John Parkinson

Another day, another cybersecurity challenge. Every time I deploy some new and potentially valuable networking technology, I must first research what new vulnerabilities and threats using that technology adds to the stack that already exists. Then, I need to find new weapons in the unending fight against the bad guys. My latest security concern is […]

I have been devoting a lot of time to thinking through the refresh of our rolling three-year IT infrastructure plan. A big piece of our thinking is focused on ways to steadily reduce the overall cost of computing, even as we increase the capacity of our computation, storage and connectivity resource pools.   Increasingly, this […]

You’d think everyone would agree that complexity and unnecessary differentiation in an IT infrastructure make it harder to achieve corporate goals. So it should be easy to get to a set of pragmatic guidelines that everyone can accept and use. It isn’t. It’s rare to see an enterprise IT shop that has had the discipline […]

You have probably seen the trade ads and promotional materials from Sun Microsystems for its Project Blackbox data center in a shipping container concept. I’m intrigued by this strange idea that you can modularize many of the elements of a data center. Prompted by an idea from my boss, I’ve been playing with a variant […]

After 20-plus years as a consultant, I moved into a corporate job and was surprised to find that many of my colleagues are different from the people I worked with previously. They aren’t worse or less capable than the people in consulting, but they are different. Consulting seeks out and develops a certain kind of […]

We’ve all had to deal with the explosive growth in structured and unstructured data. But every time I develop a strategy for working with the increase in data, another discontinuity in the pattern makes my plans obsolete. The last one was the surge in unstructured data, especially e-mail and instant messaging. And we’re about to […]

What do you know? As part of an operational hardening project, I just finished an extensive review of the operational support documentation for our production systems. We conduct this review periodically to ensure that our business-continuity and disaster-recovery plans will work even if none of our people are available to operate and support the recovery […]

One of the lessons I learned way back in college math was the theory behind how to build and optimize complex project schedules. By defining all the work to be done and how long each element of the work will take, and determining the available resources and dependencies between activities, you can generate a schedule […]

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.” –Yogi Berra I’ve heard a lot over the past decade about the war for talent and how to win it. It’s a common presumption that we are short of critical technical skills and that we must seek out and retain the […]

For the past several months I’ve been exploring the concept of cloud computing. There has been a good deal of interest in it from the technology and business press, mostly based on what Google and Amazon.com have done to create very large pools of low-cost computing, connectivity and storage resources on which they run the […]

In an ideal world, CIOs would manage a well coordinated stream of requests for new and enhanced business capabilities from their customers: the managers of the businesses IT serves. Requests would be well articulated and sufficiently detailed so it would be easy to estimate the resources required to meet them, and on delivery every new […]

Keeping track of every version of each piece of hardware and software in your production infrastructure is key to ensuring that everything is working properly. So when something goes wrong and you must rebuild a system fast and accurately, such controls become a crucial part of recovery. But the discipline required to build and maintain […]