Posts Tagged ‘security’

3 Questions That Every IT Manager Should Be Asking About Clouds

Thursday, December 1st, 2011
Image Credit Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how an IT manager can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

How Much Will This Save Me?

A lot of the excitement about cloud computing comes from the simple fact that most IT managers view the cloud as a way to reduce the cost of running an IT project. However, before visions of budget savings start dancing in your head, you need to answer some questions first.

Roger Cheng over at the Wall Street Journal has taken a look at where the expenses in running an IT department come from. What he’s discovered is that servers run about $2000 – $6,000. This capital expense can be avoided if instead of buying more servers a IT manager simply subscribes to more cloud computing resources when it’s time to expand a project’s IT infrastructure.

In addition to saving on buying more servers, there are potentially other savings that an IT manager can realize by moving a project to the cloud. Buying more servers would require more IT staff to act as systems administrators – no servers means no hiring of additional administrators. Sure, you want to manage a dream team of IT professionals, but first you need to make sure that the company can pay for them.

Are Cloud Services Reliable Enough?

It seems as though every other month or so there is another story in the paper about some cloud provider having an outage. One time it’s Amazon, the next it’s Google. As a IT manager you need to be asking yourself if this cloud computing stuff is really reliable enough for you to be trusting your company’s IT infrastructure to.

It turns out that the analysts have taken a look at the overall reliability of the clouds that are being provided and they are as, if not more, reliable than most company’s IT infrastructure. One reason for this is that providing a cloud is all that the providers do and so they hire and staff in order to ensure the reliability of their product.

What Don’t I Know About Clouds?

The wise IT manager knows to ask “what don’t I know enough to ask about?” One key issue has to do with your company’s most precious asset – its corporate data. When you move this project data to a cloud, you are asking another company to take care of it. Are you and your company’s management team comfortable doing this?

Is your project really going to save money by moving to the cloud? Not every project will – it all depends on how your IT department is set up now and what it’s going to look like in the future. You have other options for saving money – virtualizing the project servers that you have today is one way to accomplish this.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing is all the rage these days. IT managers are getting more and more pressure to introduce cloud computing into their IT projects. Before they take this step, they need show some leadership and get some questions answered.

The promise of cloud computing is that it will save an IT project money. Do you know where these savings will come from? How does the reliability of the cloud compare to your IT project’s current level of reliability? Finally, what other options besides cloud computing do you have for boosting your IT project’s performance?

Cloud computing appears to be here to stay. However, that doesn’t mean that every IT manager should race out and jump into the cloud today. Take your time and get the answers to the important questions and your next step will become clear to you.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that the company’s finance department should be involved in determining if the savings of moving into the cloud would be worth the effort for your project?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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How IT Managers Work With Their CIO

Thursday, October 6th, 2011
Image Credit Presenting To The CIO Is A Big Step For IT Managers

Presenting To The CIO Is A Big Step For IT Managers

Congratulations IT Manager – you’ve been asked to make a presentation to your company’s CIO. Oh, oh. What are you going to have to do in order to make your career move forward due to this opportunity and not screw it up?

What Does A CIO Of Directors Want From A IT Manager?

Let’s make sure that we’re all on board here – do you really understand what the CIO does for the company? Although the CIO is in charge of the IT department, he or she is really responsible for making IT a company asset, not so much about the day-to-day working of the technology side of IT.

Although the CIO does understand the importance of information technology, they really don’t care about the nitty-gritty details that everyone in their department works on every day – they have much bigger things to worry about. That means that you are going to have present the information that they have requested very carefully.

Arthur Langer has done some research in this area and he has the following four recommendations for how IT Managers should present information to their CIO:

  1. New Ideas: IT Managers need to understand why they have been asked to make a presentation to the CIO. The CIO is not interested in what you spend most of your time worrying about – budget details, hiring issues, etc. Instead, his or her focus is on the IT department as a whole and they want to hear from you what you can do to help the department help out the rest of the company. This can include how your team can help out with ongoing operations as well as what you can do more strategically.

  2. Security: Every presentation that a IT Manager makes to the CIO needs to touch on the topic of information security. Remember, they don’t care about the details. Instead, what they want to hear from you is what you are doing to protect the company against risks and what you are doing to ensure that the company’s confidential information won’t get stolen.

  3. Data: If there is one thing that is keeping your CIO up at night, it’s worrying about all of that data that your company is sitting on. As the IT Manager, they see you as being responsible for keeping track of all of this data. That also means that you are viewed as acting as the point-of-contact if the company gets sued and one of those e-discovery programs has to be conducted.

  4. Analytics: Since the CIO sees the IT Manager as being in charge of all of the data that your team collects, they also see you as being responsible for finding ways to get the most out of that data. This means that you need to be ready to tell them how you plan on going about doing this.

How Can You Prepare For A CIO Presentation?

Being invited to make a presentation to your company’s CIO is a great honor. Now you’re going to have to ensure that you make the most of this opportunity. That means, sorry about this, you’re going to have to do some homework.

Here are four things that every IT Manager needs to do both before and during their presentation to the CIO:

  1. Know Your Audience: You should do this before every presentation, and presenting to your CIO is no different. You need to understand the personalities of the CIO. What is their background? What is their reputation within the company? What do other people who have presented to them have to say about them?

  2. Make Friends: How the presentation is going to turn out is often determined before it starts. If you can make contact with the CIO before the day of the presentation and ask them questions, then you will have a chance to have an ally in your corner on the day of your presentation.

  3. Time Counts: When you were told how much time you had for your presentation, the person who told it to you was lying. The way that these things work out is that you never get as much time as you were told, or even as much as you ended up being allocated. The CIO will hate you forever if you run over your allocated time and will love you forever if you finish up early. Always show up with multiple version of your presentation so that you can fit into smaller and smaller time periods.

  4. Use Stories: As one of the company’s IT Managers you have a great deal of sophisticated knowledge about all things related to the IT sector and how they work. Don’t share this during your presentation. Instead, keep things simple and use stories to make you points – this is what the CIO will be able to remember.

What All Of This Means For You

The definition of information technology is that it is how a company uses computers to become more successful. As one of the company’s IT Managers, it’s your job to make this happen. When your CIO summons you to present to them, you need to understand both what they are interested in and what they don’t want you to talk about.

When you are preparing for your presentation you’ll want to focus on what the CIO wants hear: how your IT team can help to grow the company, data security, data management, and how best to use the data that the company has. Additionally you’ll need to do your homework in order to prepare for your big presentation.

We talk a lot about finding ways to get the IT Manager a “seat at the table” when it comes to working with other departments. Being asked to present to your CIO is a fantastic opportunity for an IT Manager to make a name for himself or herself. Make sure that you take the time to prepare for this presentation and you’ll see your career take off…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that you should prepare a separate handout for your presentation to the CIO?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT manager, your time is spent keeping projects and teams on track. You wouldn’t think that something like strategy would be part of your job at this stage of your career. I mean, that strategy stuff is what the big boys in IT spend their days worrying about right? Hmm, if you don’t start thinking about how to both come up with and execute a strategy now, how are you going to develop these management skills later on? Let’s see if we can show you what you need to be doing with strategy right now…

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Google’s Lessons For Managing Tech-Savvy Teams

Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Image Credit
How Does Google Solve Common IT Manager Issues?

How Does Google Solve Common IT Manager Issues?

Sigh, if only we all could work for Google, right? If there is one company out there that seems to “get” IT, it would have to be Google. The stories that float around about how nice the Google campus is and all the free food and other perks sure make it seem like a Shangri-La. Hmm, but wait a minute, no matter how nice it seems, they’ve got to be dealing with the same IT Leader issues that we all are. Maybe it’s time to have a talk with their (former) CIO…

It’s All About Choice

One of the big issues that IT Leaders have to deal with on an almost constant basis is the issue of keeping our teams up and running. This comes down to making sure that they have the right laptops, the right operating systems, etc. If you are not careful, this can eat up a lot of your available time.

Over at Google, Douglas Merrill who was their CIO up until April of 2008 said that the model that they used for solving the individual system issue was freedom of choice: employees got to choose both their machine and their operating system. I’ll bet that pretty much eliminates any complaining!

You would think that this would make support from an IT perspective a lot more complicated / expensive. You’d be right, but Merrill said that it didn’t boost costs all that much in part because of Google’s extensive use of self-service. They maintain internal web sites where users can go to download and install any software that they need. They do this by themselves and it places no additional burden on the IT department.

What About Security?

I can almost hear what you are saying / thinking right now: man, that must cause all sorts of security nightmares. Any IT Leader that you talk with these days probably has one or more horror stories about a team member downloading (or clicking on) something that they shouldn’t have and causing a mess that took forever to clean up.

Merrill says that they look at things a bit differently at Google. Most companies try to secure their networks by locking down the endpoints: our laptops and our smart phones. He feels that this really doesn’t work very well — thus all of the problems that we still have. At Google they put the security into the infrastructure.

What this means is that, yes, they still have antivirus and antispyware applications running on everyone’s laptops, but they also have a lot of software running on their corporate mail servers and infrastructure. When taken together, they feel that they have solved the problem of just how you can secure your corporate network.

Just in case you need more convincing that they really take their security seriously, Merrill states that Google has over 150 engineers who work on nothing but security. They’ve worked very hard to make sure that security is not something that is handled by “some group” and instead is worked into everything that they do. One of the ways that they make this happen is to use automated tools to check each developer’s code before it gets put into production.

What All Of This Means For You

No, most of us are not going to end up working for Google (unless they take over the world, at which this turns into a different discussion). However, how they run their IT shop does hold some clues for the rest of us.

When it comes to resolving issues regarding the technical environment in which their team members work, they’ve turned over the decision making to each employee. We can’t necessarily set up the same system, but it does provide some clues. Where possible if we allow the team to decide things like what code editor to use or what template to use then all of a sudden it’s not “my” decision, but rather “our” decision which is always a lot easier for everyone to live with.

Security is another issue that just doesn’t seem to want to go away. Google’s approach is to do the baseline needed at the edge of the network and then focus on securing the core. This just seems like an overall good idea. Additionally, setting up ways to carefully check your team’s products to ensure that they are secure is always a good idea for any IT Leader.

It looks like Google is running a pretty tight ship in their IT department. Even if we can’t all work there, we can still learn from their example…

Do you think that working at Google is all that it’s cracked up to be, or is it just like working in any other IT department?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As the world economy tanked and countless people in all industries lost their jobs, the one thing that IT Leaders really didn’t have to worry about was having members of their team jump ship to go to work for other firms – there were no other jobs to be had. Well as the economy improves, this is going to change. Got a plan for keeping your team on board?

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