Take Control and change your habits

We are creatures of habits. We get comfortable in our comfort zones and sooner or later become complacent. However, the world is fast changing and pretty soon, we could be out of the job.

The old paradigm - "If it ain't broke, don't break it" probably holds little water nowadays because in the Information Infrastructure landscape, those days are long gone. We have seen the days of adding new storage capacity, or buy when it is full, things of the past.

The global meltdown in the past 2 years have made the CIOs and the management to rethink how they store their information. In our frequent exercises to assess file systems and networks, we have seen and heard about many stories about employees using their corporate NAS to store their vacation photos, movies, torrent files and much, much more. So far, the best one we have heard was one particular employee at the government office was practically using their corporate storage to sell torrent downloaded movies on the Internet, using the office's broadband network. Well, I actually think this employee was one smart dude ... until he got caught!

Presently, there are many, many organizations that do not spend the time (and money)to know what's going on in their network and what's stored in their expensive storage. Even if they did, the efforts are usually quite feeble because it is difficult to get cold hard facts of what's happening.

We, at Real Data Matrix, believe that as part of the IT operations, you must be able "see" what's going on. Here's a simple formula:

VISIBILITY = CONTROL

And by controlling means lesser wastage, more productivity and controlling the costs. CIOs and IT operations would be glad to get more from their investments that obviously justifies their existence.

So one of the best things CIOs should invest in is to do a network assessment. Find out which computers are the heavy network traffic generators, what sort of protocols are communicating on the your network and see if your current network investment justifies the investment. See if it can take the load of all the applications running in the network.

Another good investment is to do a file system assessment and profiling service. Find out what types of files are stored in the storage; how long have the files been residing in the primary storage and discover the percentage of duplicated files.

You would be surprised that these 2 simple investments could help you save a lot of money and maximize your returns on investment. The visibility from these assessment reports could tell you how your IT resources are being used; when these resources would run out and also help you design a better information infrastructure eco-system.

So, the moral of this story is "Take control of your Information Infrastructure!"