Tag Archives: Infrastructure Management

Top 5 ways that IT wastes money

A number of common IT projects that seem like they should add value rarely do. Here are what I consider the top IT projects that waste budget dollars.

The role of the CIO has changed more in the past five years than any other position in the business world. Success for the CIO used to be based on bits and bytes, and is now measured by business metrics. Today’s CIO needs to think of IT more strategically and focus on projects that lower cost, improve productivity, or both, ideally.

However, many IT projects seem to be a waste of time and money. It’s certainly not intentional, but a number of projects that seem like they should add value rarely do. Here are what I consider the top IT projects that waste budget dollars.

Over provisioning or adding more bandwidth
Managing the performance of applications that are highly network-dependent has always been a challenge. If applications are performing poorly, the easy thing to do is just add more bandwidth. Seems logical. However, bandwidth is rarely actually the problem, and the net result is usually a more expensive network with the same performance problems. Instead of adding bandwidth, network managers should analyze the traffic and optimize the network for the bandwidth-intensive applications.

Investing in fault management tools
On paper, it makes sense to invest in fault management. You deploy network devices, servers, security products, and other infrastructure, so of course you would want to know when devices are up and down. However, the fact is that today we build our network so redundant that the loss of any single device has little impact on the performance of applications. Also, most of the fault management tools have a big blind spot when it comes to virtual resources, as the tools were designed to monitor physical infrastructure. IT organizations should focus on performance solutions that can isolate what’s been “too wrong for too long” to solve those nagging “brown outs” that cause user frustration.

Focusing IT energy only on the “top talkers”
When I talk to IT leaders about new initiatives, it seems much of the focus is on the top 5 or 10 applications, which makes some sense conceptually as these are the apps that the majority of workers use. Instead, IT leaders should monitor all applications and correlate usage to business outcomes to determine and refine best practices. For example, a successful branch office could be heavy users of LinkedIn, Salesforce.com and Twitter. In aggregate, these might not be among the company’s top 10 applications, and the usage would fly under the radar. If organizations could monitor applications and then link consistent success to specific usage patterns, unknown best practices can be discovered and mapped across the entire user population.

Using mean time to repair (MTTR) to measure IT resolution success
ZK Research studies have revealed a few interesting data points when it comes to solving issues. First, 75% of problems are actually identified by the end user instead of the IT department. Also, 90% of the time taken to solve problems is actually spent identifying where the problem is. This is one of the reasons I’m a big fan of tools that can separate application and network visibility to laser in on where exactly a problem is. This minimizes “resolution ping pong,” where trouble tickets are bounced around IT groups, and enables IT to start fixing the problem faster. If you want to cut the MTTR, focus on identification instead of repair, as that will provide the best bang for the buck.

Managing capacity reactively
Most organizations increase the capacity of servers, storage or the network in a reactive mode. Don’t get me wrong, I know most companies try to be proactive. However, without granular visibility, “proactive” often refers to reacting to the first sign of problems, but that’s often too late. Instead, IT departments should understand how to establish baselines and monitor how applications deviate from the norm to predict when a problem is going to occur. For example, a baseline could be established to understand the “normal” performance of a business application. Over four successive months, the trend could be a slight degrade of the application’s performance month after month. No users are complaining yet, but the trend is clear, and if nothing is done, there will be user problems. Based on this, IT can make appropriate changes to the infrastructure to ensure users aren’t impacted.

The IT environment continues to get more complex as we make things more virtual, cloud-driven or mobile. It’s time for IT to rethink the way it operates and leverage the network to provide the necessary visibility to stop wasting money on the things that don’t matter and start focusing on issues that do.


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Top 10 cloud jobs

Dice.com, the popular tech-focused job site, posts upwards of 3,800 cloud-related job listings on any given day. Researchers there crunched the numbers to come up with a list of the top 10 most available jobs in the cloud. These job descriptions and credentials were compiled using multiple job listings in each category.

 


Cloud architect
Job description: Spearhead the development and implementation of cloud-based initiatives to ensure that systems are scalable, reliable, secure, supportable, and achieve business and IT performance and budgetary objectives.

Required credentials: B.S. in computer science or engineering; 10+ years experience in large-scale, multi-platform networks; expert in Shell, VBScript, Perl or Python; expert knowledge of Linux and Windows; significant experience designing, installing and administrating virtualized environments.

Requested credentials: Experience working with public cloud providers; expert understanding of firewall and load balancing concepts; prior work creating PCI-compliant solutions.


Cloud software engineer
Job description: Responsible for design and development of distributed software modules that integrate with cloud service providers.

Required credentials: B.S. in computer science or engineering; 2+ years professional experience in software development; work experience with ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) tools and techniques; work experience with system configuration and deployment automation technologies; hands-on programming experience on a Linux/Unix operating system; excellent understanding of at least one compiled-code language.

Requested credentials: Experience in deploying software to cloud computing infrastructure; experience in SOA technologies; ability to provide accurate ETA for software modules.

 


Cloud sales: cloud sales executive, cloud sales representative, cloud sales consultant, cloud sales manager

Job description: Develop and grow a book of outsourced cloud business with C-level professionals in midsize and enterprise-level customers.

Required credentials: Bachelor’s degree in business administration and 5-10 years business experience in client-facing roles, with some of that spent in outsourcing or systems integration; highly effective communication skills; strong understanding and successful experience in building strategic and/or developmental partnerships at the C-level within midsize and large corporations; demonstrated consistent quota attainment in selling infrastructure, IT, cloud and security services.

Requested credentials: Ability to travel more than 50% of the time on the job.


Cloud engineer

Job description: Plan and conduct technical tasks associated with the implementation and maintenance of internal enterprise-shared virtualization infrastructure.

Required credentials: B.S. in computer science; 5+ years of implementation experience with highly virtualized shared infrastructure, platforms or applications architecture at a large enterprise or service provider.

Requested credentials: Vendor-specific virtualization certification such as VMware Certified Professional.


Cloud services developer

Job description: Design and build the multi-platform customer-facing tools — such as sales interfaces and management portals — that serve as the gateway into how end users consume the underlying cloud services.

Required credentials: B.S. in computer science or computer engineering; 5 years of experience with cloud architecture and design; 5 years of experience architecting and deploying Web services on SOA platforms (examples: Amazon EC2, Heroku, Azure, Rackspace); 5 years of experience with PHP Python, Java, or C++ with software development methodologies like Agile.


Cloud systems administrator

Job description: Configure and maintain the systems that comprise the underlying cloud platform. Troubleshoot when problems arise and plan for future cloud capacity requirements.

Required credentials: B.S. in computer science or computer engineering; 3 years of experience in operating system administration; 3 years of experience in supporting enterprise-level platform installations; strong Linux command-line skills; experience in performance monitoring and capacity planning for enterprise platforms.

Requested credentials: Knowledge of cloud-based development.


Cloud consultant

Job description: Conduct technical studies and evaluations of business area requirements and recommends to IT management appropriate cloud technology options.

Required credentials: At least 8 years of related IT consulting experience; outstanding understanding of cloud technologies available and vendors providing cloud services; top-notch communication skills.


Cloud systems engineer

Job description: Build the virtual systems that support the cloud implementation.

Required credentials: B.S. in computer science, information technology or related technical degree; 5-10 years of systems engineering experience, holistic understanding of the Internet and hosting from the network layer up through the application layer; experience in a 24×7 hosting environment.

Requested credentials: Experience with monitoring tools, scripting, configuration management, clustering, Drupal and Internet security.


Cloud network engineer

Job description: Perform the implementation, operational support, maintenance and optimization of network hardware, software and communication links of the cloud infrastructure.

Required credentials: Related degree in computer science ; 4 years’ in-depth network engineering experience; proven deep understanding of TCP/IP, Subnetting, DNS, DHCP, NAT and routing; strong knowledge of Layer 2 network protocols; strong knowledge of Layer 3 IP routing; proven scripting abilities in one or more language — Perl, Shell or Python.

Requested credentials: Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA)/Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) certification.


Cloud product manager

Job description: Perform product planning for cloud-based offerings including creating product concept and strategy documents, creating requirements specifications, identifying product positioning and enabling the sales processes (licensing, pricing, packaging, benefits, etc.).

Required credentials: Bachelor’s degree in business or computer sciences or equivalent work experience; minimum of 3 years of experience working with a software development company that deploys its offerings using a SaaS or cloud-based model; very strong communication skills.

Requested credentials: Advanced degree in business or computer sciences.


 

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