After self hosting several services for a few users, with SSO, backups, hardware issues etc, I really appreciate how good the IT was in my old company. Everything was connected, smooth, slick and you could tell it was secure. I had very few issues and when I did, they were quickly solved. Doing this all at scale for thousands of employees spread across the world, it is a wonderful sight to see.
Now at my current company, it’s at the opposite end of the scale where I almost believe that I could do a better job by myself! They’ve trying to do everything you would expect but somehow doing it wrong. They are so heavy on security I have a Citrix environment that takes me 3 logins to get to, fails constantly and means I can’t work without internet (like on a long train journey for work purposes recently), and on the other hand they’ve only just turned off admin rights for users so we could’ve installed anything we wanted!!! All our attachments (incoming and outgoing) are saved to a secure website (like OneDrive) and replaced with a link. It doesn’t save the file names on the email so it’s really tricky to find old emails if it’s a document you’re looking for. I could go on but just venting at this point as it’s so frustrating!!!
Thank you to the good IT people out there. Your roles are so important but not appreciated enough!
I’ve been in IT for a couple decades at this point. I stopped doing almost any swlf-hosted stuff years ago as I just don’t have the time or energy to deal with things. There’s a lot to keep up on with technologies, security, etc. not to mention all the constants of keeping things up-to-date, back-ups, troubleshooting issues, and more
True words. The sustained effort to keep something in decent shape over years is not to be underestimated. Now when life changes and one is not able or willing anymore to invest that amount of time, ill-timed issues can become quite the burden. At one point I decided to cut down on that by doing a better founded setup, that does backup with easy rollback automatically, and updates semi-automatically. I rely on my server(s), and all from having this idea to having it decently implemented took me a number of months. Just because time for such activities is limited, and getting a complex and intertwined system like this reliably and fault tolerant automated and monitored is simply something else than spinning up a one off service