Speaker 0 | 00:08.603
Hi, nerds. I’m Michael Moore, hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m here with Will Perrazzo, Director of Information Technology at Yonkers Contracting Company. But I heard that it’s just called Yonkers. Is that right, Will?
Speaker 1 | 00:23.659
That’s what we call it. the employees of Yonkers Contracted Company call the company, which is kind of confusing because Yonkers Contracted Company is based in Yonkers, New York. So we just think we own the city.
Speaker 0 | 00:35.624
Yonkers is everywhere. I love it. We’re going to start off with, by the way, great to have you on the program. We’re going to start off with an icebreaker segment that we always do, which is random access memories. I’m going to ask you a question and then you’re going to respond with the answer that just pops into your head first. All right. First question, if you could transform any IT device or software into a physical object or a living being, what would it be and why?
Speaker 1 | 01:09.202
I think I would transform a printer into a punching bag. You’ll probably guess why. I’m not a big fan. I’m not a big fan of printers. I’m not a big fan of paper.
Speaker 0 | 01:25.514
So there’s a, I have a running joke with a lot of folks that have known me over the years. Every time I try to fix a printer, I always end up with extra parts. I come back that I’ve had, I actually had at one point, anytime I’d be like, Hey, I think my printer’s not working. They would prevent me from physically touching the printer because it would just break. It would just completely break.
Speaker 1 | 01:51.240
So we have these copiers in our office, right? And a few weeks ago, one of my co-workers walks into my office with this little plastic thing in her hand, and she puts it down on my desk and explains to me that it’s from a copier, but she doesn’t know what part it is or where it came from. So I had to go on a fact-finding mission to try to figure out where this tiny little plastic part went. I mean, this is just case in point.
Speaker 0 | 02:16.111
Was the printer still working without the part?
Speaker 1 | 02:18.584
It was. It was part of the feeder for the document feeder. I had to examine another copier for 20 minutes or so to figure out where this little part went.
Speaker 0 | 02:28.951
I mean, I’ve taken apart things before, put them back and still had extra screws and be like, well, it’s still working. Should I take it apart again and put it back?
Speaker 1 | 02:41.700
No, if it works, no. The answer is no.
Speaker 0 | 02:45.423
If it’s I. you know, I don’t even own a printer at my house anymore. It’s gotten to that point where I don’t even, if I had to get, listen, if I buy a printer and it works for like six months, great. And if it breaks down or if I just need new ink, I just go buy another printer at that point.
Speaker 1 | 03:06.902
Funny enough, our home printer just died. We just had to get a new printer. So it was just. It’s just like my blood’s boiling right now. I think that’s great. Let’s move on.
Speaker 0 | 03:20.550
All right. Well, that was good. That was a good question. All right. So good answer to the question. If you could ethically, key note here on ethically, hack into any IT system or network, what would it be and what would you do?
Speaker 1 | 03:37.554
Ethically. If I could ethically hack into an IT network.
Speaker 0 | 03:41.880
Let’s say they asked you to. Let’s make it easier. They ask you. They’re like, hey, Will, come hack into our system. We want to make sure that it’s safe.
Speaker 1 | 03:52.787
Well, there are a number of vendors that I’ve worked with in the past that I would love to get on the inside of their network and dredge up some skeletons and some of the things that they weren’t doing correctly. I would love that.
Speaker 0 | 04:09.038
There’s a good answer. There’s a good answer. Oh, I love it. All right. If, um, if you say, okay, well, here’s a good one. This is, this is the last question. And I think this is a good one. You get to sit in a meeting with any company, any company, which company and what department,
Speaker 1 | 04:30.853
which company and what department? Uh, well, you know, if, if I could also have a time machine, I would probably want to go back in time and meet with the creatives at Apple. I mean, that’s kind of the layup answer to that question.
Speaker 0 | 04:49.962
That’s a good one. That’s a good one. You know what? I’m going to give you that time machine so you can do that. There you go.
Speaker 1 | 04:57.329
Yeah, definitely in the Steve Jobs era, without a doubt.
Speaker 0 | 05:01.977
So that’s that would be an interesting that would that would be so interesting. And I’m sure those people, they I can’t imagine the amount of pressure to go because I heard that Steve Jobs, very good creative mind. Right. But also was kept the pressure on as well. So I can’t imagine those folks in there and how much.
Speaker 1 | 05:26.301
coffee they were drinking and and uh and or energy well they didn’t know energy drinks early back then it was must have been coffee just will be let’s just say it was coffee yeah he was he was a little hard to work for huh i i would not would have wanted to report directly to him um you know as great as it would have been to be able to spend time with him i don’t know if that would be my jam there you go i um uh i tell everyone this right i cyber stalk him before
Speaker 0 | 05:54.873
they come on the air, right? Just so I have things to talk about. But I saw that when I was cyberstalking you, it was like, I was like, oh, wow, I have things to work with. You write like blogs.
Speaker 1 | 06:12.520
Well, very infrequently, very, very infrequently. But yes, yes, I have some long form blog articles. Yep.
Speaker 0 | 06:22.364
There is a good one. So I was reading about, I was reading through a bunch of things and I read about something here where it was falling on one sword for others and why you shouldn’t do it. Do you remember that?
Speaker 1 | 06:40.880
I think this was in my angsty project management period of my life. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 06:45.164
it was. It was all about project management. Let me start this off real quick because I’m going to give you a second to chat about it because it’s such a great concept that I really wanted to bring in. I had somebody one time and we were doing something and I had messed up somewhere. And at this point, I believe I was in management. I don’t know where. And one of the folks on the help desk. a junior help desk tech, had jumped up and stood in front of me and said, no, that was my fault. I did that. Right. And I turned around and I looked at him. I said, no, you didn’t. You didn’t do that. Right. Go sit down. I appreciate it. That’s very nice of you, but you didn’t do that. Right. And I explained that it was me and stuff like that. And I did that on purpose because Two things. One, I’m not going to let anyone take the blame for me and things that happen. But two is he needed to understand that he needed to take ownership of the things that he does. And I need to take ownership of the things I do. And it was such a concept that needed to be had. And I brought him back and I told him, this is why I’m telling you this. Like, I appreciate the sentiment, but it’s misplaced. Right. And it’s not where it should be. So let’s talk about that for a moment. Falling on the sword for others. Angsty project management phase. Go ahead and chat about it, Will.
Speaker 1 | 08:27.158
All right. Oh, boy. All right. So first off, just a disclaimer, if you’re a manager, OK, there there is absolutely there is absolutely a thing in management where you are supposed to share credit. And you are supposed to deflect blame. So as a manager, in a way, I don’t know if I would call it falling on one sword, but you should be protecting your people. However, the blog entry that I wrote was not about that. The blog entry that I wrote more came from a place of if you as an employee are feeling pressure. from your organization, and that could come from your boss. It could come from more powerful people that you work with that in your position and your role, and this comes up for project managers a lot because the project manager really is the face of their, especially in the type of role that I was in where you’re doing projects for other, for customers, right? The customer facing roles. So if you’re a customer facing project manager, you’re really the face of your company. When you, when you execute plan and execute the project, you have to deliver the good news, the bad news, you know, you’re the go between. And sometimes you’re a punching bag and that is part of the deal. Um, but there are times when it goes a little bit too far and, and you don’t want to let it get to the point where you’ve become a punching bag to the point where it is endangered your own future career prospects. You don’t want to, you don’t want to tarnish your own name when your, your company collectively is failing on a project. That’s really where that was coming from.
Speaker 0 | 10:24.335
That’s, but that’s such a great point. I mean, that’s, uh, um, you know, and i guess we’ll dive into a little bit of project management a little bit but what a great point to bring out which is there’s a you know there’s a line that you mentioned right is a line where yes i gotta be i gotta help the company kind of look good right uh but i also don’t need to take down my own personal uh um career while doing it So that’s a it’s a great line to draw. Right. You should continue to write our blog posts. They’re fantastic. I’ve got a couple in here that I’m going to refer back to. You’re going to be like, what? Did you read every blog post? No, I didn’t read every blog post, but I read a lot of them. So, yeah, but no,
Speaker 1 | 11:13.741
there was some. I should have thought that through more and been expecting this.
Speaker 0 | 11:22.245
No, I was just. No, it’s fantastic, actually. Before we get into some of this, I would love to hear about Yonkers and not the entire city, right? I would like to hear about specifically the contracting company. But let’s talk about Yonkers. First of all, how did you get into Yonkers?
Speaker 1 | 11:50.794
Well, that one is an interesting answer in itself. I was, and I don’t know whether I coined this term or not. I like to think I did. I was reverse hired. And what I mean by that is I have a coworker, a member of my team who I had worked with in the past for other companies. And I actually hired him on two separate occasions at other companies. And this role became available at. yonkers contracting company and he was working at yonkers contracting company and he reached out to me uh he thought i would be good for the role and i was in a place where i was uh interested in pursuing it and you know i ended up getting the job so i like to think of that as he reverse hired me it
Speaker 0 | 12:38.999
reversed hired i like that actually that is a um it’s a great reason another great reason why networking is such a big deal and why you shouldn’t burn bridges and why should you always look to uplift the people that are around you. That’s a it’s a huge, huge point to that. And yes, you might have coined that term reverse hired. I’ve never heard that term before. So we’re going to say, guys, on this podcast that Will has now coined the term reverse tired.
Speaker 1 | 13:07.517
Yeah. Copyrighted. You can’t you can’t use it.
Speaker 0 | 13:10.019
Too bad. He gets royalties now.
Speaker 1 | 13:13.261
Yeah. I will say, though, in all seriousness, it was really an honor to me that someone who had worked for me twice before wanted me to be their supervisor again.
Speaker 0 | 13:27.529
I love it. It really is fantastic. And it just goes to show you that you do right by people and they will do right by you. And it’s IT karma.
Speaker 1 | 13:40.996
There you go. IT karma.
Speaker 0 | 13:43.898
I like it. So you get reverse hired into Yonkers, right? And let’s talk about what happens when you come into a place, right? Because when I first come in to a company or I need to figure out a company, first kind of things I do is just start kind of a listening exercise to see what’s working, what’s not working. Were you able to do that here or is it brought in everything working great or brought in and everything’s on fire?
Speaker 1 | 14:22.564
You know, I absolutely did a lay of the land and and surveyed, you know, what we’re doing, what what the technology landscape is, what we’re doing for the business, what services do we offer, et cetera. And there there were lots of potential improvements.
Speaker 0 | 14:42.138
to be made i’ll say that there was there was a lot to be done which which really motivated me it’s a um so it sounds like there’s a lot there’s lots of things there that uh um and i you know i actually love how you put that because that’s essentially what that is you know problems are all these opportunities you know and um and it’s normal by the way for companies always have problems, you know, because there is always opportunities to, you know, to go in and get them fixed. And so when you came in, lots of opportunities here, how do you even begin to prioritize that?
Speaker 1 | 15:26.770
That’s a really good question, because I did have a lot to prioritize. You know, I think the way that I look at it is The first thing you need to do is solidify the infrastructure. The infrastructure is the foundation that all of your technology services sit on top of. To use a construction analogy, it’s the foundation. And you need a strong, sound foundation. So one of the first things we did was assess that foundation, our IT infrastructure. looked at what software are we running that’s duplicative. We were running a number of internal IT management tools and software that was partly or completely duplicative. There was a lack of documentation. There was a lot of tribal knowledge rather than documented procedures. So everyone was sort of using their best judgment. and their career expertise to figure out how to do things. So we put a lot of documentation in place, a lot of standard procedures in place, and we worked for a while, probably the first year and change to shore up our infrastructure. And there were some immense pains during that journey, but we got through it.
Speaker 0 | 16:59.929
Oh, let’s talk. So we’ll look. So, okay, well, we’re going to get to that in a second here. Let’s jump back to what you said about the duplicative software. I love the term so far on here. It’s just great. Duplicative software. So the great thing that I always love is when I can find duplicative software to pay for my infrastructure upgrades later on, right? I mean, that’s really the… One of the things I always do is get with the CFO, get with the, you know, the finance teams. And I and I go hunting for software that I can kill. That’s not going to make much of a difference because it’s just such a it’s like the low hanging fruit of it’s always there. It’s the low hanging fruit. And you can you can use that money later on, hopefully, to to say, I saved you this. Now we really need to do these things. So were you able?
Speaker 1 | 18:00.630
uh with that uh slashing of the duplicative software get to that kind of a point yeah that’s exactly what we did it’s like a it’s like a budget cheat code right so we yes we save on all this annual licensing for for something that we that we basically already have and then maybe we maybe we upgrade our microsoft 365 licensing so we can now do x y and z and now you know have a standard version of office on everyone’s computers and you
Speaker 0 | 18:28.662
move our email to exchange online and do all and do all these other things so yeah yeah it’s that that’s absolutely what we what we leverage that for and i like the the lack of documentation you’re talking about and you refer to tribal knowledge which is such a risk in an organization right i mean tribal knowledge runs away when people run away right and it’s such a um it’s such a risk to have that tribal knowledge not actually documented anywhere where anybody can have it Um, and, uh, I have seen organizations just be stuck using, uh, equipment and literally had to migrate out of entire systems and entire software with, uh, um, uh, and just leave it there because they, because nobody knew how to upgrade it held hostage really by the, uh, um, by that.
Speaker 1 | 19:19.428
Yeah. And it makes onboarding a pain too. When you have nothing documented, everything, everything has to be verbal. Everything is going to. Every piece of information is going to require you sitting down with someone and hearing it from their mouth. And what are you going to end up doing? You’re taking notes anyway.
Speaker 0 | 19:36.609
So,
Speaker 1 | 19:39.130
yeah, I’m big on documentation. Anyone that’s worked with me knows that to some of their chagrins. But, you know,
Speaker 0 | 19:47.554
I think it’s huge. I mean, in the in the process of getting the documentation is not an easy one because it’s not like there’s one person that knows everything. You’re going to have to. probably gather it from multiple people in multiple sessions.
Speaker 1 | 20:01.264
And, you know, one thing we did, because it is legitimately difficult to find, I’m in a small IT department, so I’ll say that, I’ll throw that in there too, because that’s a relevant tool to add some context. We’re a four-person IT department, including me. And one of the things that I did, tactics that I use, which I stole from a former employer, is we do these bi-weekly documentation lunch sessions where the team gets together. We have lunch on the company and we sit and we document something that needs documenting or we update something that needs updating. And the team really bought into that and it’s worked really well for us.
Speaker 0 | 20:40.316
That’s a, it’s a great idea. I absolutely love that because, you know, it’s like, Hey, listen, uh, uh, eat your pizza and document it. Let’s get, let’s get this movie, but it’s collaborative too. And I, and that’s what, uh, you know, and people can look forward to, uh, that I think, I think, um, uh, you know, it’s, it’s a great way to also make sure that that always happens. That’s the problem with documentation. You start it, everyone gets excited and it falls off, but It seems like you’ve made it a process to keep it going and keep it, you know, keep it on regular interval.
Speaker 1 | 21:13.327
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s that’s a really good point you just made. I think a lot of things sort of follow that that trajectory. And, you know, I’m also big into programming in follow ups, like a case in point, whenever we clean something up. So a lot of the information systems that we that we maintain needed cleaning up when I started with. with Yonkers. There were a lot of stale user accounts or like test configurations, and a lot of them just needed, needed cleaning up. And in truth, they do need periodic review. So, you know, what I do is I leverage the, our IT support system, um, to put in basically recurring tickets that spin up and auto assign to people at intervals. So maybe every, you know, six months, someone, you know, just give the address book a once over to make sure nothing stale is in there. Right. Every year, you know, we go through system X or system Y and I write some kind of procedure up in the ticket to how you should do the review. You know, so that stuff really works to kind of just ongoing hygiene of your environment.
Speaker 0 | 22:18.909
I love it. I like that. I like the follow ups on it because it’s definitely huge and you want to keep it going. So you come in, you find a bunch of duplicative software, you reduce costs, you. increase the documentation so that it’s not tribal anymore. People actually know what’s going on. So now we’ve started to put process in place. You’ve identified things that need the opportunities that need to be upgraded and stuff like that. And then you’re probably get this point, right going, okay, let’s start scheduling and actually doing upgrades to key systems. How does that go at this point?
Speaker 1 | 22:59.447
So, um, okay. Well, this is going to get into our one big stumbling block that we had, which is so we started doing regular system upgrades. So one of the things that wasn’t happening on a regular cadence was upgrades. So this involves patching and other type of system upgrades, firmware upgrades, hardware upgrades, things of that nature. So we started doing all those things. you know, we’ve sat down and decided on a cadence for each one of those items, started doing them. And that was going fine. Um, it resulted in more after hours work for people cause it wasn’t done regularly before. Um, we ended up in the long run automating a lot of that stuff. Um, so it, it, it kind of brought that back down, but anyway, so we, we were starting to do all these things on a regular cadence and, uh, unfortunately it was about, I don’t know, eight. eight or nine months into my employment there um one of my engineers actually the one who reverse hired me was doing a uh was doing an upgrade to our uh we had this dell vertex blade hyperconverged system and he was doing some updates and i you know i have like a selective amnesia about this because it was so ended up being so traumatic so i don’t even remember the details it was to you something to do with either the drivers and VMware. And so he was up late one night doing this, had to schedule this for late at night. And I was asleep. And then I wasn’t because my phone rang. And you know…
Speaker 0 | 24:39.000
Wait, stop for a moment, because everybody collectively now just felt that moment you just said, right? I was asleep. And then I wasn’t because my phone rang. And then everybody got chills and went,
Speaker 1 | 24:51.983
oh.
Speaker 0 | 24:52.856
It’s shuttered at the exact same moment because we’ve all been in that that same position.
Speaker 1 | 24:58.489
Go ahead. Yeah. My palms just started sweating. So I know it’s not good. I know what it’s about. I didn’t know the details, but I knew what it was about the moment the phone rang. So I got into my home office and joined a call with my engineer and somebody from Dell. And what happened was during this upgrade, one of our VMware data stores was corrupted. And we had a whole slew of critical virtual servers. on this data store. And without getting into the hairy details, you know, suffice to say, if we couldn’t get this data store somehow repaired, we’d have to restore all these virtual servers from backup. So I spent a few hours on the phone with various people from Dell slash VMware. Around five, six in the morning, you know, I come to this dreadful realization that our workforce was going to wake up, not have email, not have access to their files, not have access to critical business apps. So this was like the other shoe dropping. Now my palms are doubly sweating. So I realized, okay, I need to wake up my boss now. And I’m not really sure exactly how people are going to react across the organization that is, because I’m fairly new. I’m in my first year and I’ve never had to… break really terrible news to people before. So I woke up my boss, I called him, explained to him what was going on that worked its way up the chain and around the organization. And for the next few days, we worked basically around the clock, you know, restoring VMs from backup. I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that our coworkers, despite being extremely inconvenienced and very much impacted by this. Our business was absolutely adversely impacted by this. They were supportive. They understood we were working hard. They were willing to put aside whatever anguish they were going through to show us professional courtesy. And we got through it. At the end of all of this, whatever it was, a week or two later, I had to meet with the senior management team and sort of explain in some detail what happened, why it happened, what actions we took, why we took those actions, and how we’re going to keep this from happening again. So again, I’ve never sat in the room with all these folks and had to talk about a subject like this to this point. So I have no idea how they’re going to react. Figured they’re not happy about it. any of this, right? That’s your default,
Speaker 0 | 27:57.805
right?
Speaker 1 | 27:58.766
Yeah. So I dutifully put together a PowerPoint and at the end of this PowerPoint is sort of the plan forward. So it was this five-year plan where it started with us backing up our servers to the cloud in a way that we could easily bring them back up. And then there’s another phase where we’re doing real-time replication and then the final sort of after five years, we’re… where our full production environment is in the cloud. We’re replicating it to another region. Josh Young So I get through this whole spiel and the CEO looks at me and he asks, can we just move everything to the cloud now? And I just thought, you’ve got to be kidding me, really? This is fantastic. So I mean, talk about supportive. I mean, yeah, there were some pressing questions during that meeting. But the outcome, you know, something really good came out of something really bad that could have gone a completely different direction. They could have lost all trust in us as a result of that incident.
Speaker 0 | 29:06.827
Well, in listening to your story, there was a lot of things that went right. Right. Which is, first of all, you were notified. let’s just start there. Someone didn’t just try to sit there and, oh, I’m going to try and get this working for hours and hours and hours and then notify you last minute. So let’s just start there. You were notified. That was a great thing. That shows trust that I need to bring my supervisor in so that they can immediately start helping me out. And then you did the right thing by notifying and giving some notification prior to people coming in. Which is always like, I know that time. It’s, I need, this is the time in which I need to notify. And this is the point where of no return. If we get here, then I need to tell people, it’s sorry, it’s not coming up, right? You know, and then they got to make plans because now they have a whole workforce that they need to make plans for. Um, did they have contingencies in place for any of this to happen?
Speaker 1 | 30:11.308
Uh, yes and no. Uh, yes. In that there were, uh, paper processes to fall back on temporarily, um, where, you know, data could be entered into applications later. You know, we had some contingencies in that for email, for instance, which is probably the most critical of all the services that we were, we were running at the time. We’re not anymore, but we were running it at the time. Luckily, we have Mimecast for email security, so people were able to get to their emails in Mimecast. It was very clunky, but it worked in a pinch. So yeah, it was a little bit yes, a little bit no.
Speaker 0 | 30:49.755
And then this is one of those good points where kind of assessing that from a non-IT perspective, right? This gave kind of the company a chance to see what… uh, having systems down, what kind of impact that, uh, would have. And, you know, I’ve been in that situation before, and I’m sure everyone has, uh, where you, you know, and, and for me, it was a hurricane, you know, uh, where, you know, it kind of, you kind of go, oh man, um, there’s some business processes that need to be, uh, addressed as well. And, and it’s good. And this is why people suggest walkthroughs, right. And, uh, a lot of companies now do walkthroughs in this. in these scenarios to try and just let’s think of a scenario let’s walk through it and see how we are and you’d be amazed how many times people go oh yeah no you’re right we need to think of something for that so um uh this was kind of a real life walkthrough right but um i i’m you know we you also did right there i thought was was the powerpoint presentation putting together um you know what happened how did it happen how we could prevent it from happening again um you know uh you know and throwing an idea out there that sparked uh you know the um you said the what’s the ceo of the company yeah yeah sparked the ceo of the company to go why wait let’s go you know and that’s uh i mean and that’s a great suggestion you know that’s a great question to ask right what do you need what do you need to go get a get there quicker and to me there’s a lot that went right um within the it department um within the management of the company all the way up and uh and for the culture that what a great culture in a company to to um go you know what they’re going through some stuff let’s let’s let’s uh power through and let them do their stuff and do their thing that is a great story what a what a um uh uh just so much in that story that you can start picking apart and saying kind of a case study almost of how it should work and how a problem turned into an opportunity, kind of like we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1 | 33:08.798
Yeah, and it makes me feel really lucky to be working with folks who have that type of attitude in a time of, I’ll call it a time of crisis, that really were. you know, supportive of their coworkers rather than taking it out on us.
Speaker 0 | 33:27.127
So then you get, yeah, okay, now we’re going to move everything to the cloud. And now you got to be back in project manager mode going, okay, now I got to design some projects and I need to put some things together. Because now you got to put together what cost you need to put together, how you’re going to do that, which systems are going to go critical. I mean, there’s so much that’s going on in your head at that point, right?
Speaker 1 | 33:49.888
Yep, there was a lot to do all of those things. And going back to the team of four, you know, we brought in some outside help to fast track the migration of the cloud. And that helped tremendously.
Speaker 0 | 34:01.574
Very nice. And did it go well?
Speaker 1 | 34:04.296
It went very well. It went very, very well. You know, we have a really stable infrastructure now. Our entire production environment is in the cloud. We’re not hosting our own email anymore. That’s all in Microsoft 365. You know, we have a and we have such a minimal footprint now because we were able to do so much reducing and and so much moving, moving applications to SAS that we have such a minimal footprint now, even in the cloud. And that minimal footprint that we do have, that minimal virtual server footprint, we’re now evolving that to platform as a service offerings.
Speaker 0 | 34:44.487
Nice. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 34:45.388
So we’re going to be down to virtually zero servers in, I would say, really within the next year or two. We’re only going to have a couple be running a couple servers at that point, which I think is fantastic. And, you know, it also all of this results in less administrative effort on our part, keeping up. the infrastructure, the move to the cloud, the move up the stack to platform as a service, to software as a service. We spend less of our time on the infrastructure, let other people take some of that load off of us, and we could spend more time working on projects and initiatives that deliver more direct value, direct tangible value to the business.
Speaker 0 | 35:30.949
And the great news about not only that, If that business grows or when that business grows, or it’s probably growing anyway, because based on what I’m hearing, it’s a well-run business. You’re going to be able to scale quicker.
Speaker 1 | 35:48.389
Yeah, so it is growing. You surmised that correctly. And yeah, absolutely. There are so many huge benefits of the cloud that to me just outweigh any of the drawbacks. And yeah, one is certainly the scaling. Super easy to scale.
Speaker 0 | 36:03.635
The cloud has really… um matured a lot um uh you know what’s from when it first uh um started and and especially there’s so many different ways to use the cloud you know it’s almost a misnomer to just say the cloud right because there’s so many different like you mentioned hey yeah at ours you know we have a small server footprint up there but now we’re moving to platform as a service right and you know i’ve i’ve taken a bunch of applications and we’re just migrating up to sas so I mean, there’s so many different ways and options to use it. And I think that is really the trick of the trade there, right? Just like it was in the days where we had the physical servers and running the VMware and the Blade servers and knowing how to do all those things. It’s just now it’s like, okay, but now we got to figure out what’s the best way to pop it up into the cloud so it fits our model, our environment, our company.
Speaker 1 | 36:57.889
Yeah, and really, that brings up a good… a good topic of discussion when you start especially leveraging sas where it’s it’s really completely outside of your of your purview at that point where wherever it’s running you know some vendor is running it somewhere keeping control over that um because starts to become uh a challenge because now it’s not all behind my firewall or even my virtual firewall or my you know acls um on my cloud objects Now this is literally someone else is running this now. So IAM becomes hugely important at that point. So that’s one of the things we’re really working on right now. We have all these SaaS apps. We’re not a huge company, but we have probably 60, 70 SaaS apps at this point. And we implemented a password policy not terribly long ago, but it’s important to have a password policy. We implemented MFA. not terribly long ago. That’s been a boon for us. That’s saved us on a number of occasions. But if we’re running SaaS apps, how do we make sure those SaaS apps are conforming to our security standards, right? So we’ve been putting a lot of effort into a vendor evaluation, right? Especially if that vendor is going to be hosting any sort of proprietary or sensitive data of ours. So we’re doing, we have a, IT now has a formal vendor review process. We’re reviewing the SOC 2. We’re filling out a questionnaire and we’re, we’re properly evaluating vendors. And then we’re, we’re really pushing hard on SSO. So our identity provider, now that we’re, we’re a Microsoft shop. So we’re in, we’re in Azure. So our identity provider is Azure Active Directory, which they’re now calling Entra ID.
Speaker 0 | 39:00.204
Yeah, definitely for now. Yes. I can’t keep up with Microsoft and them changing everything. I love the platforms they got. And by the way, you’re doing it right because you run all the apps through Entra, right? They’ll identify them as they check in, especially if all your devices are in there, right? And you logged all your devices in there. You’ve got it all set up there and you can see all those applications. And now… your SSO on all those applications. So you want to log into them. They need to, you need to be SSO in there and you need to make sure you’re logging in with your Microsoft account. What a great idea. And it’s a tough one to do, right? Cause it’s a lot of apps. That’s a lot of things. And you might not know them all.
Speaker 1 | 39:46.296
It’s not bad going forward. Like as you onboard a new app, it was part of how you do it. But yeah, going through the backlog is really difficult. And I got to tell you one thing that. bugs me is the inconsistency from vendor to vendor and app to app. We have a handful of apps that just do not support SSL, right?
Speaker 0 | 40:08.236
Which is amazing at this point. I don’t understand.
Speaker 1 | 40:10.919
Yeah. We have other ones where it’s an upcharge or you have to be a certain tier of service to get the SSO feature. Right. So it’s like ding, ding, ding. It starts to become a huge cost to implement something that I really feel should be table stakes at this point.
Speaker 0 | 40:29.888
It really should. It’s almost like not putting a radio in a car at this point. Right. You know, it’s like it needs to have that. What are you talking about? I mean, it’s a. And it’s actually even worse than that because it’s actually almost like not having brakes in a car. Actually, that’s actually a better analogy. But it is because, I mean, you’re going to upcharge for the brakes. I mean, it is a security risk for not only the, and this is the crazy thing, not only the companies using it, but the company that is hosting it. Why would you not want SSO? in there why would you not want those companies to have secure data what because if if they breach out you know that they’re you’re going to hear about it so it’s it’s amazing to me why that why that’s an upcharge for anything sso should be default mfa should be fault it should they shouldn’t even at this point they shouldn’t even be offering uh anything without like mfa shouldn’t even be like an option to be turned off it should just be like it like as standard as a password at this point. It should just be MFA. It’s amazing to me that that’s not the case.
Speaker 1 | 41:45.786
And what’s great is when you can do SSO, when you can federate, you can tie the MFA in with the identity provider. So as long as we have people doing SSO, we have a conditional access policy in entra that forces them to do MFA. And for the employee, it’s convenient. It’s the same passwords, the same MFA method across their apps.
Speaker 0 | 42:08.328
The conditional access policies, they just got those right. They do such a good job. Microsoft is really, in my opinion, winning at this point with the security tie-ins and stuff. You know, I’m sure Google will get up there. You know, it’s always a back and forth and stuff like that. But the really good thing with Microsoft is they are winning at that point. point of being able to tie that stuff in um i i think you’re right and i think you’re approaching it the right way and and really also that solves another problem for you which would be um uh shadow it kind of kind of makes that harder to do it
Speaker 1 | 42:53.299
does make it harder to do and it and it does you know what shadow it uh it i’m sure that it still happens at at my company um but I really don’t think it happens as much because, you know, what you’re talking about is is imposing controls. But I’ll tell you, over the course of the three and a half years I’ve been with Yonkers, folks there, as they’ve gotten to know me, have really warmed up to me. And, you know, when they’re looking at software now, when they’re thinking about making a change, they come to me for. for advice and for guidance. I don’t have to ask. I don’t have to track people down. I don’t have to exercise control. We’re cooperative.
Speaker 0 | 43:44.480
I absolutely love that you said this, because it is such a great point. When you, well, not just you, when any IT organization starts embracing the idea that they are the change makers in the organization, that they are the people that… help enable change and help enable people to get things done. They cease to become a cost center, and instead they become a strategic enabler in an organization. And when that happens, then exactly what’s happening to you is what happens, which is I need to go to them because they will help me get my goal done. They will help me. They will assist me. And then… That reduces shadow IT all in itself. I’m sure it’s still out there here and there. But most of the time shadow IT occurs is because people can’t get stuff done in time. They can’t get stuff done the way they need. And by making IT able to say, hey, yes, we can get that done for you. And guess what? We can get it done in a way that’s not only what you want, but better. That’s huge. That’s a big deal.
Speaker 1 | 45:00.779
Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 45:04.388
You had mentioned a really interesting thing. in one of your blog posts to go back i thought we were done with that really cool it was really cool because i know uh it’s funny because we were talking about um uh uh you said i remember being interviewed years ago uh by uh um by an individual who uh it was for a system engineer position and saying uh no i don’t have the experience uh with this or that technology um So many times you’ve said that in that interview that you were like, there’s no way I got that job. I had zero chance of getting that job. But yet you were shocked when you got the job, right? And in there, you kind of said a bright person can learn a technology or even a business model in a relatively short time. For many roles, there are other factors that should carry more weight. So tell us about this.
Speaker 1 | 46:07.278
Yeah, that job was a little bit of a reach for me. That was my second, I’ll call it my second real sort of full time IT job. And the job it involved, it was for a software company, a SaaS company. And this was like 15 years ago. And yeah, and yeah, it was very, very forward thinking company. And they were just using all sorts of like, I had never, this is for systems network engineer position, I had never used a SAN. I’d never used virtualization at that point. So they’re asking me about this stuff in the interview, of course. No, no, no, never did that. No, never worked with that. No, I don’t even know what that is. But those weren’t the only questions they were asking. They were also asking questions about working through problems, basic kind of network problems, trying to assess the steps that I would go through to troubleshoot. And. just by the end of the thing i had little confidence that i got the role and i was i was very surprised that i did but it was uh you know i learned something from that experience what do you think got you that room that’s a good question that’s a good question um i think you know it wasn’t one thing but there’s one specific interaction that i had with uh the gentleman who had become my become my manager and make the hiring decision where he asked me a question. It was trouble. It was some sort of scenario based question, right? I’m troubleshooting some kind of a system outage. It might’ve been the email or I don’t really remember the details of it, but he just asked me, what would I do? What would I do to troubleshoot it? And I said, oh, first I would look at this. And he said, no, that, you know, that doesn’t turn up anything. And I would look at this and look at this. And finally I said, well, you know, I would, I would, you know, tell them that to port, you know, whatever, tell them that to port 587 or whatever it was. And he said, ah, that’s it. Okay, we can move on. So he was just trying to understand, you know, my knowledge of the fundamentals of the basics of networking. Because if you understand networking, you can learn any vendor’s product, right?
Speaker 0 | 48:24.452
True. Very true. It’s an interesting, and I like the idea, right? Because I always say they can teach tech, right? The real thing, in fact, most of the time when I hire, what I look for is individuals that fit a certain work ethic, right? That fit a certain problem, you know, ability to work a problem and take ownership of it and know that they’re going to be the ones that are going to fix it. which is an interesting thought. There’s a, when you had that problem, I’ll jump back here to, we were talking about the issue with Yonkers. You knew that you were going to fix the problem. You just didn’t know how long it would take you, right? Right. Right. Everyone knows there’s no one else to fix it. I’m going to fix the problem,
Speaker 1 | 49:25.583
you know,
Speaker 0 | 49:26.464
but it’s like, how long is it going to be until I get that done, right? So. There’s a,
Speaker 1 | 49:33.082
we’re getting everything back. You know, there’s, there’s no, there’s, there’s no concern that like this stuff’s just gone. Right. You’re in trouble if, if your it department, you know, it can conceivably be in that situation.
Speaker 0 | 49:46.606
You don’t want to be anywhere near it. I always tell data. I just, I always want to be able to restore the data. That’s like the. Number one thing, I always had a person with data and it would be the sand engineer or anything like that. I’d be like, I always want to be able to restore this data. That is my number one request of you. So, but yeah, no, I, you know, and it just, you want that problem solving, you want this, but all those, those are, those are not IT skills. Those are, those are generic skills that, you know, that people should have, that you should look for. IT, I always look at IT as the, you know, the matching the IT is like the bonus, like the cherry on top of the cupcake, you know, so, so to speak.
Speaker 1 | 50:39.176
The most important skills, the ones that you’re describing, are also the hardest ones to interview for. To sit into whatever an hour-long conversation or whatever your company’s interview process is, it’s not easy.
Speaker 0 | 50:52.724
That’s very true. So we’ve arrived at our final segment, which is going to be IT Crystal Ball. This is the segment that we go over the future of IT. We’ve gone over a lot of stuff in here, but it’s interesting. We talked about this migration to the cloud, and then it got me thinking, are you going to be standing in your CEO’s office five years from now going with another presentation, hopefully before anything goes down, and saying, here’s the next thing that we need to do as an organization? What is that thought? What’s that mentality? Because right now, yeah, I mean, you know, many people have have done that migration to the cloud and they’re there and this is where they’re at. But where are we going from here? What’s the next what’s the next jump?
Speaker 1 | 51:51.914
Oh, geez. What’s the next jump from there? Well, you know, I don’t know if I’m if I’m imaginative enough to give a great answer to that question. But, you know, I certainly I certainly see an evolution of some of the things that. that we talked about, right? I mean, the idea of server and server operating systems are going to go away. Everything is just going to be code running in containers or on some type of platform. I think the ecosystem of products and technologies to govern a company’s assets in the cloud is going to mature. quite a bit. And also, you have the same problem in the physical world that you do in the virtual world, where you’re trying to kind of corral and get your arms around all these disparate SaaS apps and resources in the cloud. You’re also having a hard time, especially post-COVID world, of keeping some kind of governance and control over endpoints and what people are doing with their endpoints. So I think we’re going to see just a lot of evolution there. And I think we’re already at the point where really all there is is endpoints in the cloud. I mean, a lot of larger organizations, it takes a lot of effort to get to that point and they may not be there, but we’re pretty much there. It’s just your endpoint and the cloud. And I don’t really want any of our data to be on your endpoint.
Speaker 0 | 53:28.728
That’s very true. I mean, the modern desktop experience fixes that. Right. You know, and it takes the it takes the data and it it says, oh, yeah, it’s here. Right. But it’s not. It’s really, you know, sinking and stuff. And and as you know, as we continue to have better and better Internet service and stuff like that, which is I think has to be the has to be what what happens, you know, that access that data. I mean, there, you know. You can play high-quality computer games straight from the cloud now. So why do we even have computer systems where the endpoint and all the data needs to sit on it?
Speaker 1 | 54:20.058
Right. And we have cellular service speeds now with 5G, ultra-wideband. You don’t necessarily need Wi-Fi anymore. Yeah. But there is the challenge of getting that type of service out to certain parts of the world that it’s not so easy or the money isn’t there to build all of that infrastructure. So you need to start doing crazy things like balloons and things of that nature and satellite.
Speaker 0 | 54:46.240
Well, we don’t need any more balloons flying up in the sky. It’s driving everyone nuts. But but no, it is a great point. Actually, I have 5G at my house and it was just remarkable. I literally it’s a it’s a cube. And I just I said it. I set it down, I plugged it in, and it just worked. And I was just like, this is so easy. There’s like nothing to configure. You just plug it in and connect it and you’re good to go. It was the easiest IT thing I’ve ever done, I think. It was just plug this cube in and be like, all right, well, it’s working now. Well, that was internet. That’s good.
Speaker 1 | 55:31.059
Yeah, that’s the opposite of a printer.
Speaker 0 | 55:34.000
Yeah. I guess in the future. And, you know, we’re probably going to still continue to have printing problems.
Speaker 1 | 55:46.603
I don’t know that this whole idea of the paperless future really never panned out, but I’m holding out hope. I’m holding out hope it somehow happens.
Speaker 0 | 55:53.305
Why hasn’t it panned out? Why? Why can’t we move away? You know, I don’t have a printer at my house anymore. And and even at the office I work, I don’t even have a printer. I don’t print anything. And yet still people still ask me to. print stuff. And it’s like, why? Why do I have to do this?
Speaker 1 | 56:12.973
Yeah, you and I can’t solve this problem.
Speaker 0 | 56:16.716
Okay, well, maybe you know what? Well, maybe that’s the idea for the future, right? It’s to figure out a problem and figure out the… We have a problem here and it’s printers. There’s an opportunity there. We need to figure out what to do with printers. Right? So that’s maybe the future is figuring out what to do with the printers.
Speaker 1 | 56:37.574
I think we figured out my destiny on this podcast.
Speaker 0 | 56:40.555
There you go. Nerds, I’m Michael Moore. I’ve been hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds with Will Peraza, who’s a Director of Information Technology at Yonkers. I was just going to say Yonkers, just messing with people. Will, it’s been absolutely fantastic having you on this podcast. Please come on again.
Speaker 1 | 57:02.844
Thank you so much for having me.
