IT Trenches » planning

Pandemic preparation, risk and business continuity

Troy Tate — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:22:55 +0000

I’m not the kind to run around thinking the sky is falling or that the swine or bird flu risk is non-existent. I take a lot of these warnings with a grain of salt. However, the pandemic watches of the past few years should obviously have organizations thinking about their risks and business continuity plans. In fact, my organization has a few sites in Mexico and along the border with Mexico. So, this situation has the potential to directly affect our employees.

I wanted to bring your attention to a recent posting on the excellent SANS organization website about the pandemic watch of 2009. This posting is titled Pandemic Watch April 2009. This has very good explanations of the current situation and the potential health risks.

The section that I think is most appropriate to IT folks (actually to everyone) describes a skeleton plan for companies to help deal with the situation. The following is an excerpt from the SANS website.

Don’t Panic!

Initial monitoring stage (where we are right now)

* If you’re sick, stay home
* Family is sick, stay home
* Close contact with someone showing symptoms, stay home
* Wash your hands, cover your cough

Then, if multiple cases in your area,

* Think about telling non-essential workers to stay home
* Recommend workers take kids out of daycare

Pandemic stage

* Everyone will be staying home, how will you handle it?
* Do you have enough laptops?
* Can your VPN concentrators handle the load

I would recommend taking some time to read the summary about the health risks of the various flu strains. Let’s continue to keep our thoughts and best wishes for those who have already been affected by this most recent health issue.

Thanks for reading and let’s continue to be good network citizens – stay healthy too and if you are not healthy, then please contact a health care organization as soon as you can. Get well soon!

Saving Money & Stopping spam – change domain names

Troy Tate — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:47:58 +0000

Are you getting lots of SPAM? Is your organization’s internet link being saturated due to tons of inbound spam and maybe outbound non-delivery notices for invalid addresses? About 3 years ago, ours was too. We also supported several domain names across multiple sites. We subscribed to Postini (now Google) services to reduce the impact on the internet connections at our sites. After implementing Postini, we saw a drop in the number of inbound messages and bounced undeliverables of over 85%.

Postini was seeing almost 9 out of every 10 messages as SPAM or bad addresses. This is a huge amount of traffic hitting the circuit(s) and not to mention the email servers and user mailboxes. Postini has saved lots of money on both communication costs and servers. I urge you to take a look at their services or other similar “cloud” services.

We recently made a change that was done at NO COST and are seeing savings in network traffic and server load. We got rid of the multiple domain names and went to a single email domain for the entir organization. Before making this change, the total number of inbound messages was about 60,000 per day. After making this change, the number was reduced to 13,000. This is a >4X reduction in inbound messages! This was done at no cost. However, it is not without risk so a lot of up-front planning and communication is needed. All employees needed to ensure that their contacts knew their new addresses. An autoreply was also implemented on the edge email gateway to reply to all messages addressed to the old domains.

Savings can come but there are risks. All interested parties need to be kept informed during the changes. Think about what changes can be done in your environment to save costs. It may not be easy, but sometimes can be very effective.

Thanks for reading & let’s continue to be good network citizens.

Improving yourself in 2009 – part 2

Troy Tate — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:20:00 +0000

Maybe Bubbletimer mentioned in part 1 is not something that will help improve your professional value in 2009. How about the Printable CEO series then? The tools David Seah offers on his blog seem like great resources to track your goals, tasks and time. Sometimes those we work for wonder what all we do in our positions. We sometimes have to prove our worth to the organizations who pay us. The When is something worth doing? tool that David outlines may help you improve your decision making and therefore your professional value.

What other professional development and/or tracking tools do you use in your job? Please leave some feedback and let me know what you use or if this Printable CEO made a difference in your job.

Improving yourself in 2009

Troy Tate — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:05:27 +0000

It is going to be another year end here in a few weeks and the new year begins. We all struggle to meet deadlines, track what we do and where our time goes. I have found a few tools that I will be sharing with you in the next couple of blog entries. Maybe one of these will help you in 2009 and make you more valuable to your organization.

The first of these is called the BubbleTimer. It is meant to help you meet your goals through better time management. This may be useful if you are a consultant or need a way to quickly track time on projects.

Hope this is of use to you in 2009!

Did you see this? – Microsoft Infrastructure Planning & Design Guides

Troy Tate — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:41:00 +0000

Microsoft has become much better offering documentation beyond just marketing materials about their products and systems. The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guides are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, with each guide addressing a unique infrastructure technology or scenario.

The guides available include:

Exchange Online—Evaluating Software-plus-Services
Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP1 with R2
Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5
Windows Server 2008 File Services
Windows Server 2008 Print Services
Infrastructure Planning and Design Series Introduction
Internet Information Services 7.0
Selecting the Right NAP Architecture
Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology
System Center Operations Manager 2007
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
Windows Deployment Services
Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services
Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
Windows Server Virtualization (for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1)

As you see, there is a lot of information here to absorb and make use of in your environment. I’m going to be checking out the Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 implementation guide. It’s gonna be an interesting ride but at least Microsoft is offering some free support assistance in the planning and design phase.

Try some of these guides out. Share with us your thoughts and how effective the guides were in helping your organization meet operational demands.