Category Archives: IT Management

Featured, IT Management, ITIL, Project management

PMP Meets ITIL and Says, “YES!”

By Brian Shaw, PMP, ITIL Foundations, LogicsOne

Successful IT project management professionals are making continuing education the norm. Neither IT ecosystems nor the tools for managing projects are static, and as a result, we must actively build skills to evolve with business needs. Furthermore, by achieving certifications we demonstrate competency within the marketplace.

The first certification you need as a project manager is your PMP, Project Management Professional certification (For more information visit www.pmi.org). The body of knowledge for a PMP certification, often referred to by PMBOK ®, provides a framework for: initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing projects. This framework provides a common language, set of expectations and guidance for project success. GreenPages-LogicsOne has made PMP certified project managers the standard to ensure consistency and excellence in project management.

Recently a peer recommended I attain the ITIL Foundations certification. ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library and provides an approach to IT service management. ITIL offers structure and processes for: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement.

A certification, such as ITIL, for ongoing services may seem like an odd choice for a PMP accustomed to managing projects with a fixed scope and duration, however upon closer review you will discover an ITIL certification fits perfectly with project management. While ongoing services are different from projects the implementation of new or changed services are typically achieved by projects.

New services are brought to life in service transition. Projects in service transition interface with the other stages of the ITIL lifecycle to ensure the vision from service strategy, as outlined in service design, comes to life in service operation. Additionally, opportunities to improve services as identified in the continual service improvement ITIL stage may also become projects.

The ITIL Foundations certification has many benefits to project management professionals practicing within a service organization. Those benefits include:

  • Shared Terminology: Engineers and operations staff may not always know project management terminology, however they are familiar with terms such as incident management, SLA, etc. The knowledge required to gain an ITIL Foundations certification will ensure you are familiar with the same terms as people in the service organization. This shared dictionary goes a long way towards avoiding confusion.
  • Outcome Based Action: Projects should deliver a specific result, as should the transition stage within ITIL.
  • Clarifying Roles & Responsibilities: This is a huge benefit for project managers. Have you ever been on a call, trying to assign a task and either nobody volunteers or you don’t know who the owner should be? If yes, then ITIL is a great fit for you. ITIL delineates responsibilities by roles which fit nicely into project plans.
  • Project Success: The ITIL strategy for building new services has proven successful since originally conceived in the 1980s by the British government. What project manager doesn’t love successful strategies?
  • Professional Development Units (PDUs): Already a PMP? If yes, then you are required to attain 60 PDUs for each certification renewal cycle. ITIL courses and the certification can be used for PDUs. For the exact number of PDUs allowed with your course, check with your ITIL program provider and PMI.

Each project manager has a responsibility for continuing education. The ITIL Foundations certification demonstrates familiarity with knowledge certain to contribute to your overall project success.

 

Interested in speaking with one of our project management experts? Click here!

Featured, IT Management, IT Projects, Project management

IT Project Management Methodology – Does One Size Fit All?

By Stacy Toof, Director, PMO, Solutions

You might be asking yourself, is there more than one methodology that can be used to manage a project?  What are those methodologies? Do you always use one consistent methodology?  What are the pros and cons of doing so? Can you shift mid-stream of a project? Ultimately, how do you know what methodology to use and when, or if it’s even necessary?

As you may or may not know, project management methodology is a conceptual framework for project and program management.   It’s the specific development and documented approach that is called a methodology, allowing an organization to standardize its project management practices company-wide and aiding in the effectiveness and efficiency of resource utilization.  The GreenPages-LogicsOne Project Management Office (PMO) has customized and documented project and program management processes to fit the specific objectives and needs of our business environment.

Toof Table 5-7

 

With that said, since there is no one-size-fits-all for each and every IT environment, there is no one-size-fits- all in project management methodology either.  It’s our recommendation to start by researching and understanding what has already been successfully developed within the project management industry by recognizing and supporting the value of work that organizations such as the Project Management Institute (PMI) have already created. Take the information you gather and internalize and customize it to fit the needs of your business environment. Your thoughts and consideration should include management buy-in, a set of guidelines, standards, best practices and processes with a vehicle to constantly share feedback and communication of lessons learned, with a focus to adapt as business needs evolve. 

The advantage in going through the process to define a project management methodology and determine whether or not you need one, is to help provide those individuals within your company who are managing projects the guidance, standardization and feedback mechanism for delivering better quality and consistent results.  This allows a framework for sharing a common language and delivery of optimum value of cost, time and output through a defined workflow process of initiation to closure. 

In addition, I would like to provide you with some insight into a couple of commonly used terms in project management; “Agile” & “Waterfall.”

It’s important to understand that these terms have a purpose in the world of project management, but understanding their definition and when to use them will contribute to your success.   Agile is the ability to move quickly and easily.  Therefore, Agile techniques are best used in small-scale projects or on elements of a wider program of work where requirements and solutions evolve through team collaboration iteratively throughout the project lifecycle, driving the need to support and adapt to change.  You are able to recognize workable output/products, (quick wins) at the end of each tested stage. (I.e. software or product development projects). Waterfall is used when progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards within phased projects such as Conception, Initiation, Analysis, Design, Development, Testing, Implementation/Production and Support.  The product is tested at the very end, resulting in the workable output/products being recognized upon completion of the last phase of the project. This means any bugs that are found result in the entire technique being performed over again. (I.e. phone implementation or infrastructure projects).

By taking time to consider these things upfront, it will help you ensure that you are on the right path to successfully establishing a project management methodology.  As always, our Project Management Team at GreenPages-LogicsOne is available to help get you started, fill in any current gaps and offer you professional advice any time. What project management strategies and methodologies does your organization currently use?

 

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Featured, Heartbleed, IT Management, Managed IT Services

How our Managed Services Team Responded to Heartbleed

By Jay Keating, Vice President of Managed Services

 

A lot has been written about the Heartbleed bug impacting versions of OpenSSL software in recent weeks. For an in-depth description of what Heartbleed is and how to respond to the vulnerability, you can refer to http://heartbleed.com/ or any number of 3rd party reports. This blog won’t review the actual weakness, but rather describe how our Managed IT Services team responded to the incident in support of our customers.

As software and hardware vendors release code updates to deal with vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed, our Managed IT Services team assesses overall risk in context to mitigating factors and then recommends a course of action. In the case of Heartbleed, since the scope was so broad, we prioritized our assessment in the following tiers:

  1. We quickly evaluated our internal systems and support tools. This important step had to happen immediately so our own management tools weren’t creating risk or concern for our customers.
  2. We then evaluated all Managed IT Services customers’ Internet-facing devices such as firewalls and web servers. All devices that were exposed have been patched at this point, and customers were notified of the risk and mitigation plan immediately. In this case, given the extent of the exposure, we declared emergency maintenance windows with our customers rather than wait for pre-approved monthly maintenance windows.
  3. Finally, with the Internet-facing systems no longer vulnerable, we have refocused on our customers’ internal networks for the next round of assessments and mitigation. As we work through this phase, we will once again work collaboratively with our Managed IT Services customers to coordinate an acceptable maintenance window as soon as possible.

With Heartbleed still top of mind, I suggest a few moments of reflection to think through how your organization responded.  Here are some questions to help frame your review:

  • Do you have a formal security incident response program in place and was it useful in responding to Heartbleed? If not, who will manage your response and what process will be followed?
  • How long did it take you to fully understand your risks? How long did you expect it to take?
  • Do you have support and maintenance contracts in place for all components of your infrastructure, and are the support contact details documented within your security incident response plan?
  • Who is responsible for internal and external communication in case you need to declare emergency maintenance periods?
  • What will your staffing plan be if your team goes into extended hours of operation in response to a security threat?
  • Who are your key IT delivery partners and what resources could they bring to your assistance if you need help with assessment, planning, communication, mitigation, and / or recovery? 

Just answering those six questions will improve your response program. Let us know if we can help.

Learn more about how your organization can properly manage your IT environment

 

 

 

BYOD, Featured, IT Management, Shadow IT

Game of Thrones: Five Takeaways for IT

By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud

After a long wait, Game of Thrones Season 4 has officially started (no spoilers for the first episode of season 4 – I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy).  Amidst the action and excitement, there are some lessons IT can take away from seasons 1-3 of the show. Here are five of them:

The War Lies to the North

After Robert Baratheon dies, there is all out war for rule of the Iron Throne and control of the Seven Kingdoms. Joffrey Lannister usurps power after the passing of the king and executes the Lord of Winterfell, Ned Stark. This sparks Ned’s son Robb to march on King’s Landing to attempt to overthrow Joffrey. Meanwhile Robert Baratheon’s younger brother Renly, his older brother Stannis, and Daenerys Targaryen are also all raising armies to try and defeat Joffrey. By the end of season 3 however, it becomes known that the deadly “White Walkers” are back after thousands of years. Some people realize that the war everyone is fighting right now is insignificant because the real war lies to the north.

The lesson for IT: There is often a good amount of unrest between the IT Department and other business units. Maybe Accounting gets frustrated and places the blame for a systems failure on IT, but IT claims it was the Accounting Department’s fault for not following proper protocols. Maybe there is unrest between Marketing and IT around budget allocation for new tradeshow equipment. The lesson here is that IT needs to partner with the business and work together in order to achieve the overall goals that will determine the success of the company.

Liberate Your Users

Daenerys Targaryen, or Khaleesi, is looking to take back the throne that used to belong to her family. Without an army, she purchases a large number of slave soldiers. Instead of treating them poorly and forcing them to fight for her, she frees them all and says it’s their decision if they would like to stay and fight by her side. She then goes from city to city freeing slaves. The result? An extremely loyal and passionate army.

The lesson for IT: People will respond better if you give them choices as opposed to dictating how everything is going to work. Employees are going to bring their own devices to the workplace whether you allow it or not, so empower them to do so by implementing a BYOD program. Shadow IT is going to happen. Employees are going to bypass IT and use AWS. Provide them with a way to do so while you control costs, security, and governance.

Innovation Is Key

When Stannis Baratheon launches a full scale attack on King’s Landing with a large fleet of ships, things look pretty dim for the Lannister family. Stannis has more man power and weapons and has the advantage of being able to cut off supply lines to the capital. Tywin Lannister, King Joffrey’s uncle, is forced to think outside the box to try and defend his city. He ends up catapulting barrels of deadly wild fire onto the attacking ships, successfully fending off Stannis’ forces. 

The lesson for IT: Continue to innovate and look for creative ways to solve problems. It can be difficult to get to the strategic initiatives when your team is bogged down by day-to-day mundane tasks. IT leaders need to make innovation a top priority in order to keep pace with the needs of the business and the rapidly evolving technology landscape.

The Wall of Security

Security is critical to the survival of any organization. Winterfell and the North always relied on “The Wall” to keep out marauding Wildlings. The Wall is hundreds of feet high, made of sheer ice, and guarded by the Men of the Night’s Watch. Getting a large group of people past The Wall is extremely difficult. However, when an assembly of the Night’s Watch has to abandon their posts to head out beyond the wall, a group of Wildlings is able to scale it and cross to the other side.

The lesson for IT: It’s obviously important to have the proper security measures in place in your organization.  The lesson from the Wall though is that no matter what security you have in place, there are always ways to infiltrate your environment no matter how secure it may appear. This is why you need to proactively monitor and manage your environment.

Choose Your Partners Wisely

As the war with the Lannisters drags on, Robb Stark is in desperate need of more soldiers. Robb strikes a deal with Walder Frey to have one of his uncles marry one of Frey’s daughters to unite the families. Robb chose the wrong partner and things don’t go according to plan (and by not “going according to plan” I mean Robb, his wife, his mother, and his countrymen are brutally murdered during the wedding ceremony…).

The lesson for IT: There are a lot of factors to take into consideration when you’re deciding who to align yourself with. Choosing the right vendor for your organization depends on many factors including the specific project you’re working on, your existing environment, your budget, your goals, your future plans, etc. You don’t want to make a hasty decision on a specific vendor or product without thinking it through very carefully. This is where a company such as GreenPages can act as a trusted advisor to help guide you down the right path.

Any other lessons you can think of?

 

Download this whitepaper to learn how corporate IT can manage its environment as if it is “deployed to the cloud.” So, if and when different parts of the environment are deployed to the cloud, day-to-day management of the environment remains unchanged—regardless of where it is running.

 

 

Featured, IT Management, PMO, Project management

Are You Ready for a Project Management Office? Part 2 – Players and Pitfalls

By Nancy Mather, Director of Professional Services Operations, PMP

This is the second part of a series. Catch up with part 1 here.

Once you’ve made the decision you’re ready for a Project Management Office (PMO), it’s time to think about who you need for players. If you’re on the fence about a hire due to uncertainty of sustained business needs to support the hire, or due to the fact that you have found someone that might not have the exact experience you are looking for but you believe is the kind of person you want on your team, consider a contract position instead of a permanent hire. More than half of all PMO’s use contracts resources to manage projects.

Consider the reporting structure and if the PMO will manage the project managers. It’s important to try and keep PMO resources unified within the group. That doesn’t mean that there can’t still be a dotted line reporting structure to groups outside; however, try to keep the PMO together.  The team will gain great value from the consistency that comes from being part of a PMO. In addition, it will make it easier to keep processes and best practices consistent. Project Management team meetings can be a great forum for the team to share lessons learned.

Be on the lookout for functions that might take Project Managers away from their primary focus of project management. Project Managers are known to be detail-oriented and organized by nature. This can at times make them a catch all in the company for a variety of responsibilities, some of which might not need to belong with them. This could include things like:  resource scheduling, contract creation, negotiation, or other general administrative tasks.

Over the years, we have gone through my renditions of what functions our PMs hold.  Some functions we’ve moved to centralize, and others we have decentralized. Centralizing helped us increase efficiency in areas around contract writing and resource scheduling, and it decreased efficiency when it came to centralized billing. The key is to be open to change and recognize that there is not a one size fits all answer.

If project managing is not the primary role of the person that’s deemed the project manager, you could be setting yourself up to fail. We often see examples of IT professionals that wear a project management hat as needed in their organization. While some can do this effectively, others can get more hands on than needed and take on more of the leg work than needed. Just because someone is good in one role, it doesn’t mean they will automatically be a good project manager.

Executive buy-in is also a must. Without executive level support of the PMO, your PMO could be doomed to fail by not being valued or being dismissed as an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. There must be executive buy-in that believes in the fundamental value of a PMO. In order for this to happen, the PMO must be aligned with the organization’s strategy. If the PMO doesn’t understand the company’s key drivers, it won’t contribute to the value.

Continual improvement is also key.  While a PMO should use best practices for consistency, it’s important to make sure that these practices are continually being looked at for refinement and continuous improvement. The PMO must be agile in the event that the needs of the business change.

By considering these things up front, it will help ensure that you are on the right path to successfully establishing a PMO. As always, our Project Management team is available to offer you professional advice any time!

 

 

Featured, IT Management, Project management

Are You Ready for a Project Management Office? Part 1 – Where to Start

By Nancy Mather, Director of Professional Services Operations, PMP

As modern IT continues to transform, so must traditional project management approaches and methodologies. Conversations have shifted away from a sole focus on technology to more of an emphasis on business vision and outcomes creating an additional layer of complexity as new stakeholders become involved in the process.

A Project Management Office (PMO) is a centralized group set up for the purpose of implementing project management expertise across an organization. At its best, a PMO benefits an organization by providing accountability, visibility, a sense of discipline, and ensuring that projects are completed successfully, within budget, and on time. At its worst, a PMO is viewed as a police force, roadblock, and layer of red tape that slows down progress while not providing any value.

How do you know if you need a PMO? When GreenPages made the decision to implement a PMO, it was a natural progression based on the size that our project management team had reached and the number of projects that were coming in per year. We had reached a point where stratification of the team was necessary. The one size fits all role of “Project Manager” was no longer effectively representing the varying levels of experience across the team. In addition, we had collected a significant amount of collateral from templates to best practices, so for us the formation of a PMO was a natural progression in the evolution of the department.

One of the questions we often hear from our customers, is how do you create a PMO and where do you start? I’m a big believer that it is important to start with the basics. Define your mission, vision, and goals. Formally defining the role of the PMO can be a challenge, however defining where you want to go will help ensure you are on the right path to get there. Consider a value proposition for the PMO. It would be something as simple as projects delivered on-time, on-budget, with higher quality.

Define your timelines with phases. After changes are made, take time to breath to understand the effects of those changes. This will allow you to make refinements as needed. Define what effectiveness looks like and how it will be measured in the future. This is where the vision and goals come in to effect. Defining what you want to achieve will help you steer the course.

It’s also important to perform a gap analysis of where you are today and where you are trying to go. It is important to look at the staff that you already have and begin to think about the roles you envision them in under the PMO. It’s also important to think about who will manage the PMO, and if there will be layers of management within it. The formation of a PMO can be an opportunity to create a management career path for those on the team that want it and are ready for it.

Develop a training program for the PMO. Consider a program that is tiered and on-going. At the onset, a focused training on tools and process is necessary.

Determine the new project funnel flow. Where will the project that the PMO will be responsible for come from? Determine how many projects you believe each person can reasonable and effectively manage. Will you be able to control the flow of project to manage to that level? It’s critical to identify key metrics and watch trends closely that effect your staffing needs. Weekly one on ones with staff are valuable to understand what the team has on their plates and to understand current bandwidth.

Stay tuned for part 2: Are You Ready for a Project Management Office? Players and Pitfalls

 

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Featured, IT Management, ITBM, vCAC, vCloud Suites, vCOPS, VMware, vSOM

vCOPS? vCAC? Where and When It Makes Sense to Use VMware Management Solutions

By Chris Ward, CTO

 

I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently, both internally and with customers, around management strategies and tools related to virtualized and cloud infrastructures.  There are many solutions out there and, as always, there is not a one size fits all silver bullet to solve all problems.  VMware in particular has several solutions in their Cloud Infrastructure Management (CIM) portfolio, but it can get confusing trying to figure out the use cases for each product and when it may be the right fit to solve your specific challenge. I just finished giving some training to our internal teams around this topic and thought it would be good to share with the broader community at large.  I hope you find it helpful and know that we at GreenPages are happy to engage in more detailed conversations to help you make the best choices for your management challenges.

The core solutions that VMware has brought to market in the past few years include vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS), vCloud Automation Center (vCAC), IT Business Management (ITBM), and Log Insight.  I’ll briefly cover each of these including what they do and where/when it makes sense to use them.

vCOPS

What is it?   vCOPS is actually a solution suite which is available in four editions: Foundation, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise. 

The core component of all four editions is vCenter Operations Manager which came from the acquisition of Integrian back in 2010 and is essentially a monitoring solution on steroids.  In addition to typical performance and health monitoring/alerting, the secret sauce of this tool is its ability to learn what ‘normal’ is for your specific environment and provide predictive analytics.  The tool will collect data from various virtual or physical systems (networking, storage, compute, virtual, etc.) and dynamically determine proper thresholds rather than the typical ‘best practice’ model thus reducing overall noise and false positive alarms.  It can also provide proactive alerts as to when a problem may arise in the future vs. simply alerting after a problem has occurred.  Finally, it also does a great job analyzing VM sizing and assisting in capacity planning.  All of this is coupled with a very slick interface which is highly customizable.  

The Advanced and Enterprise editions of the suite also include vCenter Configuration Manager (vCM), vCenter Hyperic, vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN), and vCenter Chargeback Manager (vCBM). 

vCM automates configuration and compliance management across virtual, physical, and cloud environments.  Essentially this means those pesky Windows registry key changes, Linux iptables settings, etc. can be automated and reported upon to ensure that your environment remains configured to the standards you have developed. 

Hyperic does at the application layer what vCOPS does for the underlying infrastructure.  It can monitor operating system, middleware, and application layers and provide automated workflows to resolve potential issues. 

VIN is a discovery tool used to create application dependency maps which are key when planning and designing security boundaries and disaster recovery solutions.

vCBM is utilized for showback or chargeback so that various lines of business can be accountable for IT resource utilization.

Where is it best utilized?

The vCOPS suites are best suited for environments that require robust monitoring and/or configuration management and that have fairly mature IT organizations capable of realizing the toolset’s full potential. 

vCAC

What is it?  Stemming from the acquisition of DynamicOps, this is primarily an automation/orchestration toolset designed to deploy and provision workloads and applications across multiple platforms be they physical, virtual, or cloud based.  Additionally, vCAC provides a front end service catalog enabling end user IT self-service.  Like most VMware product sets, vCAC comes in multiple editions as well including standard, advanced, and enterprise.  Standard edition provides the base automation toolsets, advanced adds in the self-service catalog (the original DynamicOps feature set), and enterprise adds in dynamic application provisioning (formally vFabric AppDirector).

Where is it best utilized?

If you have a very dynamic environment, such as development or devops, then vCAC may well be the tool for you.  By utilizing automation and self-service, it can take the time required to provision workloads/applications/platforms from potentially days or weeks down to minutes.  If you have the issue of ‘shadow IT’ where end users are directly utilizing external services, such as Amazon, to bypass internal IT due to red tape, vCAC can help solve that problem by providing the speed and flexibility of AWS while also maintaining command and control internally.

ITBM

What is it?  Think of ITBM as more a CFO tool vs. a raw IT technology tool.  Its purpose is to provide financial management of large (millions of dollars) IT budgets by providing visibility into true costs and quality so that IT may be better aligned to the business.  It too comes in multiple editions including standard, advanced, and enterprise.  The standard edition provides visibility into VMware virtualized environments and can determine relative true cost per VM/workload/application.  Advanced adds the physical and non-VMware world into the equation and enterprise adds the quality component.

Where is it best utilized?

The standard edition of ITBM makes sense for most mid-market and above level customers who want/need to get a sense of the true cost of IT.  This is very important when considering any move to a public cloud environment as you need to be able to truly compare costs.  I hear all the time that ‘cloud is cheaper’ but I have to ask ‘cheaper than what.’  If I ask you how much it costs to run workload X on your internal infrastructure per hour, week, month, etc. can you honestly give me an accurate answer?  In most cases the answer is no, and that’s exactly where ITBM comes into play.  On a side note, the standard edition of ITBM does require vCAC so if you’re already looking at vCAC then it makes a lot of sense to also consider ITBM.

Log Insight

What is it?  Simply stated, it’s a dumping ground for just about any type of log you can imagine but with a google type flare.  It has a very nice indexing/search capability that can help make sense of insanely large amounts of log data from numerous sources thus helping greatly in event correlation and troubleshooting as well as auditing.

Where is it best utilized?

Any environment where log management is required and/or for enhanced troubleshooting/root cause analysis.  The licensing for this is interesting because unlike similar products it is per device rather than a per terabyte of data model, which can potentially provide a huge cost savings.

vSOM and vCloud Suites

vSOM (vSphere with Operations Management) is simply a bundle of traditional vSphere with vCOPS.  The editions here are a little confusing as the standard edition of vCOPs comes with every edition of vSOM.  The only difference in the vSOM editions are the underlying vSphere edition.

The vCloud Suite includes most of what I have described above, but again comes in our favorite three editions of standard, advanced, and enterprise.   Basically, if you’re already looking at two to three a la carte solutions that are part of a vCloud Suite edition, then you’re better off looking at the suite.  You’ll get more value because the suites include multiple solutions and the suites, along with vSOM, remain licensed by physical processor socket vs by the number of VMs.

 

Leave a comment if you have any other questions or would like a more detailed answer. Again, GreenPages helps our customers make the right choices for their individual needs so reach out if you would like to set up some time to talk. Hope this was helpful!

 

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Cloud computing, cloud service broker, Featured, IaaS, IT Management

Are We All Cloud Service Brokers Now? Part II

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

In my last post, I discussed Cloud Service Brokers and some of their benefits after reading a couple of articles from Robin Meehan (Article 1 here and Article 2 here). In this post, I will break down some of Robin’s points and explain why I agree or disagree with each.

At the end of last post, I was breaking down cloud arbitrage into three areas (run-time, deployment-time, plan-time). Credit to Robin for run-time and deployment-time arbitrage. I really like those terms, and I think it illuminates the conversation. So, run-time cloud arbitrage is really science fiction right now – this is where the CSB moves running workloads around on the fly to find the best benefit for the customer. I haven’t seen any technology (yet) that does this. However, VMware does deployment-time and run-time arbitrage with VMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduling – albeit, in a single virtual datacenter, with individual VMs, and with a single policy objective to balance a cluster’s load across vSphere nodes. See Duncan Epping’s excellent write up on DRS here. Even 10 years ago, this was not possible. 15 years ago, this was certainly science fiction. Now, it’s pretty common to have DRS enabled for all of your vSphere clusters.

A few of Robin’s points…

Point 1:
“The ability to migrate IT workloads dynamically (i.e. at run-time, not at deployment time) is something I sometimes see as a capability under the ‘cloud broker’ banner, but in my view it really just doesn’t make sense – at least not at the moment.”

I agree. Run-time cloud arbitrage and workload migration ala vMotion is not possible today in cloud. Will it be possible within the next few years? Absolutely. I think it will first manifest itself in a VMware High Availability-like scenario. Again, see Duncan Epping’s fantastic deep-dive into HA. If cloud provider X drops off of the internet suddenly, then restart the resources and application at cloud provider Y (where cloud provider Y might even be your own datacenter). This is sometimes known as DR as a service, or DRaaS. And even now, there are some DRaaS solutions that are coming onto the market.

Point 2:
“The rate of innovation in the IaaS/PaaS/DaaS market is such that most of the other vendors are playing catch-up with AWS, as AWS continue to differentiate themselves from the following pack. This shows no sign of slowing down over the next couple of years – so the only way a migrated workload is going to work across multiple cloud vendors is if it only relies on the lowest common denominator functionality across the vendors, which is typically basic storage, virtualised compute and connectivity.”

Also agree, the rate of innovation in the market for cloud computing is rapid as specialization sets in at an industrial level. This also means that downward price pressures are enormous for vendors in the cloud space, even today as vendors vie for market share. As switching costs decrease (e.g., portability of applications increases), prices for IaaS will decrease even more. Now, wouldn’t you, as a customer, like to take advantage of this market behavior? Take in to consideration that CSBs aggregate providers but they also aggregate customer demand. If you believe this interpretation of the market for IaaS, then you’ll want to position yourself to take advantage of it by planning portability for your applications. A CSB can help you do this.

Point 3:
“The bottom line is that if you are going to architect your applications so they can run on any cloud service provider, then you can’t easily use any of the good bits and hence your value in migrating to a cloud solution is diminished. Not ruined, just reduced.”

Disagree. To take advantage of market behavior, customers should look to avoid using proprietary features of IaaS platforms because they compromise portability. Like we noted earlier, increased portability of applications means more flexibility to take advantage of market behavior that leads to decreasing prices.

This is where perspective on cloud becomes really important. For example, GreenPages has a customer with a great use case for commodity IaaS. They may deploy ~800 machines in a cluster at AWS for only a matter of hours to run a simulation or solve a problem. After the result is read, these machines are completely destroyed—even the data. So, it makes no difference to this customer where they do this work. AWS happens to be the convenient choice right now. Next quarter, it may be Azure, who knows? I’m absolutely certain that this customer sees more benefit in avoiding the use of propriety features (a.k.a., the “good bits” of cloud) in a cloud provider rather than using them.

What is your perspective on cloud?
• A means to improve time to market and agility
• A way to transform capex into opex
• Simply a management paradigm – you can have cloud anywhere, even internally as long as you have self-service and infinite resources
• An enabler for a new methodology like DevOps
• Simply a destination for applications

I think that a good perspective may include all of these things. Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

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Featured, IaaS, IT Management

Don’t Be a Michael Scott – Embrace Change in IT

By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud

 

One of the biggest impediments to the adoption of new technologies is resistance to change. Many IT departments are entrenched and content in the way they currently run IT. But as the technology industry continues to embrace IT-as-a-Service, IT departments must be receptive to change if they want to stay competitive.

I’m a big fan of the TV show The Office. In my opinion, it’s the second funniest series behind Seinfeld (and it’s a very close second). Dunder Mifflin Scranton Regional Manager Michael Scott is a quintessential example of a decision maker who’s against the adoption of new technologies because of fear, a lack of understanding, and downright stubbornness.  

In the “Dunder Mifflin Infinity” episode in Season Four, the young, newly promoted hot-shot exec (and former intern) Ryan Howard returns to the Scranton branch to reveal his plan on how he’s going to use technology to revitalize the company. Part of his plan is the rollout of a new website that will allow Dunder Mifflin to be more agile and allow customers to make purchases online. Michael and his loyal sidekick (and part-time beet farmer) Dwight Schrute are staunchly opposed to this idea.

At this point in the episode Michael is against Ryan’s idea of leveraging technology to improve the business process out of pure stubbornness. Michael hasn’t heard Ryan’s strategy or thought out the pros and cons of leveraging technology to improve business processes. His mindset is simply “How can this new technology possibly be better than the way we have always done things?”

Maybe your company has always bought infrastructure and run it in house—so why change now? Well, running a hybrid cloud environment can provide better service to your end users and also contribute to cost savings. Regardless if you act or not, it’s something you need to keep an open mind about and look into closely. Dismissing the concept immediately isn’t going to do you any good.

Creed Bratton is the oldest employee in the Scranton office. After hearing Ryan’s announcement about implementing new technologies, Creed gets extremely worried that he’s going to get squeezed out of his job. He goes to Michael and shares his concerns that both their jobs may be in jeopardy. At this point, Michael is now against the adoption of technology due to a lack of understanding. Ryan’s plan is to retrain his employees so that they have the knowledge and skillset to leverage new technologies to improve the business—not to use it as a means to downsize the workforce.

This is similar to the fear that cloud computing will cause widespread layoffs of IT workers. This is not necessarily the case. It’s not about reducing jobs; it’s about retraining current employees to take on new roles within the department.

Ryan claims that the new website is going to significantly increase sales. Michael and Dwight set out on a road trip to win back several key customers whose accounts they have recently lost to competitors to prove to Ryan that they don’t need a website. Their strategy? Personally deliver fruit baskets. Each customer ends up turning them down because the vendors they are currently using have websites and offer lower prices.

In this case, Dunder Mifflin’s lack of IT innovation is directly affecting its bottom line. They’re making it an easy decision for customers to leave because they simply aren’t keeping pace with the competition. As a modern day IT department, you need to be leveraging technologies that allow people to do their jobs easier and in turn reduce costs for the organization. For example, by installing a SaaS-based marketing automation tool (i.e. HubSpot), your marketing team can automate workloads and spend more time generating leads for the sales team to drive revenue. By using Amazon, or another IaaS platform, you have the ability to buy only the capacity you actually need, saving on infrastructure hardware capital and maintenance costs. For workloads that make more sense running on-prem, creating a private cloud environment with a service catalog can streamline performance and give users the ability to choose and instantly receive the IT services they need.

At the end of the episode, an enraged Michael and Dwight head back to the office. On their way back, Michael’s GPS instructs him to take a right hand turn. Dwight looks at the screen and tells Michael that it’s saying to bear right around the bend, but Michael takes the sharp right trusting the machine and follows it…directly into a lake. Dwight shouts that he’s trained for this moment and jumps in the two feet of water to valiantly save Michael. When they get back to the office Michael announces “I drove my car into a [bleep] lake. Why you may ask did I do this? Well, because of a machine. A machine told me to drive into a lake. And I did it! I did it because I trusted Ryan’s precious technology, and look where it got me.” At this point, Michael is resisting technology because of fear.

In today’s changing IT landscape, embarking on new IT initiatives can be scary. There are risks involved, and there are going to be bumps along the way. (Full disclosure, Ryan ends up getting arrested later in the season for fraud after placing orders multiple times in the system—but you get the idea.)But at the end of the day, the change now taking place in IT is inevitable. To be successful, you need to carefully, and strategically, plan out projects and make sure you have the skillsets to get the job done properly (or use a partner like GreenPages to help).The risk of adopting new technologies is nothing compared to the risk of doing nothing and being left behind. Leave a comment and share how your organization is dealing with the changing IT landscape…or let me know what your favorite Office episode is…

If you’d like to talk more about how GreenPages can help with your IT transformation strategy, fill out this form!

 

 

business continuity, BYOD, Cloud computing, CMaaS, Disaster Recovery, End-User Computing, Featured, IT Management, Journey to the Cloud, Miscellaneous IT, Storage and Information Management

Cloud Management, Business Continuity & Other 2013 Accomplishments

By Matt Mock, IT Director

It was a very busy year at GreenPages for our internal IT department. With 2013 coming to a close, I wanted to highlight some of the major projects we worked on over the course of the year. The four biggest projects we tackled were using a cloud management solution, improving our business continuity plan, moving our datacenter, and creating and implementing a BYOD policy.

Cloud Management as a Service

GreenPages now offers a Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) solution to our clients. We implemented the solution internally late last year, but really started utilizing it as a customer would this year by increasing what was being monitored and managed. We decided to put Exchange under the “Fully Managed” package of CMaaS. Exchange requires a lot of attention and effort. Instead of hiring a full time Exchange admin, we were able to offload that piece with CMaaS as our Managed Services team does all the health checks to make sure any new configuration changes are correct. This resulted in considerable cost savings. Having access to the team 24/7 is a colossal luxury. Before using CMaaS, if an issue popped up at 3 in the morning we would find out about it the next morning. This would require us to try and fix the problem during business hours. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone the hassle of trying to fix an issue with frustrated coworkers who are unable to do their jobs. If an issue arises now in the middle of the night, the problem has already been fixed before anyone shows up to start working. The Managed Services team does research and remediates bugs that come up. This happened to us when we ran into some issues with Apple iOS calendaring. The Managed Services team did the research to determine the cause and went in and fixed the problem. If my team tried to do this it would have taken us 2-3 days of wasted time. Instead, we could be focusing on some of our other strategic projects. In fact, we are holding a webinar on December 19th that will cover strategies and benefits to being the ‘first-to-know,’ and we will also provide a demo of the CMaaS Enterprise Command Center. We also went live with fully automated patching, which requires zero intervention from my team. Furthermore, we leveraged CMaaS to allow us to spin up a fully managed Linux environment. It’s safe to say that if we didn’t implement CMaaS we would not have been able to accomplish all of our strategic goals for this year.

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Business Plan

We also determined that we needed to update our disaster recovery plan to a true robust business continuity plan. A main driver of this was because of our more diverse office model. Not only were more people working remotely as our workforce expanded, but we now have office locations up and down the east coast in Kittery, Boston, Attleboro, New York City, Atlanta, and Tampa. We needed to ensure that we could continue to provide top quality service to our customers if an event were to occur. My team took a careful look at our then current infrastructure set up. After examining our policies and plans, we generated new ones around the optimal outcome we wanted and then adjusted the infrastructure to match. A large part of this included changing providers for our data and voice, which included moving our datacenter.

Datacenter Move

In 2013 we wanted to have more robust datacenter facilities. Ultimately, we were able to get into an extremely redundant and secure datacenter at the Markley Group in Boston that provided us with cost savings. Furthermore, Markley is also a large carrier hotel which gives us additional savings on circuit costs. With this move we’re able to further our capabilities of delivering to our customers 24/7. Another benefit our new datacenter offered was excess office space. That way, if there ever was an event at one of our GreenPages locations we could have a place to send people to work. I recently wrote a post which describes the datacenter move in more details.

BYOD Policy

As 2013 ends, we are finishing our first full year with our BYOD policy. We are taking this time to look back and see where there were any issues with the policies or procedures and adjusting for the next year. Our plan is to ensure that year two is even more streamlined. I answered questions in a recent Q & A explaining our BYOD initiative in more detail.

I’m pretty happy looking back at the work we accomplished in 2013. As with any year, there were bumps along the way and things we didn’t get to that we wanted to. All in all though, we accomplished some very strategic projects that have set us up for success in the future. I think that we will start out 2014 with increased employee satisfaction, increased productivity of our IT department, and of course noticeable cost savings. Here’s to a successful 2014!

Is your IT team the first-to-know when an IT outage happens? Or, do you find out about it from your end users? Is your expert IT staff stretched thin doing first-level incident support? Could they be working on strategic IT projects that generate revenue? Register for our upcoming webinar to learn more!