Countless business models have spawned from the IaaS industry – resell Web hosting, blogs, public cloud, and on and on. With the overwhelming amount of tools available to us, it’s sometimes easy to overlook that many of them are just new skins of resources we’ve had for a long time.
In his general session at 17th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, an IBM Company, broke down what we have to work with, discussed the benefits and pitfalls and how we can best use them to design hosted applications.
Monthly Archives: December 2015
Are Your Users Happy? Tips for Running a Successful IT Help Desk
What do you think of when you hear the term Help Desk? Is it a room full of technicians with noise-cancelling headsets, logged into an IT Service Management (ITSM) system, talking with their hands and guzzling Red Bulls? In your vision, do they appear haggard, glassy-eyed and stressed? Do they participate in the corporate culture, or languish in that basement call center the rest of the company thinks is some super-secret laboratory?
That may seem a little outrageous, but consider this: Google and Bing searches on “help desk” don’t show a real human representative until almost 20 images in. And even then, the images are stereotypical and generic. So you have to ask yourself, is that how the rest of the organization sees your help desk team? Are they relegated to anonymity?
Back when I started my career in the IT industry as a service technician in the 1980s, I was a pretty popular guy when I strolled in the door to solve someone’s computer issue. I would come in with my bag of tools, some floppy disks, and my trusty degausser. I was that guy who could perform the voodoo ritual that would breathe life back into their systems while they went off and filed something or made some sales calls, and, because what I did was largely a mystery to them, they were (generally) pleasant and patient.
{Register for Geoff’s upcoming webinar, “IT Help Desk for the Holidays: The Strategic Gift That Keeps on Giving”}
There is a new reality today, one born out of the following facts:
- Little productive work can be done without a functioning system today
- Users are more sophisticated with the basics of computer functionality
- Systems are more integrated and inter-dependent
- Remote support capabilities and call center technologies have matured greatly
These are not unique to IT; there are many parallels to other industries. Are you more patient today when visiting the doctor, getting your car serviced, or when your Internet goes out? Or do you find yourself self-diagnosing, visiting the forums, or fiddling with the cables first, and then when you do call or visit the specialist, you’re frustrated and impatient?
With these new realities, IT help desks have to mature to maintain value and provide good client satisfaction. Our customer base is better educated, more dependent, and less patient than in the past. However, we have new technologies to reduce wait times and improve resolution times and can leverage data and analytics to identify trends and predict usage demands. I’m actually hosting a webinar next week to go over strategies for reducing wait times and improving resolution times if you’re interested in learning more.
The development of help desk services has been traditionally based on user counts and request quantities: X amount of users placing Y amount of requests equals the number of people I need to staff my service with. But there are other factors that can complicate that seemingly simple calculation, such as the ebbs and flows of requests by time of day, day of the week or month of the year, usage spikes due to new platform and application roll outs, and the geographic dispersion of users to be supported. Other factors include the types of requests and length of the typical resolution cycle, technologies being consumed, potential complications from BYOD and mobile workforce requirements, and the quality of support artifacts. And that doesn’t even consider staff burn out, attrition, and career advancement impacts on delivery capabilities.
So, as the person responsible for the delivery of a seemingly basic, vanilla and anonymous service, how do you create something that is world-class, aligned to your specific business outcomes, and is the face of all IT support to a sophisticated, diverse and impatient workforce that needs to work anytime, from anywhere on any type of device? Seems a pretty daunting challenge. Here are some tactics you can use:
- Consider starting at the end. What is the desired business outcome from your help desk service? Ask the question of the line of business owners, determine their individual needs, and correlate that into a prioritized list of requirements. Is speed-to-answer the most valuable? Or is it resolution time? How much can you rely on their users to self-service?
- Think like a services provider, not as a member of the organization. If you had to craft a solution that provides a consistent and predictable outcome, but that can flex non-linearly as demand changes without impacting your SLAs, how would you do that? What challenges may impact your service delivery capability, and how can those be dealt with proactively?
- Determine what information is critical in self-evaluation of your service delivery, and in demonstration of value. How would you share that with the rest of the organization, and how can that be leveraged for continual improvement? Your constituents should feel empowered to opine and provide feedback, but equally as important is how you assess yourself.
- What can I achieve within the given budget? Do I have to downgrade service levels, or can I save money by utilizing lower cost resources and enabling them with better documentation and support artifacts? What are the trade-offs?
- Think creatively. If I move some services to a provider, can I improve the overall experience by re-dedicating the internal team to more complex issue resolutions or provide a more robust, hands-on response? Will providing end user training based on issue type allocation reduce the help desk need and create a more sustainable service?
Above all else, set the proper expectations, be realistic, and don’t over-commit. At the root of it, help desk is a human experience, and since all humans are bound to be imperfect, so will your help desk. While the prevailing perspective may be that they are automatons toiling away in some deep dark lair, we know that they are the face of all we deliver to our constituents.
Interested in hearing more from Geoff on how to run a world-class help desk? Register for our December, 10th webinar!
By Geoff Smith, Senior Manager, Managed Services Business Development
How Free Apps Can Destroy an Organization By @IanKhanLive | @CloudExpo #Cloud
I didn’t want to be so dramatic, but I couldn’t help but be completely honest as well. The end possibility is that your entire organization may suffer the fate as Sony Pictures, Target, Anthem and others that have been shaken by hacks and vulnerabilities in their networks. In some cases it has been analyzed that hackers sat in for months stealing data, until they chose to tell everyone about their presence. That’s probably one of the reasons that websites like WikiLeaks are constantly able to churn document after document, exposing one thing or the other. Without supporting any of these and staying neutral, enterprise IT does face a daunting task of protecting the fort from everything out there. It’s not that enterprise IT is not doing their job. The fact remains that end users within organizations are causing a huge disruption by adding consumer-level apps to their work life. The advent of BYOD and a harmless Wi-Fi connection to your work Internet is all that is needed for the hacks to start happening.
The Saga of the Unicorns | @CloudExpo #IoT #BigData #Microservices
Unicorn is a term in the investment industry, and in particular the venture capital industry, which denotes a start-up company whose valuation has exceeded (the somewhat arbitrary) $1 billion. The term has been popularized by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures. Fortune magazine counted over 80 unicorns as of January 2015. Now its most likely past 100. But their journey lately has been bumpy.
There are signs of cooling the “lofty valuations” of these unicorns. Fidelity wrote down Dropbox by 20%; Snapchat by 25%; and Zenefits and MongoDB by around 50% each. Zenefits had raised money at a $4.5B valuation in May. The reason for the markdown is the slow growth in meeting their targets. Square which had its IPO earlier in November, was valued at $4 billion, about a third less than in its most recent private round. Several others besides Square have faced “markdowns”: Pure Storage, Box, GoPro, News Relic, Hottonworks, etc.
Parallels Access on the iPad Pro
Parallels received its first iPad Pro the other day, and I was able to use it for a few days. Man that screen is big! The first thing I did was to install Parallels Access (version 3.0.2) from the iTunes App Store, and check out how well it works. I tested Mac apps, Windows apps, the […]
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How to Access Your VM Files Without Starting Parallels Desktop
Guest blog by Manoj Raghu, Parallels Support Team “Hold on, John,”—Or How to Save Time While Accessing Your Virtual Machine Files without Starting Parallels Desktop Let’s picture a situation when you are on a call with a client and need to send that file right away, but then you realize you saved it in your […]
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Security and Compliance vs. DevOps | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #IoT #Microservices
This morning on #c9d9 we spoke with two industry veterans and published authors – James DeLuccia and Jonathan McAllister – on how to bake-in security and compliance into your DevOps processes, and how DevOps and automation can essentially help you pass your next audit.
Why security will make small businesses move to the cloud in 2016
(c)iStock.com/eric1513
It has long been said that security concerns are what drives small businesses away from putting their data in the cloud. Yet according to Oscar Arean, technical operations manager at disaster recovery provider Databarracks, 2016 will see more small to medium firms move towards cloud services as managing security in-house becomes an increasing headache.
In particular, Arean argues the need for small businesses to move to Office 365 – almost by default – because of its simplicity. “Every year, more businesses reach the end of life of their onsite hardware and are faced with the choice of on-premise or move to the cloud,” he explains. “Office 365 will be the default for most small businesses because it’s so simple to use.”
He adds: “You don’t need particularly advanced IT skills to set it up and in many ways it takes the headache out of security because you know Microsoft has a vested interest in protecting your data. The damage to their reputation would be huge if they were to suffer a breach.”
A recent survey from Clutch found that almost half of small businesses in the US do not use cloud storage. Analyst Sarah Patrick, writing for this publication, argued that while “for small business protecting data is often a secondary concern to accomplishing the primary business goal”, cloud storage services provide a high level of security. “For a cloud storage provider, keeping data secure is what they do,” she noted.
Mark van der Linden, UK country manager at Dropbox, wrote for this publication back in July that ‘adoption is key to security.’ “For businesses, the real threat to security is not the cloud itself, but shadow IT,” he explains. “It is time CIOs put adoption at the heart of their IT strategies. By employing user-friendly solutions, adoption rates are higher and the risk of data being held outside official platforms is significantly reduced. IT departments put themselves back in control.”
Arean argues: “Services like Office 365 can obviously never be 100% secure, but you can be safe in the knowledge that they will have a team of skilled security specialists working to eliminate threats – which is much more time and resources than most SMEs can afford to devote to security.”
Yet he admits it is still ‘scary’ for small businesses to migrate their operations into the major cloud vendors. “Even with public cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google, which make the process much simpler, there is still work to be done in making cloud services more accessible and more intuitive for first time users,” Arean explains. “It very much still requires a ‘hold your hand’ approach to set it up which needs to be simplified in order to facilitate more widespread adoption.”
One option, as Arean notes, is to use a managed services provider, but others insist the hypervendors are not the best solution for small businesses. Mashukul Hoque, managing director of Manchester-based Datacentreplus, told this publication: “These vendors’ primary motivation for developing UK data centres is compliance-related so they can attract public sector and other very large customers who will not consent to data being stored overseas.
“Secondly, other than for the very large customer, their offerings are very much a ‘one size fits all’ that is good for a particular type of customer but unsuitable for many others,” Hoque added, citing colocation as a key differentiator.
UK Competition and Markets Authority to launch legal probe into cloud storage
The UK’s Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) is to launch a review of how the cloud storage sector may be affected by consumer law, in the wake of rising concerns about pricing and services charges.
With an estimated 40% of consumers now using cloud storage to store music, images and documents, according to the CMA, compliance with consumer law is increasingly critical. The CMA says that it is taking action as reports emerge of possible breaches of consumer law through rogue practices and terms.
In one case consumers were hit with surprise price increases and reductions to their ‘unlimited’ storage capacity deals after contracts had been agreed. The CMA is also concerned about incidents of loss and deletion of some consumers’ data.
The CMA’s review is to investigate how widespread these practices are, whether they breach consumer law and how they are affecting consumers. The process, which begins on December 1st, is open for responses until 15 January 2016. The CMA says it wants to hear from businesses about their practices and from consumers and industry experts about their experiences.
“We want to assess whether companies understand and comply with consumer law and whether cloud storage services are working well for consumers as a result,” said Nisha Arora, CMA Senior Director.
If the review finds breaches of consumer protection laws it will take action to address these, it says. This could include enforcement action using the CMA’s own consumer law powers, namely Part 2 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 relating to unfair terms and for contracts entered into before 1 October 2015 the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999. It can also invoke the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (CPRs). Alternatively, it may seek voluntary change from the sector or provide guidance to business or consumers.
The CMA has a general review function under section 5 of the Enterprise Act 2002. Information gathered can help the CMA to determine whether further action is warranted. However the CMA says it has not taken any decisions about what it might do once this review is completed.