unusual icebreakers continue.
And Ariel has been very generous and
been listening to my crazy icebreaker ideas.
So it popped into my head the other day of it doesn't have to be a full crowd.
But if you had to do karaoke, what is your go-to karaoke song?
And I can go first.
I'm a fan of rock and so I would probably do No One Knows by Queens of the Stone Age.
It's a pretty simple lyrics, nothing too crazy,
pretty memorable lyrics that I could probably pull out.
I've listened to it quite a few times.
It's on my running playlist, which helps with that.
I've heard it quite a few times.
But I feel like it's a good,
not a huge range where I have to hit like Mariah Carey levels on the top.
So or the Berryman low bottom.
So right in the middle, kind of my range.
Yeah.
Nice.
Teenage Dirtbag by Weedus.
Anything by the band Placebo that they've got, which tends to not be much.
Or it's tough.
There's so many choices.
If they've got Rock in the Suburbs by Ben Folds,
I think I got to throw that out there because it's got to be light.
You can't go too heavy with this song,
especially if you're doing karaoke in front of like with,
maybe you're in a bar rather than just with a group in a private room.
Yeah.
I mean, Teenage Dirtbag is a real, real easy one to throw out there.
Or a bunch of songs by Blink 182 as well,
because I'll just revert to feeling like a teenager again.
I was gonna say, I like that Matthew.
He said, what's your karaoke song?
And he's like, well, here's my whole set.
I'm doing a whole show.
Wait, does everyone, let me hide the sheet.
Does everyone not have a set list?
I love it.
Oh my gosh.
I think I've answered this before in a different like meeting.
And my go to is just anything that does not have a lot of singing
and just a lot of music so I can just dance awkwardly on stage.
Okay.
And there's just no singing.
Just up there.
Would you do like a lip sync battle?
Would your song change if you were doing lip syncing instead?
Yes, that would be fine.
Boy, I would love if I did a lip sync battle.
That's a totally different thing.
But I probably choose some sort of like musical theater like, you know,
singing in the rain or something, you know.
Somewhere you can like dance around.
Yes.
Make a production of it.
I'm with you Ariel.
I'm like, I am tone deaf and I know it.
You will never see me do karaoke.
I definitely Google them aside.
Funny as karaoke songs when you can't sing.
Google it.
So I now have a list.
I still wouldn't sing any of these because they're like,
want to be by the spice girls.
And I was like, I say, maybe you have an alize.
But I'm with you, Ariel, that I'm like, because you immediately think
of right like Tom Holland lip sync battle doing umbrella.
And I was like, if you could do it as like a whole choreographed
performance, then it sparks some joy in me.
But I still don't even want to lip sync.
Let's just say that enough like theater tryouts as a child that I
failed scarred me enough for life that I was like, I was a dance
minor, but I still would never want to move my lips.
So that's my answer to that.
Whereas I'm realizing I didn't even think of musical theater
numbers.
And now I have a separate list.
So I'm going with Matthew to be his agent and stage manager,
but I will not be performing.
My favorite one of my favorite lip sync battles.
And I'll end with this is the rock doing Taylor Swift's
shake it off on Jimmy Fallon.
And it's amazing because he's lip syncing.
And so it's Taylor Swift singing, but it's the rock.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
I'm a stone doing all I do is win.
I just decided if I had to do one, that was incredible.
And that's just a fun song.
So yeah.
Awesome.
Well, just like karaoke singers rely on their technology.
I'm doing.
Thank you.
So many businesses for the day today.
Yes.
All right.
So today on our tech for business podcast, we're joined by
Matthew, our GRC analyst and BC so and Andrew, our customer
strategy advisor.
Who last time we talked workstations this time we're
talking servers and applications.
I'm going to kind of throw it over to Matthew because I know
you had a lot planned for today and I'll let you just dive
right in.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So those of you who listened to the other podcast know that we
realized pretty early on how much of this topic we could
cover during the timeframe we'd set aside so that you guys
don't listen to us just talk for an hour and a half flat.
And so we really wanted to segment servers from this
because it's such a completely different conversation.
Even though you can generalize some of it and you've probably
heard it be generalized, it really shouldn't be the
conversation should be bigger from the types of servers and
how we'll dig into all of this to the way your applications
can impact that, the licensing can impact that.
There's a bigger conversation and a different conversation that
goes into how does everything that we do keep running and when
should we replace it, then how should we replace workstations?
And so with that being said, while AJ and I both have these
conversations, I think AJ had one yesterday, which is a little
more recent than my last one.
So AJ, what's the first thing for you that kind of comes up
when you're having these conversations about replacing
servers?
You know, first thing is really what is the goal of the company?
Everybody hears the cloud.
Everybody knows, you know, okay, the cloud is, for lack of
better words, somebody else's computer that's always available.
It's resources that are available to everybody instead of
having to hold them yourself.
Is that the goal of your company?
If that is, great.
Let's talk about some of the things that do that.
Coming into the applications, Microsoft has done a very good
job at taking a lot of the services that they have traditionally
hosted on their servers on a server that you manage, and
they've transitioned them over to Azure and 365.
One of the easiest examples is mail.
People don't have mail servers anymore.
It's through 365.
And so...
A quick shout out there, or you shouldn't have mail servers
unless you have a very specific need for them.
Hosting your own exchange server is a real task.
Yes, especially nowadays.
Not to let my feelings shine through too heavily.
I still remember how to configure them.
And, you know, still remember that stuff.
But, you know, it's really where are you going and trying to
find an equivalent to what is available for you.
And so Microsoft is an easy example because they have a lot
of things and most, you know, if it's Google, great.
Google has a lot of those services as well.
When you come to specific applications, it's really working
with that vendor.
And it's really identifying those.
So I would say the first step is identifying what is dependent
upon those servers.
You know, we talked about Microsoft.
There's ERP systems.
There could be a database.
They don't communicate with you aboutれて- café.
connected to.
Then what does it mean?
So, you know, Python is an easy way to do this.
And couldn't win it on cloud because they didn't know
that.
But, don't整te, don't nervi blood or cosaetate others.
Do you want to have, like a dynamite that it could take
millions of look at it from the source?
Because if it was going to pull our ends,
then it would be a couple of best ways to do this service.
If you're somebody could give you a training skill what that
model works.
You can complete a tutorial for that server or
no, just create engineers.
more. You know, I don't even want to guess because I don't.
I'm going to age myself and whatever. But hypervisors or
hosts are very common now where you have one or two pieces of
hardware, actual physical hardware, and they have virtual
machines or VMs hosted on them and you can spin up and run
multiple servers on that host, right? So you could have your
domain controller and a print server in your domain services
or whatever services you're running, you can have it on
that one. It's, you know, they're definitely different
VMs. So that's the environment that we're looking at now of can
we translate that to the cloud or replace that hardware? Most is
that cycle of four, five years. The discussion came up
because I have a customer. It was as Matthew said yesterday,
the warranty is coming up in 2024 in March. And the company
told him told our contact, hey, our goal is to be in the cloud
by January of 2025. And we said, okay, that's perfect. We'll
renew the warranty for one more year, which is easier through,
you know, HP or Dell or whatever service, we can say,
hey, let's renew this, this warranty, making sure that if
something happens to that hardware, especially engine
hardware, that we have that coverage. And then, okay, we
have a, you know, we have an end date to replace that hardware
and have that plan. It is great that that company goal is to
have it, we're going to have a lot more backing on on the
initiatives that we're proposing and from the IT
department, because that's the company's goal. It's, you know,
it can be more difficult when you need to get leadership
involved in saying, hey, this is why we should do it. You know,
and in a lot of the reasons are, you know, frankly, moving
anything to the cloud or any resource that is always available.
Something you don't have to manage. Mail is a great example,
because it's pretty much almost always moved over to the cloud
now and hosted somewhere else. It's always up. Or it has, I
don't know what Microsoft guarantees, but, you know, four
nines or five nines of availability. You know,
management is a lot easier, you can do it from anywhere, you
don't have to come into the main location to access the
server. You don't have the server costs, you don't have
everything that's related to that server costs to the
security of that server. What happens if something happens
to it to the data? So all of those translate to that
physical hardware. So it's trying to find what solution
works best. One of the big challenges that we're going to
have to have with this customer is they have a database that
we have to see if we can move it to a cloud resource. That's
not always possible. And I've had other discussions where
they have, they host one thing on, you know, their hardware,
physical hardware on site, and everything else is moved up.
We've done a pretty much full migration as much as we can to
a cloud resource, but it's not always possible, but it's looking
into it. And that's really where it's finding the solutions
using a technology partner like CIT to say, hey, what am I
running? How can this move? Talking to your vendor of, okay,
you're using QuickBooks. Okay, what does QuickBooks have? I
know QuickBooks has QuickBook Cloud. What does that look like?
What is their timeline for the migration? Because it's not
just going to be a flip of a switch, and it never is. And
again, I applaud this company for saying January of 2025.
That's a realistic goal for a lot of these things in being able
to set benchmarks of saying we want to get our new QuickBooks
in by July. So we know we can run through several months of
going, do we have everything and doing a spot check? Again, it's
a, you know, all the different systems you have, you have to
think about that on the whole scale. And if you're going to
change stuff on a full scale, that's a lot of changes. So
having a realistic timeline too is something to keep in mind.
You know, January of 2025, I think is a good goal. It's also,
you know, we're having these conversations now to make sure
that we can hit that goal. And that's still going to be, you
know, we're going to have to make sure we keep things on
track on our side and be able to help facilitate those
conversations to make sure we hit that goal. Yeah, I think I
like, I agree with everything you've said. There's so much of
this that is important for how we think about this long term,
right? This, we're talking about this at a technical level,
and that's where people think about it because we're talking
about hardware, we're talking about technical hardware, but
it's really a business conversation. And when we're
talking about hardware lifecycle, the reason we have to
think about what do you want to do in five years is because
it's not as simple as just replacing the laptop, right?
We're talking about, like you said, every piece of hardware
and software that is critical to your infrastructure
effectively. If this goes down, how bad is that for you? And
then we're talking about what can we take off your hands?
We're talking about, like you said, going to the cloud,
creating a hybrid environment. We're talking about how we can
make things more resilient in office. You spoke about
hypervisors and VMs. And without digging too deeply into
those, one of the most common questions I still get is what
differentiates a server. And the answer is you decide it is
one in the short term that really is the only thing that
makes it a server. People can argue the hardware in it.
Yes, sure, there's special server hardware that is only
designed to go in servers, but that's not because it can't go
in workstations, it's just it goes in servers because we want
the better stuff in there. And so the overarching idea here is
not so much we need to replace the server. It's we need to
think about exactly what our environment is doing. And we
need to think about how we can make it better and more
resilient and future-proof it as best as possible.
Mail servers are still the best example. And I know Andrew went
into that a couple of times, but the move to Exchange Online,
which became Microsoft 365, significantly helped a lot of
customers. It's helped many businesses, not just because
there have been multiple security issues with local
Exchange servers in recent years, but because those, all of
this now became handled by Microsoft. You didn't have to
worry about it. You didn't have to do updates or make sure
you were checking things. Back when I started as a
Service Center technician, Exchange Online security issues
and technical warnings were one of the majority of things I
looked at because if someone configured them incorrectly, all
of a sudden you're getting pinged from all over the world
because mail is something people can sell online. So when we're
talking about it, we're really building down to that asset
knowledge. And for me, as you guys have heard, if you listen
to this as someone who works heavily in the GRC space and
talks about regulations and compliance, there is so many
things we need to keep in mind for that. And I often come back
to the FFIEC who has a tiered system for how they judge
things, but one of their higher tier ones for servers states
that every server should only perform one function. And that
doesn't mean that there's only one thing running on it, but
it means it should only provide one service to the
organization, whether that is the print server, like Andrew
mentioned, whether that's a file share, whether that's your
domain name services or DNS services. What you're looking
for is a system that allows for resilience by saying if this
thing breaks, can I still keep running in some way? The
servers that Andrew described of everything's on one big
server and then that service gets shut down and you lose
everything is how it was run back when I started doing this
and it's the way some organizations still run. The
resiliency is zero. If something breaks and requires a
reboot, you lose access to everything. So we're trying to
come up with ways to break that out, come up with every
service. And for me, it still always starts with an asset
management list. Every single application you need, every
single server and piece of hardware you currently have,
break them all down, find the ones that work best, find out
how you can make them survive, find out where they should
go. Can they be moved to the cloud? Speak with those vendors
if it's a specific tool. Maybe you need a hybrid
environment where some things are in the cloud and some
things are in your office. That's okay. That still may be
incredibly cost effective for you. But what you're trying to
do is really confirm and create a system that allows you to
move forward. Sometimes moving everything to the cloud
isn't the right goal for you. And sometimes that means you'll
need a couple of hosts, maybe a bunch of VMs all doing
different things. I know this is going to sound a little
crazy to a lot of people, but I honestly think that most
organizations need at least one host and four VMs nowadays.
Any less than that. And I'm wondering what you're doubling
up on. As I said, the FFIC has these requirements and some
environments I'm looking at have six to eight hosts and we're
talking 30 or 40 servers. And when I say servers in this case,
I mean VMs running on those hosts. And the reason for that
is that if you're running a piece of software that handles
your financial data, but you're also running one that
handles your internal communication data, you shouldn't
have to lose both if one of them breaks. And so if one
breaks, that services down, okay? But everything else is
running because you've segmented them safely. And so like I
said, these conversations feel like we're having technical
conversations, but really we're having that business
conversation. Which of these things is the most critical?
How comfortable can you feel with one of them disappearing?
How long can they disappear for? We have an RTO and RPO
podcast that may be helpful in those types of conversations.
But there's so much of this is really just a the servers are
not in and of themselves important. Because no one's
physically touching them the same way a workstation is being
touched. The thing that makes them important is what you're
doing with them. And so if you aren't planning for what
they're going to do, what they're going to do in the future
and how you're going to replace those on a regular schedule,
you're basically in reactive mode hoping something doesn't
break. And that is the part that I feel a lot of people don't
want to think about and definitely don't want to talk
about that. Yeah, I agree. It's it's just like if a workstation
is doing a specific function that we talked about last time
like the shipping computer. What is your business going to
look like if you don't have that running? If you unplugged
your server, what aren't you going to be able to do?
It's always kind of funny where when we're decommissioning
things and I'm sure Matthew has done that set. At some point
you just need to pull the plug if that is turning off the
service and you see what breaks. And we call this a
scream test where we pull the plug and see who screams first
the loudest about something not working anymore. Exactly.
They're bad. We don't want to do that. But sometimes it's a
necessity. And within any transition of these kind of
services, you have that. You have that point where you just
need to you know, you just need to initiate that scream test
see what happens. But that's built in that that should be
something you know about. The extreme case would be like I
wonder what we're running in our environment that depends on
our server and going in the server closet and just pulling
plug. That would be a little extreme so I don't recommend
that. But you know, talking and knowing about the different
functions that occur within your business. That is the place
to start of going what what do people use on a daily basis on
a weekly basis on a monthly basis and is that dependent upon
something that you are responsible for as the business.
Can I make somebody else more responsible for it?
And be able to take some honestly you sleep a little easier
at night. You know, I have had many you know coming back to
our tech days, Matthew. When you mention the mail and a lot of
things can go wrong with services. I just think of
people who may not pay for a static IP right. People you have
to go in and you have to change a record to make sure mail can
flow to the organization again because their IP changed.
They didn't pay for a static one or they couldn't pay for a static
one.
That's just one example of one of the responsibilities you
don't have to worry about anymore. And knowing that your
services are backed up to at least a certain point and
there's other products that help getting it past
the 30 days that Microsoft has. But you don't have to
necessarily pay for that and continue to have that. So
really just peace of mind of moving those things as much as you can
to make it somebody else's responsibility and being able to
have it. One of the big conversations I have
is basically just about that. I have a risk management
conversations constantly. And as part of that we're talking
about transference of risk. Who can we give this risk to so
that it's not on our hands. In this case that's what you're
doing when you move to Exchange Online. I'm showing my age.
When you move to Microsoft 365 is you're saying I trust
Microsoft to do this. Microsoft is taking on that risk for me.
And there are so many things you can do that with. It's why
QuickBooks now has QuickBooks online because they are offering
to take on that risk so you can transfer it from yourself to
them. So many of these things are about doing that.
Servers are a huge upfront cost for a lot of organizations.
The amount you have to pay down just to get those servers in
office and then effectively you're thinking of them as
depreciating assets over the course of their life.
When you move to the cloud most of the time it's
subscription based. So yeah there's still that recurring cost
but it's over time. And one thing that I found that's been
interesting is it doesn't actually it's not actually that
much cheaper to move to the cloud. Sometimes it's a little
more expensive. But because it isn't an upfront cost it does
feel a little better sometimes to just say it's going to be
X amount per month versus I need to drop in some cases and
I did a server replacement not too long ago that was I think
it was $80,000 per server that we were replacing.
And we ended up doing I think five or six hosts for this
organization. And then there was all the servers on top of
that. So for them to move the cloud wasn't an option but the
cost of doing that they were they were looking at I think it
was ended up being close to a half million dollars for the
costs of that after they were done with everything. And
that's again a recurring five-year cost. Now you should
be including that in your budget. You should be ready for
that. But at the same time you're going to want to
mitigate that as much as you can. Technology is important and
you want to spend as much as you have to. But the five-year
cycle gives you time to confirm that's what you have to
spend. And not to harp on about it but again asset
management. You can't confirm that's what you need to
spend if you don't know what you have. Please do asset
management.
Nice. This is a big conversation. I'm glad we split it up
into multiple podcasts today. I want to make sure that
we're covering everything you want to cover. But so what
I've heard from our workstations conversation and our
server conversation it's really important to know what
you have and then where you want to go. And my question is
besides budget because that's always a hurdle. What is the
biggest hurdle that businesses are kind of bumping up to
when they're talking about their server life cycle and
kind of replacement. And then how would you approach that?
I'm going to harp on about it again. It's not knowing what
they have. It's not knowing exactly what they're doing.
They don't. Part of that is maybe they're trusting
someone internally to do it all. But again this is a
business conversation and you need to be aware as
business leaders of exactly what's going on in your
system. If you don't understand part of it or if it just
is kind of one of those things that makes you glaze over
which I fully understand. There are people who fully
glaze over as soon as I start talking I can see it
happen. But it's really about you need to be able to make
an informed decision and if you trust someone else to
make that decision for you that person needs to be in
these discussions. They need to be fully made aware of
what's going on. Because you can't fix what's the
saying. You can't. I've forgotten the saying you
can't fix what you don't understand is not right.
Paraphrasing. Yeah. You can't do this correctly and
save money in a correct and actually financially
responsible way. If you don't know what you're actually
saving money on. And a lot of times when I see people
who still have those all in one service and sadly I
still do see them pretty regularly. It's because
someone said I know a way to do all of this in one for
a small amount of money. Cool. You're going to
experience significant downtime. No question about it.
It's going to happen and I can probably guarantee as we
get closer to that three or four year mark you're
going to experience that downtime once a month. If
not more often than that. So know what you have and
where you're putting it. And that for me is the
the number one biggest hurdle. What about you Andrew.
I would say I would say that's number one. Number two
is vendor availability of does your vendor currently
have an option that you can move to cloud resources.
Not everyone does. And knowing what that is and if
you need to transition from that onsite to the
cloud or a full different system that needs to be
looked at as well. Because if a piece of hardware or
excuse me a piece of software isn't meeting your needs
you know it's you need to assess if it's really the
right program for you. If that's your goal to move to
the cloud and the only thing is keeping you is
you know this this program that does a certain function
most of the time there's another program that can
that can help you with that. And it's again working with
that vendor understanding that and really saying you
know sometimes it's been pushed like I've had a push
vendors of going what options do you have. Like what do
you have anything available or else you know maybe we're
going to have to look somewhere else and that's you
know that that's that's a hard hard hard thing to
swallow sometimes. Because we you know it's the it's a
sunk cost fallacy right. We've spent you know 10 years
and X amount of dollars on training and have so much
invested in it but you know that that's a past
cost. What is going to be your future cost because of
because of this lack of you know cloud transition
or lack of supportability if they're like oh we have to
you know we shut down and or we got bought and we don't
support it anymore. So again it starts with that asset
management of knowing what you have and then knowing what
the options are for each of those.
Thanks. Well we're running low on time so it might be
something that we come back to in the future. I think
these are really important conversations but I just
wanted to thank Matthew and Andrew for joining us
today. Thank you so much. If you enjoyed this podcast
please like subscribe. It's how we know that you're
interested in these topics or if you have a topic you'd
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