Comment by blahbl4hblahtoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blahbl4hblahtoo | Hacker News Reader

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blahbl4hblahtoo

I know that some of you guys have some issues with hosting data in US datacenters...but I have to tell you...I'm so fed up with IT. I'm actually sitting on hold with a major "all hands" issue with our IT department...

I've done this for years...maybe 20 years at this point. I can tell you this..."We" (meaning everyone in IT) don't do desktop management well AT ALL. I can't remember the last time I used a corporate baseline. They take 10 minutes to SHUTDOWN. (That's private industry...government is worse.) I don't know why users put up with it and it makes me realize why everyone hates Windows. (The average baseline literally forces it to stink like a rotting fish.) Couple that with networking guys that are useless at telling you anything other than "its up"...ITS ALWAYS THE FIREWALL.

Almost everyone that I work with just doesn't get how precarious their position actually is...if people don't want to use the sh!t that you work on you just might find yourself screwed at some point.

I work in IT and I would use something like this in a HEARTBEAT if it meant getting better boot times and less "what port is open" bs.

It seems to me that most people in IT actually think that the servers are more important than the people using them.

Thanks for putting up with this little rant...

What the f--k is a "corporate baseline"? If it's some sort of pre-done corporatized software stack using some nonsense like IBM Tivoli ("provides Integrated Service Management software to help manage business value of your IT infrastructure" -- sounds like something generated by http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live), that's where most of your problems lie. These are a pain in the ass for everyone -- people who have to use them and people who have to support them.

Trust your users. If you can't, educate them. If you still can't, get rid of them and hire smart people you can trust. Now you don't need fancy "desktop management".

> If you still can't, get rid of them and hire smart people you can trust.

It's hard to believe, but IT is typically not in charge of hiring and firing the rest of the company.

I work with smart people...Lots of smart people who make critical components for computers. Trust me, you still need desktop management, with corporate standard images.

By corporate baseline, I imagine it's corporate standard image with the standard loadout of software (encryption, antivirus, office, etc)

Ha! If you have a userbase of thousands of PCs, or PCs & Macs, or PCs, Macs & mobile devices, you absolutely have to have a standard operating environment, for many reasons, and if you believe otherwise you have no business commenting in this thread. You don't need to use something like Tivoli, but you do need a standard desktop image, standardized software packages and a method to provision/deprovision machines, management/reporting software, some kind of license management scheme (to prevent over-installation of commercial software, especially stuff that uses a corporate license key rather than individual keys), anti-virus and security systems, a way to force full disk encryption, a method of dealing with Patch Tuesdays, a way to push standard browser configurations or proxy .pac files, and innumerable other things.

Believe it or not, most employees' job at most companies has nothing to do with computing. They use computers to execute some other responsibilities, but the computer is a tool and all they want is for it to be as easy as possible to use, and for it to "just work".

Even if you have a BYOD policy, you still need management around it for a lot of the reasons I listed.

Your IT department isn't everyone's IT department.

Besides my own, I interact with our client's IT departments as part of my role. They run the spectrum from dysfunctional to superior.

> Your IT department isn't everyone's IT department.

Quite true but having interacted with a number of IT shops from startups to Fortune 100 / .gov scale it's quite disturbing to think about the percentage which could accurately be described as impediments and how few even realize this.

I imagine this is similar to what it felt like to work at a US auto maker shortly before the Japanese manufacturers started rolling.

Wow...that's a really good analogy.

Moving your systems to "the cloud" won't change any of the problems you identify. It will just shift where they occur.

But it will. The "cloud" will eventually replace corporate IT departments. Most companies don't want an IT department, it's a necessary headache and cost center that they only deal with when it gets in the way.

Moving where the problems occur to a single "cloud" company that develops the expertise to solve these problems once for each of their corporate clients is a large improvement.

Companies will simply pay for cloud IT services that manage desktops, provide servers, and most importantly take care of maintenance and updates at a much cheaper total cost.

The thing is - How do you develop a standardized toolchain for work? Who decides what the tradeoffs of a particular ERP stack are, how do you integrate it with your accounting system, who controls data flow in your company? You still need people to make those decisions, and that is what corporate IT is about - it's about designing, implementing and refining processes, not really technology. The tech is a tool, not the be all end all.

I think that "cloud" will be a definite bonus to the SMB shop, and provide a wonderful amount of spare capacity to enterprise shops, but I can't foresee "the cloud" replacing in-house IT completely.

> You still need people to make those decisions, and that is what corporate IT is about - it's about designing, implementing and refining processes, not really technology. The tech is a tool, not the be all end all. I think that "cloud" will be a definite bonus to the SMB shop, and provide a wonderful amount of spare capacity to enterprise shops, but I can't foresee "the cloud" replacing in-house IT completely.

But it will replace the major costs of corporate IT - technical resources services. For example, today a large corp (let's use Gazprom as an example) will contract a big IT services company (let's use Wipro for example) to manage their servers. This specific AWS service can in theory replace a large Citrix farm. When I was internal at SAP for example, every employee had access to their very own remote windows desktop, which had the basic office software on it required to do anything they could do on their laptop. The overall idea of cloud isn't the technology, it's that it's shared services.

You can't. Every business over a certain size will still need in house people that understand their problems. All Amazon, or any cloud providers for that matter, are doing is abstracting away IT services from the bottom up.

Need a server? click a button Message queue? click. Database? click. Virtualised Desktops? clicky-clicky. Virtual Tape Drive? (I'm as surprised as you are).

You're still going to need people who need to know what each one of those things means to your business. But in-house enterprise IT today still consists of lots of people (and payroll) who put things in racks, re-image desktops, restore SQL Backups, install custom software and give the tapes to the dude in the motorcycle helmet...

In the medium term the cloud won't replace IT. It will however redefine it to the point that the 'spare capacity' that you mentioned will be seen like an amusing anachronism.

This is the big reason many of the people where I work have simply opted out of the enterprise IT offerings. They use gmail and google apps, policies be damned.

I'm looking forward to the first really big instance of ass-biteage from that. Where ubiquitous "national security" surveillance gets undeniably linked to a spectacular display of for-profit business interest or insider trading.

If I were a corporate IT/Security type, I'd have a firewall config ready and waiting for the day it becomes clear that corporate secrets (hopefully somebody else's first) are finding their way from employees GoogleDocs into competitor's hands. I'd quite likely consider the collateral damage of blackholing every Google IP address, including search (and advertising), to be easily justifiable in the campaign to keep corporate data out of gmail/googledocs/gdrive et al.

(I wonder if that's an opening for someone like DuckDuckGo or Blekko? Become "the search engine that's still allowed from behind corporate firewalls", because you're not offering the sort of end-run-around-IT-policies email/apps/storage that Google/Yahoo/Bing all have available?)

That is on my list of things blekko should do eventually, for example we could set things up for big company networks to run all their queries through an anonymizing proxy that they control. The problem today is that Google's results (for technical queries) and search brand (for all queries) are so strong that a majority of the hypothetical big company users would revolt.

(As an aside, the possibilities for industrial espionage in your typical not-privacy-respecting search engine are staggering. Google knows what the R&D departments of every Fortune 500 company have cooking. Just look at the queries and clicks from their IP addrs. Yow.)

It happens in litigation all of the time.

People decide to do something they shouldn't do, talk about it on GMail, and some "unfortunate accident" results in the deletion of said data when litigation time comes around and it's time to preserve stuff.

> They use gmail and google apps, policies be damned

I wonder how their company's lawyer will react when presented in a courtroom with claim that they did not hand over all of the relevant employee e-mail in discovery. Further, perhaps they would like to read some of the correspondence for the first time as presented by the other sides law team.

Goes to the gp's point: if people don't want to use the sh!t that you work on you just might find yourself screwed at some point.

I get the feeling the person not using the company approved services will also suffer in a lawsuit. The company is going to take a hit, but I bet the person screwing around will have some personal liability.

You have a people problem. Technology won't solve your people problem.

I'm a sysadmin and I write some simple database driven tools for internal use. I wish I could make the owners of the company realize this simple truth.

Just because I can make the program, doesn't mean your shitty neighbor's son will care more about his job.

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