Lost Data in the Cloud: How Sad

The headlines are ablaze because somebody over at the company, Danger, upgraded a storage array without making a backup, and voila – bye bye T-Mobile contact data.  (See the article on The Washington Post here)  Nik Cubrilovic’s point in his article is that data has a natural lifecycle, and you should be able to survive [...]

Chapter 3: Activate Me

A cornerstone of security for most computer systems is the user account.  The user account is a way of defining what each human being on the system can do with (or to) the system.  Universally, systems are designed with a user hierarchy in mind: users at the bottom rungs of polite computer society may be [...]

Chapter 2: Stop Screwing With Me

Writes an angry user one Sunday morning at 7:48 a.m.:
“I don’t who know who’s doing the back up this morning, but who ever it was cut me off in the middle of my writing a complicated and lengthy assessment on a patient that is now lost.  I know you can tell when we’re using the [...]

Lessons From IT Management: Introduction

For the last ten years, I worked for a health center that serves several underserved populations: the gay and lesbian community, HIV positive patients, and patients that lack sufficient health care.  Over that time, we have built a complex and extensive information system to help support the mission of the organization.
This series is about how [...]

Lessons from IT Mgmt Chapter 1: Information Insecurity

To improve the security of our network, we decided to close port 3389 and no longer publish a Windows terminal server to the internet.  In order to continue to support remote access to our network, we implemented a secure socket layer (SSL) virtual private network (VPN) device that allows users outside of the corporate network [...]

You Aren’t Working Hard Enough

Lessons from IT Management: Prologue
Published in serial fashion, the blog posts in the Technology | Management section of this blog are some thoughts on managing an IT department from an insider’s perspective.
This series is about where the rubber meets the road when it comes to implementing technology for a lowest common denominator of sorts: office [...]