Let me guess
The accountants wouldn't spring for the money to do DR properly, and got bitten.
They now run off to the cloud, rather than doing the job right, as the cloud never has outtages, right??
61 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2011
When Sugar closed sourced their CRM, we were on Enterprise. I ran a project and ported the whole lot over to the final version of the CE OSS edition.
It's now maintained by a 3rd party company who do dev work for us, and I saved $50k pa, on a 150user base!
Bugs are fixed more quickly, and we are free to prioritise our own (useful) upgrades; unlike when we were asking Sugar for years to put business functionality into the core product, but kept getting social media plugins!
Obviously does not have to go through the convoluted change control procedures of onw of my customer, every time he goes round the break/fix/deploy cycle!! Agile is not something most large corporate change control processes are aware of!
For Agile to work properly you need agile customers. I have yet to meet one.
Speaking as the guy responsible for sourcing our phones for my company. the selection criteria goes something like this:
Does the hardware allowance from the network cover new phones for all, at the smartphone level. If yes pick best phone for the job that the IT team can support.
If no, will CFO stump up the difference?
If No, what phones do our heavy road warrior users NEED (not want!), and will the budget have enough left to get all other users usable phones, with some smart features (eg Galaxy minis and not full size ones).
That's it for me!! Other elements are less important, as road warriors have car chargers and laptops, so battery life should be less important a consideration.
I must admit, I got a BT box as part of a contract renewal, for the £49 install fee, and I like my little YouView box. I don't use any of the BT Services, but for freeview HD it's great, as a PVR is pretty darn good, and the integrated EPG for catchup and realtime services works well.
It is frustrating that all the different catchup TV services use a lot of different apps, but what the heck.
My only gripe, to make the box perfect (for me) is that it needs a streaming media app to connect to my NAS full of movies!
I've tried other boxes, such as WD TV Live, and even on these not all apps/catchup TV stations are available on all boxes.
This is what happens when you treat all data as equal. We run highly transactional DBs where the entire source data on a multi terabyte systems changes every 3 months. Holding db backups beyond that point has no purpose. On top of that we store the source, input, data so can restore most of the db by reloading source data. Any other data (usernames password tables and the like)are backed up and stored under a different retention scheme.
For me the key is to define your backup regime when creating, or design, the app,or install, with recovery in mind and be ruthless in removing data that has nofurther purpose.
So now (as an IT Admin) I have to supply road warriors with large screen phones (with accompanying data contract), high spec laptop, and an iPad (others tablets just won't do!!). And pay Salesforce their fees as well.
See my costs spiral, whilst sales remain remarkably flat!!!
Fail from my perspective, in the old days there was an incentive for the sales guys to work from home in th evenings doing personal admin. Thanks Salesforce you're making them do it in the day time, when they should be selling instead!
EU laws are harmonised, this deals with data going outside of the EU.
The DPA (and other EEA country laws) set a minimum standard to allow the free passage of data, within the EEA (not just the EU).
Having said that certain types of info are more strongly protected in certain countries than others. The data here includes credit card numbers, so (theoretically) also falls under PCI-DSS, which makes DPA look like a walk in the park!!
I completely agree. I work with a small, multidisciplinary team, and we deal with providing services to large telcos.
A recent project involved us providing a recommendation on their hardware infrastructure to implement the new version of our app on. We spent a lot of time creating a doc that really detailed what was needed (down to SAN IOPs and latency levels), for the Customers server team to through it out. The customer was then less than happy when we told them their performance SLA was not valid, as they were not running on the recommended infrastructure.
I deal with a lot of 'vertical' skilled teams in customers, and my multidisciplinary team runs rings around 90% of them.
Segregation of duties is all well and good, but, if not done correctly, leads to a lot of gaps and grey areas that each team will exploit to it's full.
I think, with one customer, the lead time to implement a simple change is measured in months, due to trying to get 3, or 4, teams to play well together.
On the plus side, my organisation wins extra business, due to our responsiveness and flexibility!!
Financial records get shredded after 10 years, or so, so why not all other records?
Where I work we store offsite backups in destruction date order, as they are far more likely to be destroyed than accessed!
Also, the chances are, if you don;t need a backup in the first couple of years, you'll never need to access it.
Also, as time goes on, all your historical 'tapes' (I use tape as a unit of currency rather than a physical media) will fit onto a single, super capacity future tape format, so the on going transfer will be a single tape at a time.
Are we buying into the keep everything for ever trap, and what happens with 'Big Data' which doesn't even get backed up?
Fatties should receive tax breaks.
They offer 2 advantages over people who exercise:
1) Less CO2 produced, due to no exercise
2) they operate as highly efficient carbon capture devices.
Providing they are buried and not cremated when they die, they are an ideal carbon capture and storage resource :-)
After trying to work with medical people on their requirements, and noting their entire lack of empathy with how software needs to be developed?
Or, as my wife recently said to a overly empathic nurse - 'Stop simpering over me like I'm a small child, and talk to me like an adult'!!
Outsourcing works well for items you don't have to do regularly, and for which it makes no sense to keep a person fully skilled and trained for.
Servicing your car is a great example of this.
Cloud computing is financially viable on exactly the same model.
BUT for things you do regularly, or long term then both outsourcing and cloud computing both fail the financial TCO test.
I deal with both, and know this for a fact!
Have any of us ever come across any public body that can work in an agile way? Their bureaucracy is so deep and so ingrained that agile just can't/won't work for them.
Agile requires a highly developed, and knowledgeable requirements management person, who can have firm needs, and knows the end result, and can stop their stakeholders from gold plating.
Scope creep is so endemic in most government projects, that they often times founder under the scales of creep employed.
As soon as your corporate data (esp personal data covered by the DPA) hits a personal device, the corporate loses control , but not responsibility.
If you fire a person who has synched their Outlook to their phone, and you fire them, you immediately have personal records (covered by the DPA) on a device that is not owned by an employee.
Even if they are still employed you have not rights (unless you get a court order) to examine he device, or to ensure data is deleted off it.
This is the huge Achilles heel in BYOD.
This is just what I need, but please can I have more than 4 network connections, and an ADSL router built in?.
Currently I have 4 on my ADSL router and another 4 on my NetGear Powerline hub, and it works a treat.
I have to plug in Xbox, WD TV Live Box, BD Player, TV plus NAS. I'd rather save WiFi bandwidth for laptops etc, so hard points are good for me.
And when they are away from the 'Office' in Westminster and are required to work offline on documents - how are slabs going to help them then?
Oh, I know, they print them out, rather than having a laptop with reasonable storage, where they could work offline.
Slabs - great for reading the daily paper f-all use for much else in the business world!!
If it's anything like the Avamar client (same stable) it will also then do a deduplicate check on the block, and not transfer if a block is a copy of one already residing on the target server.
This is where is saves the bandwidth, not the other bit.
That outsourcing to India, does not cost less anymore. Yes the day rate you pay a developer is lower, but the management overheads of running offshore, and the sheer depth of detail design specs need to be written to quickly negates any saving in day rate.
Having been through this with a company I know first hand.
As for 24hr working, put a night shift on on the UK!! Or are they referring to taking advantage of poor worker treatment in the sub continent?
Says more about managers at public authorities than it does about people!!
All public authorities have acceptable usage policies, defining what employees can and can't do on works time.
If someone breaks the rules it's up to the manager to sort it out.
Unfortunately a lot (not all) of public authority managers are not very good managers.
You can't respect through force, but you can get compliance.
I'll settle for compliance!
For all the folks banging on about the use of lethal force - nothing living was killed, therefore the force was not lethal QED.
In that respect, if the guy had run it over with his truck (he must own a 'truck') then that too should be classed as using lethal force.
Trust, but verify, the bye words of security these days.
It may well be that the contractor had a contract to destroy harddrives - not knowing what may, or may not, have been on them.
The NHS has a duty to safe guard information, and that cannot be delegated.
A hard lesson to learn, but learn it they must.
One reason that public bodies need to be fined (not that I am happy about it) is that commercial organisations suffer commercially if they cock up and get in the news, as we, the consumers can vote with our feet; where this does not apply to public bodies.
It's an additional 16% off the already discounted rate.
Although I do agree Open Source should be where they NHS is at.
Neither happy nor sad. Although reading the article it seems to suggest that the NHS has a 'shortfall' of licenses, so I'd rather spend money getting the correct licenses, than getting sued for punitive licenses should MS decide to audit the NHS!!
The M60 is a derivative of the MG42, invented by ze Germans in WWII.
I see the ammo vs weapon issue in the same light as inkjet printers and ink manufacturers!!!
Over the lifetime of a military weapon (esp in the field) they will expend many times their purchase value in ammunition.
who sees this a positive. 2G as not everyone has 3G in their area. Not supporting a plethora of differing comms methods broadband, powerline etc) makes life easy.
Good use of existing and stable technology. Doesn't get away from the new meter issue, and install times, but (and I work in the mobile data/telco data sector) I would be OK with this.
Higher bandwidth means greater simultaneous recording capability. I agree for 2 channels USB1.1 is fine, but try 8/16/24 and beyond and you need much more bandwidth.
I am also an IO2 fan, and have the original version. It's been great for me, but from other reviews I've seen of the Mackie, the quality of the AD/DAs is where the money goes.