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The Need to be Transparent

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

I recently came across a rather curious but common case. This is an

organization with a fairly robust Internet presence that runs multiple domains.

The websites are run by the one of the business divisions and the e-mail service

by internal IT, both out of different cities. Both divisions have, over time,

diverged in their hosting decisions with the result that the Web server is

hosted with one service provider and the mail server with another.

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And for some strange reason, there is no backup MX server. Things were going

fine till the mail service provider was changed. Obviously, there was this large

and awkward dance involving three service providers and two departments, spread

across geographies and time zones to get this done. And obviously, the worst had

to happen. One of the four jumped the gun, leading to considerable mail outage.

The story does not end here. The mail server now requires some work requiring

a change in MX records-incoming mail needs to be pointed to a new spam-filtering

service. And that is where it all breaks down. Not wanting to face user ire over

lost mail, that move is just not happening. My guess is that it is a simple case

of being once bitten twice shy.

Krishna Kumar



Group Editor

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Now, I am sure that this is a common enough story that has parallels in many

organizations. The point is that as the IT infrastructure grows, often,

different parts grow in different directions with different owners and are held

together with nothing more than patchwork or code glue. There is a case for all

IT infrastructure to be run by one department, but there are organizations that

may choose not to do so. While infrastructure consolidation, internally and with

service providers, has its merits, business imperatives may sometimes dictate

otherwise. My argument is not with how you choose to run your IT infrastructure,

but with the lack of communication that leads to the breakdown that happened in

the example above.

Every once in a while, it would make sense for all stakeholders to sit

together and discuss what each one is planning to do in the immediate future and

work out what the others need to do to keep the tango going. Like you have a

network map (or do you have one?), it would make eminent sense to create a big

picture block diagram of the various major elements and service providers and

how they interlock into a whole. Can you tag each of these blocks with the name

and contact of the owner of that block and make the diagram public? That one

small act can save a lot of heartburn and loss of face. Clear communication and

a clear sense of the big picture can avoid the need for the patchwork.

A transparent IT infrastructure-one whose makeup is known to all stake

holders in a language they understand is perhaps the best bet you have against

system failure due to wrong decision making.

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