One thing is certain technology will keep advancing as long as the demand is there for faster, safer and just more of everything delivered yesterday. What this really means is can we not just keep up, but be ahead of the competition? A little secret that the new crop of IT professionals might not be party to is, a lot of what we use today was around in the ‘old’ days of IT and programming. So what goes around, comes around and is based on the cyclical pattern. What has changed is the repurposing of many of the core principles from back in the day. How does it look and behave in a 2.0 or 3.0 or n.0 version of its original self? Armed with this sage insight the seasoned IT leader will pull out some of the old tricks that are still valid today.
What are we talking about exactly? Let’s start with that old stalwart infosec. Good physical security practices lead to even better information security. This still rings true but the difference today is that instead of being very guarded about who looks after hardware, there are lateral ways to lockup. Traditionally the locked up approach has meant data center access is limited to a small number of people and automated logs show who comes and goes, but now alternatives such as full cloud exist, and offsite providers who can share the load of not having your own data center.
Infosec’s best friend the security threat is also still relevant and once upon a time the answer again was lockdown. Desktops were locked down and security threats were stopped in their tracks by timing out CICS sessions. After PCs and the advent of the internet guarding with increasingly intricate firewalls became essential. Inventory of threats might have been the old way but that still holds water now and everyone should be doing this regardless. Now spending more time on weatherproofing the assets is wise as is continuing to guard the perimeter. The cautionary tale of lockdown has always to be not to be so stringent it prevents creativity and innovation in the workforce, that is counterproductive. Lock down might be a physical reality but it can be a metaphor for thinking too, stifling thought is never good.
Let’s talk about technology and the commitment it takes to get the right thing. Most people take the safe traditional route and buy from people they feel secure with often that is the larger well known vendors, again this is the old school way but the modern take on this and also deemed riskier, is open source. Don’t tell anyone it too has been around since the 70s especially if we consider EMACS. The point here is however that the newer iterations of the open source concept is as much about reliability as anything else. Businesses tend not to quibble too much about where the technology comes from as long as it is solid. These days the big vendors are even supplying open source Java from Oracle is a good example.
So what else is out there that still fits? Sometimes if it isn’t broken don’t fix it applies and the old style mantras have not changed one iota for today’s IT vernacular. Take code changes in production environments for example. Then and now there is no easy way to place new code into the production environment without causing disruptions if you are lucky and breakages if you are not. The process is still the same and tedious as it might be, there are no short cuts. Get slap dash here and it will break production and now with the cloud providers acting as your third party it is even more crucial to rein change control in under a formal process. Imagine them putting their code into your production environment and hoping for the best, sadly this is something every IT team has experienced and wrung their hands at.
While I am on the subject of the production environment where does testing stand these days? The basic rule used to be to maintain three environments dev, test and prod and that meant three of everything too including three times the maintenance. Now testing can be moved to the cloud especially if you maintain your own data center, all great news because this can be scaled up or down depending on business need. The usual pitfalls are security and date privacy issues.
So we have established that old concepts provide the backbone of IT and they simple become streamlined and more attractive to the purpose in accordance to the specific need. This in many ways has had a knock on effect on people too. You just have to look at what IT leaders have to do when it comes to managing the relationship with the Csuite. It used to be this was a huge part of the job, though this is still true it coexists with managing the relationship with the rest of the business too. So that remit has been widened to everyone being mindful of each other and everything IT. IT has to do an extra PR job on its reputation. It can’t just please the Csuite as interactions and collaborations are so much less siloed than they used to be. It is about building trust in IT all round.