1. Hi!
I'm an IT expert who has been working in the field for nearly 20 years. I really enjoy IT, and one of the
aspects of IT I enjoy the most is the human connection. I think for some IT experts, computers and
technical skills are a way to avoid human contact and interaction, but I feel that to really do quality
work in this field, you need to have the exact opposite attitude.
Computers have radically redefined the business world in the last couple of decades, and I think most
of us, regardless of age, have not really kept up, or even really caught up. Our world is in a radical
transition from pre-Google to post-Google, and for most of us, our little monkey brains are a little
overwhelmed by all the bytes and bits.
What good are the tools you have, if you don't know how to use them? How reliable is your
infrastructure if you're not really sure what's happening in the background? How good is your Disaster
Recovery plan if you don't have the proper documentation? How well is your organization really
operating if you don't understand what your tech department is doing, or why?
I can't tell you how many times I've come into a data center situation and discovered their disaster
recovery plan was a disaster. I can't tell you how many managers and upper level administrators have
no idea what's going on in the data center, or why that's important. I can't tell you how many systems
I've found mis-configured, out of date, misappropriated, or catastrophically unstable. There is a real
gap today for almost every organization between what is possible and what is actually in service. Let's
untangle the spaghetti!
Data security is not hard. With proper infrastructure and documentation, it's easy. Really easy. And
you can get everybody involved from the CEO down to the most recently hired secretary. Monitoring
tools like Nagios or Icinga can be setup in such a way that even a toddler could have complete
understanding of what is happening in the data center and why. Backups and Disaster Recovery can be
automated and monitored so that every person in the organization has direct access to hourly, daily,
weekly, monthly, and even yearly archived copies of all their data. Setting this up can be not only
painless, but fun, and provide comfort and a feeling of self-worth to every person in the organization.
Systems can be so well documented that even a new hire with no previous experience could rebuild
them in less than a day.
Best of all, the very top performing systems and architectures that exist today are open source and
completely free. Debian, Nagios/Icinga, Wikimedia, Owncloud, rsnapshot, proxmox, openstack,
apache, and mysql/mariaDB are all free. Most of them are easy to use and well documented. There are
migration paths from most older technologies that other organizations have already successfully blazed.
…...and the time saved not chasing licenses!
If you have received this letter, you wanted to know more about me. The reality is, I very much would
like to hear more about YOU! Every piece of a data center I hear about or come in contact with makes
me better at my job, and I very thoroughly enjoy technical challenges and helping people through
them!
Rhy