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Out of curiosity, how does blockchain come into play with Danish municipal IT?

I work in municipal IT in the US and I was wondering the same thing.

Only thing I can think of is a ledger. If it isn't about currency then it is some sort of ledger.

Maybe it's a clever way to pay property tax. There's no other use for a ledger that couldn't just be a database+transaction log.

probably some manager is invested in bitcoin

It doesn't yet, and by large I suspect it won't for the foreseeable future. We're doing proof of concept works on things like public records, task registration for legal oversight, landownership and such.

There is a company who've build an organizational component on blockchain tech. This may seem odd to a lot of people, but we're required by law to keep a bi-temporarily record of how our organization looked and who held responsibility for what areas and cases. So far he only option has been an old mainframe system, and it doesn't integrate too well with other components such as the pay-system. I'm not sure if blockchain will carry this responsibility, a lot of other companies are struggling to meet our demand on non-blockchain and it's an extremely hard market to enter, but the blockchain based solution came first, and is currently the only option, do who knows.

Are you kidding me?

All of those operations people should be immediately trained in cybersecurity and deployed literally anywhere in the country.

If you’ve seen the latest password dumps and how bad they are, cybersecurity is getting worse if anything.

Also, as of 2015 the Chinese had 60,000 dedicated cyber security engineers. This year the US I think has 9,000, maybe less, and they can’t even protect the US, much less the rest of the world (unlike the globally deployed US Navy).

Ops people are so important.

NOTE: I actually am an AWS Engineer and I like moving to the cloud, but still.

China has one cyber security engineer per 22k Chinese and United States has one per 35k Americans. To match China we need to increase our amount of engineers by about 60%, or increase the effectiveness of an engineer by about 37%.

and what exactly are these "cyber security engineers" doing in china or is this just a fancy title for those monitoring the take from china's surveillance state

The thing is, lots of "cybersecurity engineers" are useless. There are also good ones. I wonder what the relative proportions of usefulness are.

I am not sure throwing more people at the problem will help. Developers need to stop making rookie mistakes. Parameterize all queries, question input coming from the client. Pretty much every major data leak was the result of someone doing something stupid like setting the permissioning to public on a repository rather than not being staffed to do it right.

> Developers need to stop making rookie mistakes

And how do you get them to do that?

You hire security engineers to do training, code reviews, internal pentesting...

I am afraid this is just more lipstick on the pig of a fundamental problem of the industry: the combination of 1) anyone can call himself a programmer and incompetence is widespread and 2) every company trying to maximize the data collection in the hope that will be valuable.

Experience is the way to "stop making rookie mistakes"

I don't disagree, but cyber security isn't going to get funding at the expense of welfare in a political organization in Scandinavia.

So we have to make do. :)

> trained in cybersecurity

I don't think I've ever met anyone in cybersecurity who was "trained in cybersecurity". At least not anyone useful. They're all developers first.

> All of those operations people should be immediately trained in cybersecurity and deployed literally anywhere in the country.

As someone with background in "cybersecurity". Most "cybersecurity" is automated now. Also, you need heavy background in math/computer science and programming background for cybersecurity. Something most Operations/IT people do not have.

> If you’ve seen the latest password dumps and how bad they are, cybersecurity is getting worse if anything.

That really has nothing to do with "cybersecurity". It's just operations "best practices".

> Also, as of 2015 the Chinese had 60,000 dedicated cyber security engineers. This year the US I think has 9,000, maybe less, and they can’t even protect the US, much less the rest of the world (unlike the globally deployed US Navy).

It depends on what a "cyber security engineer" is.

> Ops people are so important.

Sure. But it's also a highly automatable position too.

> NOTE: I actually am an AWS Engineer and I like moving to the cloud, but still.

AWS engineer? Do you mean you work for amazon or you work for a company that uses AWS?

When you talk about the cloud, do you mean SAAS, PAAS, or IAAS? I'm asking because we looked into moving our infrastructure to the cloud and the numbers just didn't add up. We've started to move some application to SAAS but most of the stuff just doesn't make sense to move to the cloud.

Can you share some numbers? If you count colocation as cloud, I think there is a wide range of products and services you can use.

Sorry, I really can't share any numbers. I guess for us the biggest stumbling blocks were legacy systems and software licensing.

You were wanting to move your licensing to the cloud and decided against it? Any particular reason?

You do all of the above. First you go to O365. Then you put your AD and ADFS in the cloud as a DR. Then you target other things where DR is useful.

After that, you opportunistically move stuff as it makes sense. Then squeeze every provider of software and services, and pick off the stragglers by moving to cloud/SaaS.

SAAS and parts IAAS. We've already moved our operations to a "private" cloud we run on servers we rent, but we're positioning ourselves to go full scale Azure.

Business case wise it doesn't make sense to move just to go cloud. When we moved into the rented cloud we did it instead of replacing our old servers that were end of life. This meant we saved money over all because buying and running your own hardware is expensive.

Similarly it wouldn't make sense to move our SQL cluster into Azure just for the heck of it. However when our SQL server license is up for renewal, the move to the cloud will be the best financial option.

In development the story is a tad different. Our operations wizards can't do everything that our developers (both our own but also on open scourge components) require. We're almost 100% Microsoft in operations, but we run 370 different systems and some of these run in Linux, php, nodes, python and so on. By utilizing the cloud, we won't need a certified red hat guy on premise because Microsoft (or Amazon) will handle things like patch management and security updates. Or in other words, it's more expensive to run our applications on a SAAS platform than on our own servers, but it gives us much more freedom to chose and build the applications to support our primary business of meeting the needs of our employees and citizens.

> Or in other words, it's more expensive to run our applications on a SAAS platform than on our own servers, ...

But isn't this just because the initial up front investment for your existing on prem infrastructure has already been spent, and that they are unlikely to all reach eol at the same time? Over time, won't the cost savings of the cloud model make up for the on prem write-off plus the costs of re architecture-ing for cloud? What sort of workloads do you never see moving to IaaS, where the costs of rearchitecturing are just too high? Any opinion on the new VMW on AWS offering, it's pricing, etc?

>To be honest I'm not an operations guy, and never have been, but I do work in management and my good friend who heads the IT department is struggling to find new roles for the operations people as we're heading into the cloud.

He ought to look at more security based roles to fill that gap, unless that's a separate department for you guys.

Wow, I'm very interested to read more from you. A lot of what you say seems to be the same in many companies I know. Do you write a blog or have considered it?

I don’t and I’m not sure it would be wise to do when it wasn’t anonymous.

Public sector municipal... doing what exactly? That doesn’t sound like a traditionally high tech market. Maybe your use case is atypical.

Big cities have all sorts of IT needs. And they employ a lot of contractors. Firms like IBM and Palantir make a lot of money contracting for government IT contracts...

Some cities even have their own networking team, as running their own fiber plant and all that entails (traffic lights and other devices that need comms) is usually cheaper than renting out copper or fiber from your local telco.

I'd be extremely surprised if that were true. Cities like to do this sort of thing because it expands headcount but I doubt it makes sense financially if you account for all costs.

You’d be wrong. Our city does all its own fiber plant. It’s significantly less expensive than a recurring contract with a telco. Significantly.

Cities have the advantage of building the roads and being able to lay whatever they’d like under them.

There are companies that do it - http://www.midwesternelectricinc.com/traffic-signals/

But cities of a sufficient size (pulling up Chicago because its probably larger than the sufficient size), you find https://webapps1.cityofchicago.org/traffic/about.jsp

> Chicago has about 2900 traffic signals throughout the city. About 470 of these signals are interconnected through a fiber-network that facilitates the centralized monitoring and control of signal operations. Whether interconnected or not-interconnected, the signals are programmed to synchronize with signals immediately around it so that vehicles will pass through the intersections most efficiently. New signals are added and old signals are modernized every year depending on the need and availability of funds. While OEMC/Traffic Management Authority is responsible for maintaining the signal coordination and timing, Division of Electricity at CDOT is responsible for the maintenance of the signals and CDOT is responsible for the physical design, construction, and timing of signals.

It appears that the City of Chicago maintains their own. As noted there, that is maintained by the division of electricity ( https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/cdot/provdrs/tra... ), which also maintains all street lights and signs. When one gets to a point where the municipality knows that there will always be work for some number of people - its cheaper to hire those people permanently than contract it out. This also provides a better SLA for the city (tax payers get rather annoyed if the street light is out and the response from City Hall is "we told the contractor about it, but they haven't responded yet - its the holidays.")

There is often a significant amount of data flowing around in the public sector. When there is a constant baseline of a task to be done for the foreseeable future, it is often less expensive to fill that with a FTE rather than a contractor or consultant.

Things from the city jail management (transferring to state or federal when appropriate - or to the hospital and back - or to the court and back, etc...), payroll (and staffing management), data mining, managing assments of property, scheduling housing or business inspectors, budget forecasting based on weather models, keeping track of all the permits and where they are in the process...

There is lots of places where information technology has a role. Not necessarily high tech, but rather managing the information that is flowing through the system to make sure that the proper data goes to the proper places.

Its not going to be glamorous, but it sure beats paper and excel spreadsheets in email.

While big consulting shops may be brought in from time to time to do a project - the role of integration that software with the existing systems often falls to a FTE employed by the city, state, or whatever. Keeping that institutional knowledge about how things work is often priceless (well, you can put a price on it - how long does it take to figure out the system that Stan left behind... and if that's a consultant doing that, how much are they billing you for that discovery work?). In many public sector shops, the preserved institutional knowledge that a team may have can easily run into the collective century or more. That is a lot of understanding of how things work that can't be effectively outsourced.

we're a small managed private+public cloud services provider and we only have 2 full time operations engineers to support 30+ client companies. we also have a handful of consultants that do specialized work, working a handful of hours each month. they seem to be serving a small cluster of customers each also.

we could support 40, our existing 2 engineers are basically under-worked - we have 2 because it would be insanely irresponsible to have just 1, aside from company ownership (which is able to do the work also, if needed). if we absolutely had to, we could cut that down to 1 full time guy. let that sink in; 1 full time guy to manage 40 customers.

having said that, we're still growing as a business, because we've embraced the new reality, but it hasn't been without turnover and pain. we're also putting money into developing products.

the kicker is, even with the R+D, we're more profitable now than 5 years ago, with LESS ops folks (ostensibly less people to do the actual work, though we all know that's not what's really happening). i imagine the same exact thing is playing out with larger in-house staff, as you describe.

this is the new model. WAY more output from less but higher paid full time people, small networks of high-$ specialized consultants, and smaller firms and IT groups working in mercenary fashion. embrace it, or you will bleed yourself dry in less time than you think.

How do you want to do 24/7 with 1 full-time ops eng? Even 2 is small, do they take any time off?

Reads to me like "We've significantly reduced the quality of life for our employees, but greatly increased profits!"

More part-time contractors who don't have steady work and fewer FTEs who are on constant call.