@MKM8DY said:
We explain to the prospect that most [read all] of our competitors will offer them a free assessment. In order to do it for free, they will likely send their least talented IT person to do the work.
I can confirm that this is the case! I let someone come in and do one once, never again. It was a disaster.
I don't believe in AOD. I pursued a career in IT partly because it paid well and partly through luck. I'm happy because I have decent income, decent job security, a nice office and nice colleagues. But I would probably have been just as happy if I'd followed alternative careers as an economist or an accountant.
I'm surprised the letter 'c' hasn't been used more to represent "The Cloud". The letter 'e' was everywhere ten years ago. Oracle used the letter 'g' for grid for a while when they were marketing "Grid Computing" as the new, new thing, do they still do that?
Ultimately, these things are dreamt up by marketing types and mean absolutely nothing.
It'll become something of a faux pas when people accidentally click like instead of dislike when their friend's cat dies.
No, I think the principal is ok. If they can produce a decent report giving recommendations - and they can convince me that those recommendations are good - then I might be happy to employ them to do the work. Yes, it's a sales pitch, but it could be a sales pitch with real meaning behind it.
The principal is ok, but I suspect the execution is normally poor (ie sending low quality IT people to do the assessment).
My main issue is that good IT people are always too busy doing paid work for their existing clients to do free stuff. Ergo, if you're willing to work for free you can't be very good.
I have the same issue with good plumbers. I had to persuade a plumber to do some work for me recently, rather than the other way round. He is so good he gets to pick and choose his clients.
@Dashrender said:
I'll bow out of this conversation until the OP returns.
I suspect he may run away screaming and never return 
So it is a backup, just a limited backup. I'm cool with that.
I didn't like Lastpass when I tried it, and much prefer Keepass (apart from the lack of non-third party iOS app). But if Lastpass gets integrated into our LMI account then it could be an advantage. So I see this as potentially a positive move for us.
@JaredBusch said:
Read what I wrote.
Don't patronise me. 3 days ago you said you'd never do them, now you say you are doing them. The fact that it's short term, or it's regionally targeted, or you're treating it as a marketing expense is irrelevant. Do you think other firms offering assessments don't treat them exactly the same?
You're either doing them or you're not.
@scottalanmiller said:
What I mean is, what I've at least found personally, is that the pursuit of career success, in any form, tends to result in the same set of things: more money, better work environment, less time tied to the office, better food at work, more freedom, more creativity, more flexibility, more benefits, better lifestyle, etc.
I think most of those things come with seniority. I'm happy being a big fish in a small pond because it gives me near complete freedom to work as I please. If I moved to a bigger company, I'd likely earn more money but have less freedom.
@scottalanmiller said:
But even at 500, why would you spend money on AD integrated content filtering for an average business? What's the financial (business) benefit? That's pretty small to be doing that stuff.
What's expensive about it? Webroot web filtering includes AD integration in it's basic offering, as does GFI's MailMax spam filtering. Do you mean the expense of securing your AD after exposing it to the internet?
@MattSpeller said:
And thus my core issue with cloud anything - if you don't own it, you don't control it & whoever does holds the whip hand.
Yes. A crucial factor in adopting cloud services is trust. That's why big brands end up as a monopoly, because new players don't have that trust. It's why companies shouldn't screw their customers and should always honour their commitments.
Even though I don't use O365 personal (I have a business account), I no longer trust Microsoft. If they can screw some of their customers like this, when are they going to start screwing me? (I also have 40gb of free storage with my Hotmail account, which I think they're going to cut?)
I've always been a Microsoft fanboy, and have stuck with them through thick and thin. But I think I'm done with them now. I'm going to go all in with Google.
It's simple - cloud providers can't abuse their users trust and expect to remain players.
@Breffni-Potter said:
@Carnival-Boy said in Amazon S3 Outage shows the danger of doing things cheaply.:
I disagree with the article. One of the main reasons I would move to a cloud service is to outsource my redundancy and resilience.
But you don't buy any of that from Amazon. This is the biggest misconception about cloud computing.
Clearly I have a misconception. I'm not an Amazon customer, but looking at their website, they say things like:
Designed for 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.
Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.
Amazon S3 redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility.
All of this seems to me that they are selling resilience. If I read "designed for 99.99%" and then only got 90% availability, would it be fair for Amazon to say "yeah, but that's your fault, we never sold you resilience?" I don't think so.
If the argument we're having is "you're not paying for 100% availability" then I agree with you. If your argument is "you're not paying for resilience" then I struggle to agree with you.
No, it was a guy that used to work for our MSP who was really in to security, and I got told one day he quit the MSP and got a job for a security firm in the City. Dunno more than that.
I have an HP Proliant DL180 G6 server with 4 x 1TB midline drives, giving me 2TB usable storage. Windows 2008 is installed on it (bare metal) and it only runs Veeam. It backups our VMs over the normal network once a night, I haven't bothered separating out the traffic.
I do one full backup once a week and incrementals thereafter. The full backup is then copied on to 2TB external drives, which I rotate. I keep the latest backed up external drive at home. Incrementals are backed up to the cloud. The full backup file is about 1TB, and the incrementals are about 9GB.
So in a complete disaster, where everything has gone including the Veeam server, I can restore the weekly backup using the external drive and then restore the incrementals from the cloud. So I can always recover to the previous night.
I wouldn't have a strong issue with running Veeam as a VM, but it adds an extra layer of hassle if it craps out and I don't need that.
I installed a separate USB 3.0 card in the server, which makes backing up to an external drive pretty quick. It takes about 4 hours to do 1TB.
@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Fake? I don't think there was anything fake about it, was there?
Other than that they kept promoting "unlimited" but kept having limits and never ended up rolling out the "unlimited" as it was. Some of us were still on the waiting list to get it by the time that it went away. Some people got it, but I have no idea what percentage. It was all new users signing up to take advantage of the unlimited marketing, not the people who had tried it originally. Maybe I'm one of the few, but maybe that was the norm, too.
Did you fill what space you had? Apparently, when you fill the space you get allocated another 10TB. When you fill that you get another 10TB, and so and so until infinity. So I suspect you did actually have unlimited storage.
@hobbit666 said in Salary, Are You At Your Areas Median:
My current job I've just had a rise and would say it's still under what I would get for a similar role in say London, but cost of living is cheaper here so even's out I guess.
Not even close when you take into account housing costs. The average cost of a house in London is, what, three times that of Wales? There's no way London salaries compensate. I nearly moved to London in 1999 and looked round flats in the centre that I could afford to buy. Regrettably, perhaps, I chose to move north. I couldn't afford anything now. I could commute to London from my current home, but the transport costs would barely cover the extra salary, never mind the extra time I'd have to spend sitting on the train.
The trouble is, there's a lot more jobs in London than Wales!
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
I'm a bit of an anomaly.
OK, fine. I'll rest my case. But please change your OP to "You must have someone doing the hiring that is dramatically more skills and experienced than the person you are hiring. Unless you're hiring Scott Alan Miller"
Unless its pizza, offering unlimited anything is just dumbass. What doesn't make sense is why someone storing 75TB of data on their Office 365 accounts means Microsoft thinks it's ok to reduce my free space on Hotmail from 40GB to 5GB. Especially as that extra storage was earned by me as a so-called loyalty bonus.
By all means remove offers from new users signing up, but why screw your existing, loyal customers? I've been with Hotmail for about 20 years.
