What cloud services should I know about?

June 15, 2012 7:05 AM

What are other cloud services I should consider as an IT admin for a small organization? Should I worry about knocking myself out of a job?

I work in an organization of around 350 employees, spread across 5 or 6 locations, some connected by fiber, others with VPN connections. As I am the only IT person for the organization I am very big on the KISS principle and not re-inventing the wheel.

While I'd love to spend time coding new projects, I think it's easier a lot of the time to just pay the bucks and use something out there already. For instance, our organization rents out 3 very big pieces of unique, heavy equipment to the public. It's all kept track of by hand now (paper forms!), and that has worked fine in the past but the equipment is getting rented more often and I am pushing to use something like appointment-plus to simplify reserving the equipment and keeping track of it.

We also use 37signals Backpack for internal document sharing across the remote locations though we have a Windows based central file server in the main offices. (By the way, I'm looking at an alternative to this if anyone has suggestions...Backpack was ok at first but it turns out to be very inflexible in a lot of ways..any ideas??)

Side thread:...I'm concerned as I keep trying to make things simple for users and myself I'm going to end up without a job because I'm making things too easy for everyone!..?

What other cloud services are there I could be using now that still need an IT person to manage?

posted by bellastarr to computers & internet (7 answers total)

>>Should I worry about knocking myself out of a job?
No. Hell no. Automating stuff, moving it to the cloud, making dull, routine and mindless work frees you up to do better stuff. You'll find more interesting things to work on if you're not stuck doing the crap work that could be done easier/better/faster elsewhere.
posted by Blake at 7:12 AM on June 15, 2012 [4 favorites]

Should I worry about knocking myself out of a job?

Only if you have too much trust placed in the Cloud. Make sure that you're always able to quickly and seamlessly move a service from one Cloud provider to another and have contingency plans in place for when the Cloud is unavailable (the Internet's out!), hostile (the company won't give us access to our data unless we renegotiate our contract!), or negligent (their off-site backups were accidentally loaded into a garbage truck!).
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:24 AM on June 15, 2012 [1 favorite]

Oh, god... the cloud. This depends entirely on what you mean by "the cloud." Remote hosted applications( SaaS), remote hosted servers running your own applications (IaaS), or parts of your application better handled by outside experts (PaaS) - or all of the above! Selecting and migrating your operation to the right services is a pretty significant job in and of itself, and you must always be aware of changes in the industry to make sure your infrastructure is up to date... if your SaaS vendor is going down like a wounded turkey, you need to know before it goes splat.

Lots of juggling to make it all work, and it's real work. Plus, as the IT guy, you may no longer be applying patches or swapping out hard drives, but now you have time to audit security and compliance to IT standards, monitor availability and performance, upgrade the LAN to a modern wireless infrastructure, deal with BYOD hassles and a zillion other incredibly productive and intellectually rewarding things you weren't doing because you were scraping your knuckles on the server rack.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:50 AM on June 15, 2012 [3 favorites]

I am not an IT person, but I was the manager of about 200 people and I can tell you that I would value an employee that is able to find ways to keep it simple for the other 349 employees. If nothing else, there is always the need for that one guy to complain to regardless of the merits of the complaint.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 8:29 AM on June 15, 2012 [2 favorites]

Ah yes, "the cloud", a phrase that means everything....and nothing. It's an incredible marketing push that can mean anything to anyone. There are people who think that because their Windows SBS allows them to connect from home that they have a "cloud solution"; there are software vendors who refer to aspects of their product as "the cloud", even though they have nothing to do with it.

My diatribe is because I think this is the most over-used, over-hyped, over-blown phrase of the last ten years and it's not really helping people to make the best decisions.

First of all - you should be fine with your job security because your job as chief architect should be to devise, deploy and then maintain and support the most robust, secure and functional tools for your workforce. Unfortunately the proliferation of "cloud" products and services has really muddled the waters for a lot of people who think that the *only* way to go is a cloud environment.

Your first responsibility should be to determine what the best solution for your office is. If simplicity is key, especially if it's just you and 300 users, then you will probably want to consolidate how everything from email to file storage, security, etc. is managed. I tend to say this to a lot of people who think I'm pushing a product line - but Microsoft Windows Server products for enterprise really have become very good. I'm a big fan of standardizing on one "platform technology" that everything is can grow from in lieu of using different services from disparate providers for different services. As an example, an architecture I would recommend for remote offices and users would be a Windows Terminal Server environment. In this case you spin up one Windows 2008R2 domain controller, one Windows 2008R2 file server, one Windows 2008R2 Terminal Server and have your remote offices all connect in to the main office and work through terminal services (scaled appropriately). You eliminate VPNs, you eliminate redundancies, you eliminate excess complexity, centralize security, AV, backups, data storage, etc. If you want this to be cloud based, so be it - host it all in a data center. Or, you can host it all locally on one or two beefy servers, all virtualized. Voila - a private cloud.

There are obviously many different permutations on the model above, but it gives you a standardized platform for the whole organization and reduces your support headaches immensely assuming it is architected and setup by professionals. There are tons of vendors out there who will architect and deploy this for you on contract and then if you want, just provide you backend support as you need it so you can focus on other things.

Simplicity and commonality should be key. Me personally, I'm a Microsoft Server guy because from a management and support standpoint it's pretty ubiquitous and cost effective, so I'm recommending what I know to work very well. Your mileage may vary.
posted by tgrundke at 11:22 AM on June 15, 2012

I'm a big fan of standardizing on one "platform technology"

Umm, from what I'm seeing, standardized platforms are going away. The web is the standard platform, like it or don't.

Everyone's moving to or has already moved to web-based client apps, and BYOD is getting to be gigantic. Users will expect to do their work using their device on your data - you can try to fight this, but the user-revolt will likely come from Mahogany Row, where the bigwigs all love them some iPads. The time and money and political clout spent on standardizing and locking down a single platform is better spent on modernizing security infrastructure - next generation VPNs, Firewalls and DLP, and making sure the server infrastructure is rock solid and cost effective, whether hosted in-house or "in the cloud."
posted by Slap*Happy at 11:47 AM on June 15, 2012

+1 on the notion that, if you do it right, your job doesn't go away but you free up time to do more strategic projects as part of your job. One assumption here is that, as Slap*Happy says, the new job -- worrying about compliance, availability, BCDR, user experience, vendor management, and the like -- takes up less time than the old cable monkey job.

As far a remote office collaboration/sharing service, I've heard good things about Box for small companies.

Disclaimer: work for VMware, cloud believer
posted by troyer at 6:31 PM on June 15, 2012