What makes an effective IT Management Team?

IT Managers and Decision Makers, this was written for you.

IT Departments come in all different shapes and sizes. There are however some key elements I would recommend for effective IT management. It’s important to certainly have strategy.

Here is my list:

Asset Management and Risk Assessment

Time and time again you will need to know what your on hand IT Assets are and associated Risks to those assets. This is important and empowering knowledge to have to make recommendations or make decisions that can help add money back into budget. Its always good to know how much time is left on your IT assets and when to retire them as well as getting the most you can in return for the sale of used equipment. Understanding Risk is important so as to ensure your assets will be best protected and your interests are best met. So there are different formulas for determining this, what’s important is that you have established due diligence toward this area to protect your business from significant liabilities.

Change Control

With technology advancing every moment, it is very important to limit risk when implementing changes to your infrastructure and technology. It’s always good to have management on the same page when you are driving change. Also communication to employees is key to increasing change awareness. There are many aspects of change control, what is most important with regards to change is planning and communication. If you fail to plan you are planning to fail. And failure to communicate is a structural breakdown which will only drive distraction, confusion, and inefficiency.

Active measures to reduce costs by going Green

Being Green is a buzz phrase we have been hearing a lot about. What does it really mean to be Green? In my view it means just being more efficient. Does that mean working your employees to the bone with multi-tasking? No, absolutely not. You have the potential with building a Green working environment to motivate your employees without the pay raises per-se, ie. a dollar saved is a dollar earned. With technology today this is very much possible from the front line all the way back up to the top. There are a lot of ways to be Green and we certainly can help you do that, with the problems in today’s economy it is essential to save money in order to stay in business while maintaining your competitive edge.

Release Readiness

Release Readiness is very important in the Change Control and Project Management aspects. With there being a lot of change in technology its important to be ready to effectively implement those changes. They can be hardware or software. Its important to be proactive and provide due diligence in technology management, as the very efficiency you seek through it will simply go backward with immature or incorrect technology implementations.

IT Security

As more and more companies go virtual, and data is their value. It is important then that assets, availability, reliability, and performance all be examines and protected. Threats can come from many different directions. It is important to understand the threats and risks and take action to protect against them. So there are many different types of measures to be taken when building a Security Baseline. I listed this step later on because obtaining a full understanding of your IT Assets is key along with doing a Risk Assessment. These two elements will help management understand what security measures need to be taken. You are only as strong as your weakest link, also keep in mind your business is as valuable to you as your desire to stay in business. There is a great deal of cyberfraud and startups that literally steal from their competitors. If you value staying in business you simply cannot ignore IT Security and pure and proper implementation practices. Saving money in a foolish manner can put you more at risk. But doing things smarter will save you money. As long as there are cyber criminals there will always be a need for cyber security.

Effective Communications

Each of these are important as they develop well rounded focus as we tackle the most complicated and diverse IT issues. It’s important to run a tight ship that collectively bears a scalable setup, and adaptable setup. In my personal view innovative managers and decision makers can utilize effectively their abilities to keep their employees motivated while adding to bottom dollar.

Let me know how you do, with giving your focus to these principles.

Using Ubuntu Server as a Desktop and Cost Savings

Cost Savings and Technology advantages of Ubuntu Server

Most of you are familiar with GPL/GNU Open Source Software. I wanted to recommend a highly stable and cheap to free open source server. Ubuntu meaning ethic or humanist philosophy focusing on people’s allegiances and relations with each other. The meaning behind the them is something quite intrinsic to the creation of the technology. In a humanity sense open source software allows individuals, groups, or entire communities to contribute in some way to the development of the software. The overall output of the product is of higher quality, testing, and also more in line with what the user wants.

Since Ubuntu open source you have the option to change it. So yes this is Linux. I wanted to state however that Ubuntu is the most supported version of Linux out there, and that you can do anything with it as you would a Windows Server. You have have the option to turn it into a desktop with a simple command line entry such as this:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

The wonderful thing about open source is you feel or get empowered through the transparency of what you observe. Also how you can customize and change things to better suit the needs of your IT department or Organization. So now on to the advantages. Ubuntu is a light weight server out of the box, or you can make it more robust. It can easily be converted into any type of back end server ie: File, Web, Email, Media, Authentication, Proxy, Code Repository, Load Balancing. Just about anything you want it can be turned into that. So let me point you to the documentation for reference so you will be able to observe and learn or consider the cost savings you can benefit from.

Ubuntu Home Page

At HPD Global – VIT Cloud Services we run Ubuntu and several other open source solutions on top of traditional Microsoft Windows Server. We feel this brings greater value to our customers as they have the option to tailor the technologies we offer to better suit their needs. Contact us today for more IT Profitability.

Multiple Desktops in Windows

( Linux / *nix ) feel in Windows

Making Windows feel like an open source environment

There’s a cool app that helps you multi-task in an organized and efficient way in windows.  If you have used Freebsd, Suse, Slackware, DSL, Fedora, RHEL, etc.  They all have a few things different that Windows does not have, that is that they allow you to have multiple desktops.  Now that is a good idea that allows efficient work to be done in each desktop.  It helps to be able to track what you are triaging or working on.  Here is a program that gives windows that functionality as well:
https://www.hpdit.com/sysinternals/Desktops.exe
Pretty cool…

Performance tuning the Windows System Drive

From time to time the old issue of alert or log spamming will come up.  With it the usual performance degradation and CPU throttling issues as well.  During these times, it is best to find the large temp or log files and remove them from your Windows System Drive, for return to performance stability (RTPS).  This can be done through Windows Search.
 
Press Windows Key then press S
 
If you have downloaded Windows Search you will need to on the left side select Search Companion.
 
Click all files and folders
 
From there then:
Click What size is it? Double arrows to expand
 
Then you can put in the size of the files.  You can search for different file types as well such as (*.tmp, *.tpm, *.chk, *.log)
 
Select all (ctrl+a) then shift+del.
 
Also you can modify system paging to use one file rather than many when creating the paging file.  This will help improve drive performance as well as minimize on orphaned files.  That can be done in System Properties – Advanced – Under performance click settings – than advanced tab – click change – set the minimum and maximum to 1.5 times the physical memory – click set – reboot for changes.
 
This should help you remove unnecessary files while optimizing system performance.

Windows Server 2003-2008 How to tell if a Server is a VM