Couple of years ago management decided that I should host email for four sites. As well as the transmittal of financial files to their respective destinations.
I then insisted that the company procure a proper genset.
Which was done.
Today can congratulate myself on my foresight and insistence as we had a couple of times with total power loss from Eskom, which would have turned out more expensive for the company had we not purchased the generator.
And a good backup structure which was tweaked over the years. One incident of cryptolocker tested the resilience of the backup system, and no data was lost (except the affected user's personal data files, boohoo).
Even today I am looking at protecting online backups from nasty stuff like wcry and the such. Not fun, but hey, a sysadmin's gotta do what a sysadmin need to do.
Next project will be cloud backup, to backup critical and core company documents without which the company will have a very hard time. Cloudy backup will be evaluated thoroughly, and will also be tested. I will not move everything to the cloud, as it is a single point of failure.
I may be old-fashioned, but I prefer physical servers onsite instead of cloudy servers, as you cannot poke them should they barf and decide to be sluggish.
This BA IT incident is just one more reason to be very, very careful when outsourcing your IT departmwnt, you never know what sort of people you will get.
With your own IT department in-house you have full control over them, and you can meet each team member on a one to one meeting. Outsourcer? Forget about meeting their team members. And, yup, you don't have full co trol over the outsourced IT team members.
And the most important rule of outsourcing is that the company offering outsourcing services will most probably also service more than two or three other companies, and they will not always be giving you 100% of their time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
