One of the things I am good at is finding and eliminating “single points of failure”. When I see a process or procedure I look at it and check for weakest link. Ever since my first job when my boss told me “if you’re hit by a buss on the way home, the company needs to live on” I’ve done a good job of making sure I’m not it. And when “ITIL” comes along there’s the Matrix organizations that’s all about spreading information, responsiblities and risk I felt it was totally natural and a given. And here at Thomas Cook we hate single points of failure in the IT organization and work to eliminate them constantly. Much like the lawfirm we have 2 datacenters to run from so we can lose an entire building and the IT would still work!
(now I’m going to go all computer tech on you!)
So … I took my job home again. When we got the annual bonus I bought stuff to have a 6×3 terabyte RAID 10 in my server for storing all the digital stuff I have. Everything from documents to images and the DVD/Bluray backups I have, they all need to be stored somewhere, but I’ve always felt like “if I lose this harddrive what will I do!?” – but with a RAID 10 I could easily lose one drive (actually 3 – if they are the “right” ones) and it wouldn’t affect anything… but the next level was “what if the house burns down to the ground”? In such a scenario I’m pretty sure I’ll have bigger issues to deal with than “oh no I lost all my Star Trek boxes and the digital backups of them!”, but I still wanted to make sure that’s not an added headache if it were to happen. One solution was to buy a 2 drive USB case and 2 4TB drives in a RAID0 and get a safety deposit box and once every 3 months take it home, back it all up and put it back again. That was actually looking like the most practical & cost efficient way of doing it…
Until OwnCube offered me a deal to store 30 TB of data as long as their company exists for a one time fee of €150! Done! So now I’m set to once every .. does 3 months sound enough?… zip everything I have to encrypted files and send it up to their datacenters for storage! Even though I only have a 100 mbit upstream connection which means this is gonna take over a week I can’t say I’m in much of a rush since it’s automated and running in the background.
So now the house can burn down and I’ll still have all my Star Trek episodes 🙂
Really sorry again about neglecting my duties here. It’s just very hectic at work.
Mostly for me the past 6 weeks have been about upgrading Sharepoint from 2010 to 2013 with all the issues that comes with it and all weird phenomenons that only Sharepoint can produce. Right now it’s all done and I’m “only” cleaning up and trying to be friendly with the users who are pissed off, and rightly so!, over features that are no longer available. But not my fault if Microsoft decided to do away with features they think noone is using.
And we’re also being dragged into an outsourcing project. Yeah, you can hear the “*sigh*” already right? The story of me and outsourcing goes back over 10 years and I think it very, very rarely is a good think in the long run unless you only want to save money and don’t want to care about IT issues. But if you have IT as a core for the business it’s a bad idea and Thomas Cook here in Northern Europe is all about IT and selling our products online so we shouldn’t be outsourcing in my opinion. But orders are orders so we’re going down that path and let’s see where it takes us.
But unlike the Carema outsourcing, this time they’ve guaranteed me I won’t lose my job. My problem is will I still want my job when they are done? It’s still about 2 years away from being “said and done” so still a long way to go and a lot of things to be decided. So I’m patiently waiting to see what happens with this, what else can I do? I love my job so much and I don’t want to quit because I think it may not be as a great 2 years from now…