Does our IT man know what he's doing?

Our Server died 4 weeks ago. Backup failed Shortly afterwards. Since then our desktops have been wiped, been given new passwords and logins on multRiple occasions and we have had no company email for the duration. Pretty frustrating. Will a UPS have power surge protection? That’s what the fault is being blamed on.

But business working as usual and tech department have never been less hassled by 16 emails asking for a table and chairs ever.

Oh yes, the old ‘power surge’ problem. Causes all sorts of otherwise unexplained faults. Have you done a de-frag? That’ll be next.

Doesn’t sound like it but it’s easy to say that without knowing the detail behind the issues – eg did he identify the risks or issues with your systems but get told he couldn’t have money to fix them, etc.

IME a lot of IT issues are the result of things happening outside of IT.

Should your business network have had power surge protection – hell yes…
Should a single server failure count as a disaster – no.

Although it sounds like you business impact has been negligible. Ultimately with IT you get what you pay for.
Do you pay peanuts?

died 4 weeks ago…. we have had no company email for the duration

We’d be bust.

Watched a series of documentaries programs about a crowd of IT guys and I’m not sure any of them knew what they were doing.

They do have cool t-shirts though!

You need to get a Problem Ticket opened for that little lot to identify the underlying cause.

slowoldman no, no, no first you have to raise the incident ticket once you still have an issue after a week then you can call it a problem.
You can’t get ahead of the process,if you happen to be a large multi-national that favours a blue colour then each of those will cost at least a fiver.

Without email for 4 weeks?

I’d have been setting up a Google Business account sharpish just to tide us over.

That’s what we did 5 years ago when our Exchange Server fell over spectacularly. We had email back up within 2 hours.

And we’ve never looked back….

It’ll sit somewhere between incompetent IT through to incompetent MD.

Without knowing the environment, very difficult to see where the blame sits.

Sounds like the UPS wasn’t protecting everything and backups were not sufficient. DR testing also skipped by the looks of it. IT at fault for not being prepared. UPS will handle spikes and brown outs.

backup? or mirroring?

IT bloke at my old place found out what happens when he implements mirroring as the backup scheme, and the big boss’s delete *.* was mirrored perfectly too.

Probably the same guy.

Ultimately with IT you get what you pay for.

+1 This is it, plain and simple, though IT can also be a blackhole that can swallow any amount of money with seemingly no return.

wwaswas – Member
died 4 weeks ago…. we have had no company email for the duration

We’d be bustAye, us too, no emails, surely completely unacceptable in this day and age? 4 weeks is nuts.

Ultimately with IT you get what you pay for.

I’m reassuringly expensive if anyone wants to offer me a job 🙂

I’d be job hunting even if the business survives the direct financial hit it’ll take* I wouldn’t trust the decision makers that either hired an incompetent/inadequate team or ignored advice.

*unless the email is only used to share cat pictures? 4 weeks nuts!

It sounds as though initial under spend on IT has opened the door to someone who is taking the mick. I suspect he’ll make a lot of money out of your company.

Either way, you really should get rid and get someone in who knows what they’re doing.

Without email for 4 weeks?

I’d have been setting up a Google Business account sharpish just to tide us over.

That’s what we did 5 years ago when our Exchange Server fell over spectacularly. We had email back up within 2 hours.

And we’ve never looked back….

Google mail, ahhh yes, you ever had a conference with google regarding SLA and data security and where your data actually lives……? If not I hope you aren’t storing R&D data.

Funniest thing I every heard was google telling me they have never had an outage of any form…. ever…. as they can always get to the data. Doesn’t matter if *you* can’t, as thats your outage not google’s outage; they didn’t like being laughed at.

There’s always the possibility that the IT guy has been fighting the good fight with management for the last 2 years, telling them that exactly this scenario was a possibility unless they put their hands in their pockets. Maybe even pointing out that while the company has grown x amount in the last 5 years while the IT budget has been eaten up entirely with new end user equipment rather than keeping the core service infrastructure up to date.

Maybe

Google mail, ahhh yes, you ever had a conference with google regarding SLA and data security and where your data actually lives……? If not I hope you aren’t storing R&D data.

Funniest thing I every heard was google telling me they have never had an outage of any form…. ever…. as they can always get to the data. Doesn’t matter if *you* can’t, as thats your outage not google’s outage; they didn’t like being laughed at.
Possibly Google Mail isn’t right for everyone, but we have found it perfect for our requirements. And now, when we want to set up a new email account or delete one, it takes 2 minutes of our time rather than an hour (minimum call out) of our IT supplier.

Sounds to me like an eggs and baskets problem. If you have “a” server, then it’s a case of when rather than if. Whether that’s IT’s fault or because the beancounters wouldn’t sign off a DR plan, it’s hard to say from here.

Four weeks to recover it though, that’s pretty shocking.

IT can also be a blackhole that can swallow any amount of money with seemingly no return.

Perception is a real issue with IT. You have a good IT department, no-one notices. You have a crap one, everyone notices.

Possibly Google Mail isn’t right for everyone, but we have found it perfect for our requirements. And now, when we want to set up a new email account or delete one, it takes 2 minutes of our time rather than an hour (minimum call out) of our IT supplier.

Its absolutely fine as long as you understand the risks with gmail, its very easy to use; just not a good idea if you value your data.

Google admitted that anyone in their DC op’s can look at anyone’s data and you have no way of knowing as they don’t provide (or look at) audit logs. Hence if you are involved in any form of R&D google is a *very* bad idea, and if any of your data has encryption technology in it, then you are totally **** as whoever decided to migrate to gmail risks prison time under export control law.

I spent a long time with a lot of Google Architects discussing Gmail for a company I used to work for and the discussions were pretty **** scary tbh.

People who don’t understand cannot comprehend what it can and does take to maintain 24/7 365 dependability with complex IT systems.

However, 4 weeks and no email…..P45 time!!!

Perception is a real issue with IT. You have a good IT department, no-one notices. You have a crap one, everyone notices.

This ^

You’ll find most IT Managers at SME’s know the limitations of their depts. and how close they are to a disaster due to failure and the lack of coherent planning and contingency.

I worked in IT Audit for +15 years and it was rare to actually find a decent Business Continuity Plan and corresponding tested IT DR Plan.

Our disaster recovery room also doubled as the previous (Muslim) IT incumbent’s prayer room. I always wondered how coincidental that was.

However, 4 weeks and no email…..P45 time!!!

4 weeks is to long, should be a day max, may’be two if you have terabytes of mail to restore.

been given new passwords and logins on multiple occasions

Wot?

To answer the initial question, I doubt it..!

I know of one company that decided that VMs were the future (and to a certain extent they may be right) so they bought a single server and put five VMs on there, both Windows and Linux guests.

But they wouldn’t pay for a second server for when the first died. Which it eventually did. 😀

I got a virus on a work PC. Dodgy popup, stopped using. One of our IT dudes came in and decided to resolve the problem by trying to close down the popups faster than they could appear. For the next 10 minutes, all you could hear in the office was a furious mousebashing, like he was playing diablo. I walked back over and every inch of the screen was flashing with popups, like a mental infection disco.

Then he said “This PC’s knackered, I’ll get you a new one”, picked it up under his arm and walked off with it. Pro.

there may be reasons for the apparent ineptness, I worked for a large tech company a year ago which had been targeted by a specially crafted virus which was basically roaming around pilfering what ever source code/data/IP it could from servers and desktops for export back to HQ (via anonymous sites obviously). It was very well engineered and run undetected for probably 6-12 months. The investigation was silently conducted under the guise of multiple failures (obviously servers were shutdown and desktops / laptops recalled etc) due to power spikes to prevent any news leaks from the company in the hope it wouldn’t tip of the hacker and permit data security guys to locate the source of the attack. I reckon the investigation ran for a good few weeks during which time the staff were pretty open about incompetent IT struggling to maintain functionality and desktops etc.
So its either something similar – or you just have a poor IT team.

Vikingboy, wow.. did they figure it out in the end?

No, no-one ever found out.

Wait.

(-:

In seriousness, I’d love to know the name of that infection. It sounds like the stuff of urban myths.

Cougar – Moderator
No, no-one ever found out.
Wait

That’s right, Cougar – it never actually happened.
OK everyone ? It never happened.
Good.
<whispers into shirtsleeve>

Well, adobe pretty much had their crown jewels nicked last year following a prolonged network intrusion: souce code lifted…[/url]

Unsurprisingly, it looks like that came from a vulnerability in one of their own products…

Well, adobe pretty much had their crown jewels nicked last year following a prolonged network intrusion: souce code lifted…

Unsurprisingly, it looks like that came from a vulnerability in one of their own products…

Well, who’d a thunk it!

You can’t get ahead of the process,if you happen to be a large multi-national that favours a blue colour then each of those will cost at least a fiver.

I used to work for that company – this sounds very familiar (though a fiver sounds cheap)…

It sounds like the stuff of urban myths.

It sounds like stuxnet, which wasn’t.

@molgrips: they didn’t manage to track the source of the attack down specifically to a particular company or person but have their suspicions, nothing ever came to it. I suspect there will be a fair bit of code disassembly of future products from the suspected companies to see if they can identify any code or algorithms that might support their theories. Not sure what action if any they would take TBH, Ive done some reverse engineering type legal stuff before and it was quite frankly an expensive mistake trying to make a case.
I can’t go into too many details on a public forum obviously but these sort of targeted IP attacks are indeed very real and a very cheap way to obtain what in this case amounted to about 20 years worth of R&D and development in a very short timeframe.
The tech nature of the company that was hacked would never admit they had been compromised publicly and hence why Im sure a lot more of these kind of stories remain behind closed doors.

That’s a nice looking….errm…Merc.

errrm…Concorde

errrmm….F22-Raptor

IP theft via cyber attack is absolutely rife! If you’ve got some IP worth stealing, it’s almost certainly already been stolen.