SuburbanFarmer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 8:59 pm
And you accomplish this by advocating both for and against cloud services. You must be really good at meetings.
I negotiate contracts between MS, Google, Adobe, Amazon, RCN, Slack, and a few other smaller groups out there, my first job as a Director of IT, I was able to reduce the costs by 25% by negotiating 1 year deals at the savings of a three year deal, rebuilding the infrastructure, and streamlining costs. The place I am at now, I am doing the same thing. It's not a three month program, it takes a year to do it right minimum if you don't want real downtime while things transition over.
The fact is that there is a time and place for cloud based hardware/infrastructure, and there is a time and place for old school mindset, you need to have not only a feel for what the CIO, CTO, CEO, and CFO are willing to tolerate, but also to make them happy by showing production.
Your CIO, or whatever he is meant to be took too many big steps in the wrong way. You talk to the people that are going to be affected, you ask them what they want, you butter them up and get them on your side. You get the programmers, you get the engineers, you get the people who are going to interact with it all on the same page. Then you figure out how from there you are going to implement it without or as little downtime as possible.
The smartest thing to do is to have it built in the background while the old system is still in place, once you have it up and running you test it out on something that's already in production, see if you can break the system, then fix whatever breaks. From there you let a small group test it out, then do the same thing. Once you get 90% of the bugs out (because let's be honest getting all the bugs out is impossible) you let it into the wild after a training session, and be hands on while people learn it.
Do it though during a slow time, not peak.
This gives time for people to get used to it, and your group to make it work as intended, once it's done, then you can dismantle the old system permanently.
As for the rest, data that is mission critical, you keep off the internet, and treat it as if it should stay in a SCIF, so that should stay local. That data that won't tell people anything, or is general interactions can be cloud based. If anything, if you need to have the database interact between the cloud network at home base, you should at a minimum have SSH running... of course that's like saying you should lock the doors when you leave the house too...but you get my drift, or should.
But what do I know... I just have an associates with 20+ years of IT experience behind me.
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