Do things go bump in the night in your data center? Did you wake up this morning and see a threatening dark spot in your cloud? You may not be alone. As Halloween approaches this year, The Enterprisers Project asked six IT executives to share something scary they've experienced or are encountering in IT. Here's what they shared:
FIGHT OR FLEE?
"Twas the night before quarter close, and all was well. The servers were humming and the cloud was swell. Customers and business partners alike smiled as you walked by.
But hark, in the distance, you spy your boss and the hair sticks up on the back of your neck. He is talking with the chairman of the board. He is talking about technology. He knows nothing about technology. He is promising utterly impossible functions and delivery dates and budgets. Fight or flee. Fight or flee. Adrenaline pumps through your body. Fight or flee. He beckons you to join them. You hesitate knowing he knows absolutely nothing about IT. He is the jabberwocky. He is invincible in his ignorance. Fight or flee?”
– Curt Carver, vice president and CIO, The University of Alabama at Birmingham
UH-OH, DID I JUST ERASE THAT?
“Early in my IT career I was copying a database from one server to another, but realized that my Secure Copy command syntax was incorrect and I was actually copying the file to the server and the same directory I was copying it from. I didn’t have a backup, and knowing that many UNIX systems zero out the file before writing to it I was absolutely panicked! I cancelled the copy and did an ‘ls –l’ and saw that the file was the same size as before. Still in a panic and thinking that I had just lost an entire production database I quickly started the application and verified that it was ok. I learned at that moment to never move or copy a file without having a backup. It was a significant turning point in my career and definitely the most terrifying!”
– Randy Franklin, vice president and CIO, Premier, Inc.
FACING THE FEAR OF CHANGE
“The role of the CIO changes weekly, which is the scary part. You need to ask yourself constantly: How do I solve business problems with technology? How do I align an IT organization? How do I generate revenue, just like a salesperson? I’d argue that the change isn’t faster, it’s just bigger. It’s from internal to mobile. It’s not virtualization, it’s cloud. It’s all much more dramatic now.”
– Stuart Kippelman, Senior Vice President and CIO, Covanta
THE SCARY SPEED OF THE CONSUMER
“Innovation happens at a faster clip in the open source world than it does with any of the big monolithic organizations. And I think CIOs have to take advantage of that. Years ago you didn’t have to worry about it as much – open source was perceived as scary – but today you’re being asked as a CIO to move at the pace of consumerized needs. And that’s a lot harder to do.”
– Jay Ferro, CIO, American Cancer Society
SHAKING OFF THE IoT CREEPS
“The consumer IoT landscape creates some scary gaps in privacy and security that rapidly need to be worked through. Today there are disclosure laws around PII, for example, but what happens if hackers break into your IoT provider and get all of your home security footage? Scary and potentially awkward, and companies are making it easier and easier to connect your home to the Internet every day.”
– Sven Gerjets, Chief Technology Officer, Pearson
TAMING THE BIG DATA BEAST
“You’ve got to look at your data challenges in two main buckets. There’s the technology and then there’s the people. The technology, I think, is actually very simple to solve for, relative to the people. And so I don’t think big data is this big scary beast if you’re not trying to solve it with technologies from a decade ago. As you are solving your big data challenges with the right tools, then the technology side of the equation is decently straightforward.”
