve been sold something that you can’t use effectively, you have a couple of option; suck it up and learn from experience or shout and holler at your vendor/partner for selling you something which is merely shelf-ware. In my experience, the latter is often ultimately pointless and simply results in the vendor promising you some other product which you put on a shelf and not use. Use the experience to move away from architecting to utilise a feature and architecting to solve a problem.

This does not mean that you simply purchase a new system/technology for every problem; governance has a role but I would suggest that governance should be applied after the initial high-level-architecture. I like to think of it like more more traditional bricks and mortar architecture; the architect relies on a whole bunch of technical people to fulfil their vision and bring it to reality. At times these technical people will tell the architect that the architect is a complete moron; sometimes the architect will agree and sometimes the architect will work with the technical teams to come up with something innovative and new.

But in general the architect does not start their design with a specific make of brick in mind. Neither should an IT architect.

Fashionably Late

Apr 11th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
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Like Royalty, IBM have turned up late to what is arguably their own party with their PureSystems launch today. IBM, the company which invented converged systems in the form of the mainframe, have finally got round to launching their own infrastructure stack product. But have they turned up too late and is everyone already tucking into the buffet and ignoring the late-comer?

For all the bluster and talk about the ability to have Power and x86 in the same frame and dare I whisper mainframe; this is really an answer to the vBlock, FlexPod and Matrix et all. IBM can wrap it and clothe it but this is a stack and if pushed they will admit this.

But when I first had the pitch a few months ago; I must admit, despite the ‘so what’ reaction, I was impressed with what appears to be a lot of thought and detail from an infrastructure engineering point of view. It looks pretty good as slide-ware.

Still the question is…is it any better than the competitors; well even if you treat it as a pure x86 infrastructure ‘stack in a rack’, it certainly appears to be more flexible than some of the competitors. You have choices as to what hypervisor it’ll support for starters. It appears to be more polished and less bodged together from a hardware point of view.

But at the end of the day, it is what it is and what is going to be really important is whether it can really deliver the management efficiencies and improve IT’s effectiveness. And that, as is with all it’s competitors is still a question where there is not yet a solid answer.

As a product, it looks at least as good as the rest…as an answer? The workings are still being worked upon.

Do you need a desktop?

Apr 3rd, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

Work provide me with a laptop which spends most of its time locked to my desk. It’s quite a nice business laptop but really I can’t be bothered to carry it around. On occasion, when I’m working from home and realise that I am going to need access to some of corporate applications which require VPN access, it’ll come home with me but mostly not.

To be quite honest, even my MBA doesn’t travel that much, up and down the stairs is about as far as it goes. It is quite the nicest and most practical laptop that I’ve ever owned but I think we are getting close to the stage where a tablet can do almost everything that I need where-ever I am.

I was thinking as I was working today whether what I was doing required the traditional desktop experience and could I simply use my iPad as the access device instead. The answer is mostly yes, almost all the applications that I use are generic enough that there are good enough replacements on the iPad or they are accessed by a web interface anyway.

There are a few blockers tho’ at present

1) at present I can’t get my iPad onto the corporate wireless, this means that I can’t access a number of key applications due to ‘security’ restrictions but I can access email which appears to be our preferred file delivery/transfer mechanism.

2) I need a real keyboard to type on, there is a limit to how much I am prepared to type on a screen keyboard. I could overcome this relatively easily by bringing a bluetooth keyboard in.

3) Wired Ethernet is a necessity when working in some of our data centres or secure areas.

4) Unfortunately, I struggle without PowerPoint and Visio unfortunately; I can cope without Word, Excel is a little more problematic but it’s manageable. Keynote is nice but it makes a real mess of rendering PowerPoint in my experience.

5) Working on an external display is often a much nicer experience than using the tablet screen, even tho’ the retina display is the wonderful. But I have both the HDMI and VGA dongles which gets round this. But I wish that Apple could find a way to put a mini-DisplayPort on the iPad as using the adapters means that I loose any chance of using a USB device. Not important most of the time but very useful for transferring files from cameras and other devices.

But then I started thinking some more, perhaps I don’t really need a tablet either for work. Perhaps a smartphone which I dock would do? What we could do with is a standard dock for all mobile devices which charges, displays on an external screen and allows input from a standard keyboard/mouse.

Planes, trains, hotels and the like could simply provide a dock and you would end up carrying even less. At that point a device the size of a Samsung Note or Kindle Fire becomes a very interesting proposition.

And yet, I still expect to keep my PC desktop for some time….why? It’s still the best serious gaming platform out there. But for almost everything else I could probably manage with a mobile device.

Local Storage, Cloud Access

Mar 27th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Just as we have seen a number of gateways to allow you to access public cloud storage in a more familiar way and making it appear as local to your servers, we are beginning to see services and products which do the opposite.

To say that these turn your storage into cloud storage is probably a bit of a stretch but what they do is to allow your storage to be accessed by a multitude of devices where-ever they happen to be. They bring the convenience of Dropbox but with a more comfortable feeling of security because the data is stored on your storage. Whether this is actually any more secure will be entirely down to your own security and access policies.

I’ve already blogged about Teamdrive and I’ll be blogging about it again and also the Storage Connector from Oxygen Cloud in the near future. I must say that some of the ideas and the support for Enterprise storage by the folks at Oxygen Cloud looks very interesting.

I do wonder when or if we’ll see Dropbox offer something similar themselves, Dropbox with it’s growing software ecosphere would be very attractive with the ability to self-host. It would possibly give some of the larger storage vendors something to consider.

These new products do bring some interesting challenges which will need to be addressed; you can bet that your users will start to install these on their PCs, both at work and at home. The boundaries between corporate data and personal data will become ever blurred; much as I hate it, the issue of rights management is going to become more important. Forget the issue of USB drives being lost, you could well find that entire corporate shares are exposed.

But your data any time, any place is going to become more and more important; convenience is going to trump security again and again. I am becoming more and more reliant on cloudy storage in my life but for me it is a knowing transition; I suspect for many others, they are simply not aware of what they are doing.

This is not a reason to simply stop them but a reason to look at offering the services to them but also to educate. The offerings are coming thick and fast, the options are getting more diverse and interesting. The transition to storage infrastructure as software has really opened things up. Smaller players can start to make an impact, let’s hope that the elephants can dance.

Nothing Wrong With Shadows

Mar 14th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

How many IT departments does your company? One? Two? As many as you have business units? As many as you have teams? Or perhaps as many as you have employees? I’ll be very surprised if the answer is one; yes, you might have one official department but how many do you have lurking in the shadows?

Shadow IT is a fact of life and becoming more and more prevalent. Shadow IT is the stuff which users do to get their jobs done, the stuff which makes their jobs easier and even at times the stuff which makes their jobs more fun. So how do you as a Corporate IT department deal with Shadow IT and should you deal with it?

Well, firstly I would suggest that you look at what is going on in your own department. The biggest users of Shadow IT are probably your own IT people; they know the deficiencies of your infrastructure, they know the stuff which stops them getting things done quickly and they know how to get round the obstacles which are put in place to stop them.

They are often the early adopters, the gadget-heads who have the latest toys; they love shiny and new, that’s why a lot of them do the job they do. And don’t think that Shadow IT is a bad thing, for every example of something going wrong because of it; there are examples of good things.

Arguably the most successful piece of Shadow IT is actually the Unix operating system; much of the development was done quietly on under-utilised kit pretty much in the shadows of AT&T. And the  way its way out of the AT&T due to the 1958 consent decree preventing AT&T entering the computer business meant that it permeated out into the wide world in a shadowy way.

The adoption of the PC was another moment where Shadow IT drove the change and forced Corporate IT to change and support a key technology that they were probably scared of. But you can pretty much guarantee that many of the technical staff in those Corporate IT teams were already playing with PCs and learning about them. Yes, even those mainframe guys who professed to hate the PC might well have been playing with those horrible PC things.

Linux in the corporate space happened because of Shadow IT; I know plenty of places that would say that they had no Linux in their data-centres that were running web-servers, DNS, network-bridges and various other key infrastructure services running on Linux. Their techies just never told them (did we!?).

Now, the use of AWS and others has been driven by a desire to do things quickly and to experiment but not having to jump through the hoops often put in the way by IT Management; we have potentially entire Shadow Data-Centres. Yes, some of it has been driven by technically savvy users but if you look amongst your deeply technical guys; they’ll also be experimenting, building their own small-scale clouds for fun.

And then there is the BYOD meme; look around your organisation, how many smart-phones, tablets, non-company laptops and the like can you find? How many are in the hands of your Corporate IT guys? Yes, many of them are probably running Android or if they are running iOS, it’s probably jail-broken but they are at the forefront of the BYOD movement.

So before you write off your Corporate IT department as being hidebound and stuck in the past; look in the shadows, what you might find is the future. And you might even be surprised to find that many of them are actually very aware about the business applications and potential; they might not want to build the start-up but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the ideas. Or at times, they think the it’s so obvious that they can’t believe that no-one else hasn’t thought of it.

Encourage them and nurture a culture of openness to new ideas; this isn’t about 20% time but it’s about listening and observing 100% of the time.

Don’t shine lights into the shadows but take time to walk amongst them; they are full of interesting whispers…

Internal Pre-Sales

Feb 29th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

I’ve long argued that there needs to be more movement between vendors and users; I think that there is immense value, especially for vendors who can sometimes be isolated from the trials and tribulations of the end-user. And at times, as an end-user it is useful to understand the pressures and the reality of the vendor world. I like to say that ‘I may take the piss in some of my requests but I do know of what I ask…’ But of course having worked both sides of the fence, I would say that!

However as we move to more service focused IT delivery organisations; perhaps there is real value having worked in a vendor in a pre-Sales capacity; especially if you have learnt to use ears and mouth in the right proportions. Do we need a new role of ‘Internal Pre-Sales’ and is it really a new role?

Unfortunately, I think that the answer is for many organisations that it is a new role but it shouldn’t be. Learning to listen to customers should not be a big surprise (although even amongst some vendors, you’d think it was) but it is debatable whether we would be in the situation we are today if we had all been a bit better at listening and grokking what we were being told.

Listening to the problems and the desires of our users is what we should be good at and unlike a vendor, we potentially have the whole paintbox to play with; we are not stuck with EMC Blue or IBM Blue or HP Grey etc. We can build our service offerings out of best of breed if we want.

Yet we often carry on like the most arrogant vendor in the world? Why is that? Is it learnt behaviour from our vendors or have they learnt it from us? Hard to say!

Our Design and Architecture teams should be doing this but often they are too busy playing with the latest toy and failing the Business. This is not any individual’s fault but a failing in a culture which is very introspective and often closed. Too often we focus on telling each other how cool a technology is as opposed to listening to the Business about a cool problem that technology might help them with.

But we can learn to sell and market; our business is our Business and we should know our verticals better than anyone. Marketing should not be a dirty word; selling should not be anathema. Funnily enough, I think if we got better at it, I think that the vendors might concentrate our selling to us rather than our Businesses. We should have the advantage and the vendors should want to partner with the most likely winner; it makes more sense that way!

[partially inspired by Chuck’ Blog here and riffing on the theme of needing different people for today’s IT world…thanks for inspiration Chuck]

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