Manhattan

I've recently made two trips to New York City as the company I work for opened a new office in Manhattan. Being in Manhattan reminded me of my time in Tokyo - lots of activity and lots of concrete, people & pavement.

One of the first things you notice is the frenzied activity - lots of honking horns and people talking. Something else you notice occurs while waiting to cross the street. The native New Yorkers know exactly when to start walking (meaning before the light turns) while visitors like me wait until the sign says walk. This is a way to tell who is a local and who is from out-of-town.

Everything is narrow, restaurants, shops, even the hotel rooms. But since Manhattan is an island and one of the most expensive places on Earth, it makes sense. I was able to find a nice little deli type shop to get an inexpensive lunch ($10) named Le Mirage Cafe (on W. 43rd Street). No such luck when it came to dinner - everywhere was expensive.

Something else that I noticed about Manhattan is how bad AT&T's cellular service is. Verizon & Spring worked well, but I came across several people who simply could not make a call using their AT&T phones.

Rob

Cold Hard Facts for People Seeking A Job...

Separate your work from your company

Your company does not care about your work as long as it is contributing to its business goals. Only your family and some friends care about your work and they don’t pay the bills. You need to look at your work as a set of skills you can sell to employers, not the fact that you work for a company.

http://bit.ly/n0x6Nc

IT Operations and keeping the lights on.....

As the IT Manager for a geographically dispersed organization, I spend much of my time “keeping the lights on” - meaning making sure that the voice & data networks are up & running. A better way to refer to this is IT Operations and that is what I spend the majority of my time on.

Now the cloud computing proponents out there would tell you, “Hey, with the Cloud you have nothing to worry about” but that is not actually the case. All the Cloud does is make computing resource available over the Internet (via web services). End users must still get to the Cloud and most folks still work in an office building which means a Local Area Network (LAN) so people can share local computing resources. And Local Area Networks, just like Wide Area Networks (WAN), mean Identification & Authentication (IdA) plus don’t forget Authorization. Because I manage a geographically dispersed network, I deal with LAN and WAN networking as well as Cloud issues – has anyone heard of DNS (aka Domain Name Services)? If you have, good and if you haven’t, do a bit of homework because it’s important. Both internal & external DNS must be managed so whether the SoA (Start of Authority) for your organization is your ISP or a third party vendor, someone within your organization still must be in charge. There is always a person responsible for the important things.

How about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Cloud-based applications? Your company is still responsible for the customer & client data in the databases that are the backend systems of all SaaS solutions. It is immaterial whether the server housing your confidential customer data resides locally (meaning “on premises”) or in the Cloud – you are still responsible for protecting it. Who administers the user accounts of SaaS applications? The Cloud vendor’s responsibility is to make sure “the lights are on” – meaning the application is up & running and nothing more. Your firm must still decide which employees get access to what data and that is an organizational decision. What doesn’t have to be done is the maintenance work on the individual servers that would house the application software if they were on premises. That is one advantage of the Cloud that is undeniable and a reduction in the amount of work the internal IT staff has to do by about 10%.

So your organization has moved its critical systems into the Cloud (public, private, or hybrid it doesn’t matter – all that matters is that the systems are not on premises). Ensuring that the end users have access to these systems is IT Operations and still the responsibility of the internal IT staff. Teleworkers working remotely from their homes, sales people on the road, and employees spread out among branch offices all represent the different kinds of access required for an organization to function. Oh, did I forget to mention phone service? Well, these days with simple VoIP solutions such as Skype or more complex telephony solutions, phone service is just another form of data – getting access to your phone is the same as getting access to your applications.

A good principle to remember is C-I-A which means Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Integrate these principles into your IT Operations so that regardless of where you compute from (locally or in the Cloud), you can feel confident in your systems.

Rob

May the wings of Liberty never lose a feather......

Here's to the Army and Navy and the battles they have won; here's to America's colors, the colors that never run. May the wings of Liberty never lose a feather.

Again with the Google Apps vs. Microsoft Exchange!

Again with the Google Apps vs. Microsoft Exchange!

Google put out another one of their "Google Apps vs. Microsoft Exchange" webinars. The quote from Google is, "Many companies are faced with a choice: upgrade to a more costly enterprise license for Microsoft Exchange or find a business grade alternative at a better price."

If you want to do an apples-to-apples comparison, then you must compare Google Apps for Business with the hosted version of Microsoft Exchange from a vendor such as Rackspace. Comparing Google Apps to an on premises installation of Exchange is disengenuous because it is not an apt comparison. Comparing Google Apps to hosted Exchange means that you are looking at cloud-based email services from different vendors.

For businesses & workers who utilize Microsoft Outlook, hosted Exchange services works well. I know that Google Apps supports Outlook, but it is just not the same. Or if you prefer to just use a web browser, Exchange's Outlook Web Application (OWA) + Internet Explorer offers a feature rich web-based email experience. Google Apps + Chrome looks the same as does Google Apps + Firefox or Google Apps + Internet Explorer. Plus let's not forget the integration advantages offered by Exchange if you run Windows Active Directory for identification & authentication.

As for mobile support, with the advent of Exchange Active Sync (EAS), practically any modern smartphone can hook directly into an Exchange environment. I myself use an Android-based smartphone with both Gmail & Exchange Active Sync running on it and there isn't much difference between the two clients.

Google touts the fact that they use Postini Services for effective spam filtering. If you go with hosted Exchange services, the vendor will also do spam filtering. Most anti-spam technologies these days are very good and rely upon the same black lists so I'm not sure if Postini Services is leaps & bounds ahead of what others can offer in terms of blocking junk emails.

I'm speaking about all of this from first hand experience. I have two entities that I'm responsible for. The first is an organization with 50 employees spread across four locations plus teleworkers. I run my own internal anti-spam & email servers. By doing so I'm able to access any & all message traffic to & from the three email domains that I operate. For the smaller of the two entities that I'm responsible for, because I started them out from scratch, I went with hosted Exchange services. Initial setup & configuration were straight-forward and so was the setup for each individual mailbox. Configuring Outlook to use hosted Exchange was also a simple process. But I get this feeling of dread every month when I get billed. I feel like I'm being nickle & dimed as I'm charged for each & every mailbox. You want a mailbox to use for public postings, that will cost you. You want a mailbox for a logical group of users, that will cost you too. With my on premises Exchange server, I can create, modify, and and disable mailboxes as needed. Google charges $50 per year per mailbox while Rackspace charges $156 per year per mailbox. Pricing should be a primary consideration when weighing your options. Remember that with both vendors, as you add mailboxes, you add costs so your OpEx goes up. Do you own calculation for my setup - more than 100 mailboxes spread across three (3) email domains. Whether it's Google or Rackspace, they'd charge me for each mailbox in each email domain so in fact I'd be looking at triple the cost. From Google I'm looking at $150 per mailbox each year and from Rackspace I'm looking at $468 per mailbox each year. Wow, that is a lot of money.

As I'd mentioned earlier, I run my own anti-spam & Exchange servers on premises but not inhouse. I've put these system into a collocation facility. One of the benefits of a collocation facility is that along with the messaging system, I've re-located other internal infrastructure critical systems into the facility. Some might call this setup a "Private Cloud." I refer to is as Business Continuity. I pay the same amount each month no matter how many mailboxes I create plus I have protection for my internal infrastructure and that is something that Google can't do.

My goal as the Technology Manager for a small organization is to offer cost effective messaging, identification, and authentication services to the business. Management must be able to control who has access to what and when they have access. Running Exchange internally allows me to do this.

Rob

'Cloud Computing' and how it has affected my job as the IT Manager for a small business

I’ll keep my example focused on a single piece of software, CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

When I joined my current firm, they used an on-premises CRM that required a fat client to be installed plus a network drive mapping in order to work. I was responsible for the server hardware (including warranty coverage), the application itself (purchase of the initial product + ongoing support), backing up data on the server, backing up the server itself (which is different), and keeping the server powered up and cooled down.

The positive was that we weren’t being nickel & dimed for every user account. A negative was that the old CRM didn’t work well across a wide area network (WAN) because it was never designed to be used in such a way.

Because the server that housed the CRM sat in a room in an office building, it was vulnerable to any ‘event’ that might affect Houston. A prime example is 2008’s Hurricane Ike.

The new CRM is software-as-a-service (known as SaaS) and thus has business continuity built into it. A SaaS CRM works well across a wide area network because it was designed from the ground up to work in a distributed environment (i.e., the Internet).

A negative aspect of a SaaS CRM is that we are getting nickel & dimed by the vendor when it comes to per-user licensing.

Running reports from the SaaS CRM is painfully slow and as the vendor adds more customers to their shared environment, things get even slower. SaaS vendors only make money by adding more & more customers while not adding additional resources to support their growing environment. It’s the old adage of, “Let’s see how many people we can fit in a telephone booth.”

I still must take backups of my firm’s data from the SaaS CRM (via FTP) just in case something happens to the vendor. Always have a backup plan, whether it’s a cloud based application or on-premises software. That will never change.

I still have to create new user accounts, disable old user accounts, and set access rights to the SaaS CRM just like I did with the old on-premises CRM. That aspect of my job has not changed. What the SaaS vendor provides is the environment and it’s up to the customer to determine who gets access to what.

Overall, I still must administer the CRM, it has built in business continuity features, it works well for all of my office locations, but the SaaS CRM can be slow and is affected by not only your connection to the Internet, but the traffic patterns of the Internet itself.

Something to think about are the “peering agreements” between the major Internet Service Providers. My firm experienced a “peering” issue. What happened? My firm was caught in the middle of a dispute between ISPs. I’ve had real experience with this problem and the most frustrating part was that all the vendors pointed their fingers at the other vendors and said it was their fault – it was like a Three Stooges routine but with terrible consequences. I remember telling the ISP that provided access for my office that when I used my wireless broadband card, I could access the CRM just fine. This stunned the technical support folks and made them realize the problem was larger than they’d first thought (that plus they had dozens & dozens of complaints from other customers of our specific SaaS CRM who experienced the same issue).

So what is the take away from all of this? A SaaS CRM is a mixed bag just as the old on-premises CRM was a mixed bag. I still spend as much time administering the new SaaS CRM as I ever did on the old CRM.

Rob

Losing weight....

I've had a lot of folks ask me how I've lost so much weight. The answer is simple - lots of cardio exercise coupled with the complete surrender of my taste buds!

Oatmeal, grilled chicken, zero sweets, and a lack of fried items have slowly killed my taste buds. They waved the white flag of surrender long ago. Now all they have are the memories of chocolate chip cookies, cheeseburgers, and those sweet morsels from heaven, DONUTS! I now know how Homer Simpson feels when driving by Dunkin' Donuts.

Rob