I just took my IT team out rock climbing for lunch last Friday. It was great. It was team building. Everyone gets excited about racing up the wall. We have a ping pong table at work, and at night they constantly play and have matches. It develops relationships across teams. Before you"d have a development team and a site operations group that sits by itself at lunch. Now they"re spending more time with each other. I try to do more team building. My thought is that people don"t want to leave their friends.
What"s the greatest technology challenge these days? Security never goes away as an issue. Lately we"re spending more time on network- and security-related issues. We"ve spent so much time securing our networks and building them up and monitoring them, but I"m always concerned that security issues can occur within the organization and we may not have spent as much time as we should have on it.
Has disaster recovery become a key issue? We"ve got some very good disaster recovery plans. It"s never fast enough. I know we"re going to get there. Even when you"ve gotten to the point when you"ve got disaster recovery that works, if you"re not consistent in your testing, the environment is always changing. Then when you really need it, you"re going to say, "Shoot, we changed that but didn"t change our high-end systems." We need to test it frequently enough so that we know it will work when we need it. I don"t feel 100 percent there yet. We"re headed down that path, but it"s all process and procedures. When things change, you have to update the documentation in every task.
If you"re not testing it in a way that validates it, I"m not sure you have a 100 percent reliable solution.
What things in disaster planning are most key: data redundancy, long-distance replication? It"s convincing the executive management to properly invest to do [disaster recover]. It"s really an insurance policy. It"s about how much you want to pay for insurance if that happens. We"re starting to see more natural disasters, so it"s becoming an easier project to get proper funding [for]. As for the technology piece of it, for us it"s the replication of data. Making sure we"ve got all the data we need in the right location.
If you need more servers, worst case, you go to your vendor and ask for another hundred. Either you sell them to me or I go somewhere else. Physical infrastructure is relatively easy. The data is not. I personally would have a real concern -- and I"m not loading data from tapes -- but if I was, I remember when I worked for IBM I used to participate in [disaster-recovery] drills where we"d load data off tapes. Every time we tested, there was always some tape that got left behind or had an I/O error.