Re: On occasion
> Some IT services companies aren't any better
But you can only say that if you know the whole story.
I work for what some future person might call "one of those It services company that's no better" - but with some customers you just can't do things right. They won't pay you for your time to do stuff (especially at out of hours rates), they won't permit the downtime to do it, you send emails to the director responsible pointing out that they've had no backup for months, that servers need patching, etc, etc, etc and it still has no effect.
With some customers you get used to adding a footnote to all emails along the lines of "and we take no responsibility for any data loss of disruption". So, still the IT services fault that the server hasn't been patched for 5 years ?
Anon for obvious reasons - we have a customer that has begrudgingly allowed some patches to be installed and a backup taken. But only because the age of the SQL server has made something break with another package - one where there's a "if you don't upgrade, we won't support you" clause in the agreement, and that package effectively is their business (business sector specific system - without it and the data it holds, they are gone). And the backup only got done because we point blank refused to apply any patches without having a full backup first.
But that's still only the patches needed to fix the SQL problem - not any other SQL or OS patches !
And if that sounds like a bit of whining about getting the blame for other people's faults - then that's how it should sound.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
