Speaker 0 | 00:09.606
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we have Michael McClure. McClure, am I pronouncing that correctly? Am I getting this right? I’m very paranoid about names.
Speaker 1 | 00:21.694
You got it just fine.
Speaker 0 | 00:23.495
Yeah. Okay, excellent. So thank you so much for being on the show. I love that you have gray. in your beard, as I also do. You know, you’re not one of those guys that’s dying the beard yet, are you? I have a contemplate.
Speaker 1 | 00:37.344
Oh, no, that will never happen. No, you got to embrace the gray. I mean, every one of those gray hairs stands for something.
Speaker 0 | 00:46.009
Yes, exactly. It stands for a knowledge, a character. Let’s see, what else can we say? Battles.
Speaker 1 | 00:56.315
Battles survive. Yeah. That you’re just out there doing stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 01:02.297
you got it. Now, I like that you’ve got a background picture, too, of snow in the background. And I’m sure you have, and I can say this because I have a beard, you have a beard. I’m sure you have some pictures somewhere down the line in the history of the world of ice being frozen to your beard. I’m sure you know what it’s like to have snow frozen to your beard.
Speaker 1 | 01:22.485
Oh, yes. Yeah, when we would head up to Crater Lake and… go snowshoeing and so forth or every once in a while get the opportunity of some friends of ours would go snowmobiling and invite us along. And yeah, it’s inevitable that you can’t have all that cold and moisture without getting something encrusted on the beard there.
Speaker 0 | 01:46.723
I love that you just said snowmobile. I haven’t had the snowmobile conversation yet on the show. This is an IT show, everyone, by the way. Just so everyone knows out there, this is a technology show. And, but believe it or not, people that are in IT and technology have lives outside of the server room where people slip.
Speaker 1 | 02:06.775
We do indeed.
Speaker 0 | 02:07.876
Yeah. And one of those lives is riding a snowmobile. And I’m one of the most fond memories I have. And I just replaced the battery on my snowmobile the other day. Is a like 300 mile snowmobile trip with my best friend growing up in like sixth grade. You know, we started out in like Southern Maine, drove all the way up to the Canadian border. And in Maine, they’ve got tons of snowmobile trails. It’s like I-81, and there’s two snowmobiles on the right and two snowmobiles on the left. You know, the trails are everywhere. But, you know, snowmobiling can be, it’s almost like RVing. It’s like another part of the world. It’s another world that they haven’t made a reality show out of yet.
Speaker 1 | 02:49.142
That’s true enough. And, you know, there’s just, yeah, it takes you down pathways you don’t get to see any other way. It gives you a different perspective on the world around you and everything. And, you know, you have all the noise and all the motion, but then you stop. And you’re just in the middle, especially in the snow in the winter. You know, you can, you know, be zooming through the trails, through the trees, and then you pop out into a clearing or maybe like a frozen lake or something like that with nobody around. No sounds of industry or traffic or anything. It’s just you in the moment out there. It’s really wonderful.
Speaker 0 | 03:24.351
You get, you get. it’s great because you get exhaust fumes you get the the motor piece and then you get the nature at the same time and then if you’re with if you’re with a bunch of crazy people um and there’s some open water and ice at the same time then you get people like can
Speaker 1 | 03:42.784
we make it over the open water uh so oh yeah with that being said i just came back uh i just came back from uh doing a polar plunge on Saturday for Special Olympics. Ran into the Willamette River in Eugene, Oregon. That was invigorating.
Speaker 0 | 04:01.475
We have a lot in common. I’ve always wanted to do that. And I have, I do a lot of surfing and there’s like a winter surfing. There’s a lot of guys that do winter surfing. And I saw like one of the guys that owned the surf shop up in Maine where I pretty much spend thousands of dollars each year with him. very very willingly um you know he goes he’s i ask him like you know even on the good surfing days like why aren’t you out there he’s like i can’t i gotta be you know i gotta open the shop it’s in you know summertime he’s like i do most of my surfing in the wintertime because just not everyone’s willing to go out when
Speaker 1 | 04:36.977
the it’s seven you get get some of the best waves then put on a dry suit and just get out there he doesn’t even put on a dry suit he puts on like a five mil
Speaker 0 | 04:45.024
like a 5.4 mil with really stuff. Yeah. Yeah. He’s doing seven below zero and the water is like 34 degrees and he’s out there. And you know, I guess if it’s a five or six mil wetsuit, I guess it’s still, it’s still good enough. He keeps, I just haven’t, I stopped that. So So now that we’ve gotten that stuff out of the way.
Speaker 1 | 05:08.012
Talk some IT.
Speaker 0 | 05:09.333
Yeah, I mean, you’ve been at the same company for 24 years and six months. And you’re not the first person that I’ve talked to that’s been in a company for that many years. And it’s always fun to talk with someone that’s been at the same company for that many years. Number one, I want to know why. Number two, how did you get through the ups and downs and the mistakes over the years? But in the meantime, let’s go back to September of 1995. What did the network or network specialty? You have network specialist 1996. What was so special about the network back in 19?
Speaker 1 | 05:49.492
Well, it was just brand new. And, you know, if I could go back just a year from that, I had stumbled into the business of IT support in that I was hired at the college in my first. full-time role as a registration specialist. I was in taking, you know, student paperwork and so forth, but it happened to be the same year that the college’s internal Cat5 network came online and I started being interested in it. I had this Gateway 286 in front of me and it was suddenly connected to something. And so I started fixing things and it, you know, they… Our computer services department was going out and putting out fires. And after a little while, they realized that one of the largest buildings on campus, they weren’t getting calls from. So who was to be my boss made a call over there and said, how are things working so well there? And they said, oh, Mike’s been fixing everything. And so he poked me. Yeah, he poked me into the department as a programmer aide, which I failed miserably at. Right. I don’t like programming, but luckily he also threw me out.
Speaker 0 | 07:06.053
I don’t like programmers. No. Oh. I’m joking. And I don’t like programmers either. So it’s like, you know, anyways, keep going. So anyways, you don’t like programming, but in just a…
Speaker 1 | 07:16.640
Yeah, I just don’t do well with it. I don’t like staring at pages worth of code, looking for a misplaced semicolon, that kind of thing. But he put me in front of their first two servers that the college had bought, a couple of big blocky HP servers. and let me loose on them. And from then on, I’ve just marked my way through the different job stratifications and answer to network specialists. Network specialist was just created as kind of the gunslinger who goes out to all of our different sites and diagnoses problems, deploys the equipment. We were pulling our own cat5, terminating our own cat5. So you’re the jack of all trades. if it had to do with network communication. If it plugged into the network, you dealt with it. Everything from the computers to the servers to old cut repairs and different things. You know, we had all kinds of…
Speaker 0 | 08:11.787
I’m very intrigued. You don’t still have the Gateway 286, do you?
Speaker 1 | 08:17.011
Yeah. Well, that belonged to the registration services area. So, no, I never saw that one again.
Speaker 0 | 08:25.759
No one ever talks about bringing a Cat5 network online. That shows you how old it was. Like we brought a cat five network online. What? It doesn’t even, it doesn’t even, it doesn’t even sound like it makes sense. Would you have a network card in the two 86?
Speaker 1 | 08:40.788
Yeah, we were adding in the network cards. We had to buy them separately and add them in. And because before that we had a, a vax VMS system connected to Amber terminals, you know, dumb terminals. And that was our network up to that point. So we worked through the transition from that back and to a Fox. pro database on the HP server and all of that. And yeah, we were just pulling building to building. I was the guy crawling under the buildings or up in the attics and we just did it.
Speaker 0 | 09:08.805
That’s actually a lot of fun. That’s actually a fun job. When you think about it,
Speaker 1 | 09:12.988
it can be.
Speaker 0 | 09:13.929
Cause it was new cause things were new back then.
Speaker 1 | 09:16.471
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 09:18.072
Yeah. I mean, I went to boarding school, um, for three years and I remember I remember My friend, Andrew Paul, who was always talking about being a Navy SEAL. It was back when like the movie Navy SEALs came out and we always thought,
Speaker 1 | 09:31.930
Oh yeah.
Speaker 0 | 09:32.891
You know, we thought we were like, you know, we ordered soldier fortune and, and we took like Kenpo karate and, and you know, all this stuff back in the day. And he was always talking about, I’m going to be a Navy SEAL. And we all kind of laughed. He actually became a Navy SEAL by the way.
Speaker 1 | 09:46.880
Good for him.
Speaker 0 | 09:47.721
Yeah. Became a real life like Navy SEAL, but our rooms were right next to each other. And. I had a Gateway 386. So when you say 286, that’s like, yeah. You know, he had a 486, which I was like, man. I was like jealous. And, but I remember him being like, you know, let’s buy you a network card and we’ll drill a hole in the wall and run a cord through. And I was like, what’s a network? Like, what are we going to do? Because back then you used a computer for what? Word processing, your, you know, science, maybe something with chemistry, micropipetting, lab work in a very simple spreadsheet. That’s it. That’s what you use a computer for.
Speaker 1 | 10:30.531
Word processing. Some DOS based. turn-by-turn game or something.
Speaker 0 | 10:35.274
You’re playing video games and have to…
Speaker 1 | 10:36.814
Or get frail fired up, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 10:39.756
Have to auto-exec bat and move some memory around to make it load, you know, something crazy, which no millennials know. So here’s the deep question. Here’s the deep question.
Speaker 1 | 10:48.241
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 10:49.682
How does one who has not been at a company for 24 years and six months understand the vastness of how young the internet is or… I’m just, it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be amazing now to grow up in a, in a, in a society where it’s just there. The internet’s just there. Um, we, you didn’t grow up in it. You didn’t understand any of the stuff that we kind of went through. So I wonder if it’s hard for, um, young millennials, uh, because my wife who was born in 1981 is, I guess, technically considered, considered a millennial, but, um, for the real young millennials or whatever the next generation is, YZ generation, how do they. Do you think there’s going to be a technology gap or a hard learning thing? Is that going to be a problem?
Speaker 1 | 11:38.871
Well, I think the challenging thing we are seeing because, you know, we see the millennials come through here, come through the college, and everything comes down to, you know, people have the full embracing of what Apple put out for years in let’s create something that… So very simple. It’s a highly technically advanced device, but for the user interface, we’re going to make it as simple as possible. And millennials have gotten to a point in general where they don’t want to know what the behind the scenes is. They don’t want to know the mechanism. They want it to work. They want it to work now. If it’s not easy enough, how do you make it easier for me? Because that’s the environment I grew up in is everybody trying to bring me. the easiest technology and that’s what i’m going to buy so that’s the challenge that we find is getting millennials who want to dig into the minutiae you know get into the why um and it it’s it’s hard you know that’s you know what’s easy as far really what’s that what’s easy is hard what’s easy is hard yes yeah Very true. So, I mean, yeah, just finding people who want to fill the skills gap for, you know, network administration, network security and things like that is challenging for us.
Speaker 0 | 13:14.319
Here’s a question I haven’t asked for someone that’s been in a company for a long time. What year, what year did paranoia set in?
Speaker 1 | 13:26.944
Really,
Speaker 0 | 13:27.364
like at what point were you like? Like, crap, we need to worry about, like, these people that are called hackers. Remember, they made the movie, like, Hacker or whatever it was, you know, like, whatever these were.
Speaker 1 | 13:36.867
Right, yeah. At what point did paranoia… Oh, they were going after… Yeah, what year did paranoia set in? What year? Well, for us, I mean, because, yeah, the hackers, from a conceptual standpoint, oh, they’re going after the corporations, oh, they’re going after this. You know, we are in a space that we don’t have to worry. I would say it was the timeframe that the I love you virus came up. It was too long ago. It was one that, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, that was really the timeframe where it really popped up on the radar of the midsize business, midsize higher ed and K-12 and local government and state government, all of us midsize players. finally had something that was so tasty that people couldn’t help but click on it. And our AV engines weren’t ready for it. And it actually really propagated and caused the first problem. And then after that, you know, the level of awareness just got through the roof. And as the years progressed, we’ve seen it get worse and worse. But I would say that would be the milestone. for us in my sphere and the people that I talk to is when I love you, Ed. I don’t know what you’re like.
Speaker 0 | 15:03.963
Do you remember that affecting like, like you personally or anyone personally? Do you remember having to deal with that? Just out of curiosity? I’m Google I’m going to like to I’m going to Google. Yeah, right.
Speaker 1 | 15:15.329
To find out what Yeah, to dig into that sucker.
Speaker 0 | 15:19.711
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 15:21.132
Well, I mean, the trick with that one, and I can say this, because just so you know, yeah, there we go.
Speaker 0 | 15:28.016
I thought it was I actually didn’t think it was that long ago. But wow. Okay, so 2000.
Speaker 1 | 15:31.397
Yeah. Time flies. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, Y2K, that was our Y2K. But I would, I would say, you know, I can say this now because the people involved have, have long since retired out of our college year.
Speaker 0 | 15:48.257
I’m not trying to like, I’m not trying to, how do we say this? I can’t think of the word off the top of my head, but go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 15:57.084
Well, I don’t want to throw somebody under the bus. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 16:00.907
I guess you could call that disparage. Disparage is a better word, you know, disparage somebody.
Speaker 1 | 16:06.752
I can say that a top-level executive within our organization was the one who triggered it and then who was basically the predecessor before my predecessor made the mistake of then speaking on the news and admitting. WIT executive that was on the news, on local news. And so it’s like our IT group just did a, oh. And so that’s shown a very bright light on IT as a center from which the bad things were not being stopped. So we. There was a lot of backpedaling and there was a lot of research, reinforcement, re-evaluation of the security structure we were currently using. The implementation of a more layered approach came in at that time. So, I mean, it triggered a lot of good things and there was no real damage done other than loss of productivity from the virus itself. We recovered, you know, with it. We were down for a good part of a day. And so, I mean, it didn’t impact us that adversely, but it was a very public recognition of what our security stance was with NIT. So it gave us a lot of fuel.
Speaker 0 | 17:42.462
You know, the security boss is going to laugh at me for not knowing this. You’re going to be like, what are you talking about? And it was… who are this guy, Rionel Ramones. And, you know, it was part of his senior. And this is why he perpetrated this. And I mean, like, but, but that’s, that’s, it’s just an interesting question. When did paranoia set in? So for, it was the, I love you virus in, in 2000, before that, before then it was just a, it was still just a cool job where we were a bunch of geeks playing around with computers and making stuff work and making everyone’s life easier. Now it’s much more complicated than that. It’s just, would you say that IT has gotten more fun or more stressful or both?
Speaker 1 | 18:25.689
Well, I don’t think it can. If you’re doing it right, there is going to be an owned amount of stress. I think you can’t if, you know, because security is something, IT security is just like… regular season. It’s something you do. It’s not something that’s done. So, I mean, there’s always going to be something on the horizon. There’s always going to be some focus and some, you know, you’re going to be reevaluating your weak points and recognizing that, you know, we’ve gone past an era of, you know, are we going to get hit? It’s more like when we get hit, how fast can we recover? I mean, that’s where we’re at. It’s not the if-now-wins. The if-now-wins, it’s now. We focus on now and what we are going to be able to do to keep our business functions going. So with that comes a certain amount of stress. But the challenge of it has to be one you embrace. I mean, because if you can embrace the challenge of it, there is where you find your fun. And just being able to… Talk dynamically to other peers within your IT, your internal structure, your local and community structure, and beyond, and going to IT security conferences and so forth, and just continuing to… learn and look at different angles and hear different viewpoints from other people in your field on how to tackle things and how to deal with the day-to-day. And still, for me, you know, having a life outside it, like we started the conversation with, is an important factor in not having your brain explode. You got to have other things you can focus on to… to keep you going. Because if you bury yourself in the fear, then yeah, it’ll eventually defeat you.
Speaker 0 | 20:36.220
Gotcha. Do you think IT leaders, security leaders have a hard… Well, I doubt security guys high up, but do you think there’s some misset expectations in that security realm when you say you’ve got to embrace the challenge, right? We need to be setting the right expectations with executive management, et cetera. Where’s the cutoff? Where’s the cutoff of, hey, we got hacked. It’s going to happen. I guess let’s flip the script here a little bit and say, how does, I’m curious, how do you think executive management and leadership of companies and in the public space and everything, how do you think? They even know how to evaluate whether their security guys know what he’s doing.
Speaker 1 | 21:34.110
Well, I mean, that is the onus there is on your security person, whoever is representing IT security speaking to exec level, administrative level personnel. You have to be able to break things down in a way that makes sense to them. from whatever, if they’re in the business function, if they’re in the executive function, whatever their function is, you have to be able to look at, you know, you have your own information that you can just view a bunch of terms that they don’t understand and a bunch of statistics that are just going to bring fear and all of these different variables that they’re going to they’re going to reel away from. They’re going to say, I don’t want to hear that. So you have to be able to streamline and customize that message in a way that makes sense, not only from an IT security model, but from a business function model that is that. It increases business. It makes things safer. It will increase productivity and consumer confidence and things like that. You just have to tweak it a little bit. And talking to different people within my organization and my community and so forth, there are several different ways that I approach talking to them about the same subject. And it’s just knowing your audience and speaking to them. with respect from the area that they learned in and that they are operating at.
Speaker 0 | 23:26.444
In other words, as many conversations as often as possible with a little bit of details and paranoia.
Speaker 1 | 23:40.968
Just enough to flavor it a bit.
Speaker 0 | 23:45.702
Uh, it’s excellent. So, um, maybe just give me one of those. Um, I don’t know. What’s, what would you say is your best piece of advice for having those conversations for anyone that’s, I don’t know. I think one of the common themes is a lot of times there’s a disconnect between it and executive management. People get stuck in a cost center. Uh, people get stuck trying to ask for money for an initiative that they need for an upgrade or something like that. Maybe what’s your philosophy around? uh, gaining executive buy-in?
Speaker 1 | 24:19.754
Um, reading the audience, uh, if I’m talking to one person, or if I’m talking to the board, or I’m talking to a smaller group, or whatever it may be, um, being able to read the audience and adjust pit when I start to see eyes glazing over, or I start to see people, you know, they obviously. start tuning out at a certain point if it’s not going in a direction that’s viable to them. And, you know, be able to quickly do a little mental reset, have some backup, just things you can throw out to them in that conversation that will re-engage them.
Speaker 0 | 25:00.590
Gotcha. And I’ve heard from a lot of other, just when it comes to, I guess, asking for money or for some initiative that you need, maybe it’s a security thing. And obviously, IT costs money. It does. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a cost center. A little bit harder in the public space where you guys have strict budgets, and you’re not actually always looking at maybe, you know, IT as a revenue generator, it might be IT as a… you know, keeping the shop running type of thing.
Speaker 1 | 25:33.883
But one of the-Yeah, keeping the doors open. I mean, we have, you know, we are at least at that point. Whereas before we were easily put aside, but in the last few years, there is an overall recognition that with so much of what we do being either in local databases or in the cloud, that keeping- This functional, you know, keeping IT functional and keeping things secure keeps our doors open.
Speaker 0 | 26:09.176
There’s just so many applications. There are so many ways for kids to learn. I mean, you’re a college, right? There’s got to be so many applications and so many moving parts that there’s got to be a thousand ways that you make people’s lives easier, faster, better. Easier, faster,
Speaker 1 | 26:25.201
better. Yeah. And we have more and more. students and more and more instructors who never set foot on one of our campus locations. They are going straight to our distance learning portal, straight to the cloud, and getting degrees. And in the case of the faculty, getting paychecks without, they don’t care about the history. They care about how can I more easily get into this portal while I’m at the same time saying, how can I make sure this portal is secure for them?
Speaker 0 | 26:59.076
Without ridiculous latency and all kinds of other factors that come into play. This has been a great and outstanding conversation. What’s the last thing? Team, how big is your team?
Speaker 1 | 27:18.070
I have four network administrators under me. And then I have a partner IT director who has a network administrator that we work hand-in-hand with.
Speaker 0 | 27:31.653
And how many end users and moving parts and people and kind of end points that you guys, I mean,
Speaker 1 | 27:40.740
essentially six or seven people are trying to help? Right. That’s a more and more challenging question to answer because looking from like a database perspective, there’s maybe 1,400 staff accounts, but a lot of them are part-time faculty. And at Conquer Those part-time faculty, the only use they have with us is to log on to our secure portal and then log on to our learning management system in the cloud. So, I mean… We have anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 students per semester. A big chunk of them are in the cloud. So, yeah, we’re representing quite a lot of people, but the numbers decrease when you talk about seated classes and so forth. And full-time employees, we have about 250.
Speaker 0 | 28:35.969
Well, I think part of the… I don’t know if we want to call it a revolution, maybe an awakening. Maybe we should call this an awakening. I like to refer to revolution as well, but that can be, I don’t know if revolution is the right word. Maybe it’s awakening. But the IT director, the person in charge of technology quite often is tasked with a ridiculous amount of different silos and less silos than more silos. Less silos than more silos if you’re… if you’re good at your job and the ratio of individual person helping an end user endpoint is like, is at a bare minimum one to a hundred. So that’s like going into your, your freshman year, um, you know, biology class with, you know, 200 students in the room and one, and one professor upfront. And can he really possibly care to know, um, all of his students? student gets lost, like a student gets lost. But the, the consequences could be catastrophic from a technology standpoint and depending on, you know, what the business is. And all of that is kind of riding on, on the tech, on the shoulder of technology. And I don’t know if the IT director in 80% of all the organizations in the face of this earth right now is getting the due respect that they deserve and or the support that they deserve based on the amount of responsibility.
Speaker 1 | 30:17.390
Oh, yes. I mean, it’s just a reality. I have a list of our areas of operation within our department, and we’re not even front of house. So there is a separate IT director who runs our help desk and distance learning. I’m IT network and cloud connection and our server farm and different things like that. But myself and my admins all have at least three major areas of responsibility within those areas. And, you know, we try and backfill each other on them. But, you know, easily any one of those areas of operation would be one person’s full-time job. And there’s just no way. So we all just spread it out and try and backfill with each other. I consider myself lucky in that within my structure, I have three site administrators. And then I have a special projects administrator who spends time with each of the three sites. administrators and spends time with me. And so he’s that, that conduit for keeping, uh, each other up to speed on different pain points that we’re having different focuses we need. And so I found that very beneficial. I could of course use more people, but it’s not going to happen. So we, we make, make do with what we have.
Speaker 0 | 31:41.040
Have you ever done anything real ninja that just made life so much better? Was there any upgrade or anything that you did or something that you fell upon? You never know. I might uncover some crazy golden nugget.
Speaker 1 | 31:56.645
Well, I mean, just the big push that I’ve had as we’ve grown is making sure that our WAN and Internet infrastructure keeps pace. Because I talked to so many of my colleagues who end up with these scope points. especially as they grow their cloud infrastructure and so forth. So for me, a source of pride is that, you know, we just went through a major overhaul and I was able to push through to get us upgraded 10 gig site to site. We’re finalizing a spin up of SD-WAN with three separate gig internet connections in two different counties and just having that SD-WAN infrastructure to have that fail over and fail back. and load balancing and everything to make sure everybody can see that nothing is wrong from a communication standpoint, that it’s business as usual, that they don’t see those points. Yeah. They would never go. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 32:59.576
Oh, yeah. It’s huge. And it’s load balancing is putting it lightly. It really is. Cause it’s not, I mean, it’s not really load balancing. It’s, it’s, um, it’s bandwidth aggregation. Cause you’re using. multiple circuits at one time. We’re not really kind of like failing back and forth and flip-flopping, which can create so many issues like it did in the past, and complex BGP network schemes and stuff like that. Then just application stacking too. I don’t know if you’re using some of the benefits of SD-WAN and application stacking and prioritization of applications.
Speaker 1 | 33:31.855
Yes, yes. I mean,
Speaker 0 | 33:32.416
on YouTube, when one circuit goes down or the network gets congested, we’re just going to not allow people to watch YouTube.
Speaker 1 | 33:40.402
or whatever it is you know that might be appropriate for an educational uh institute but yeah it’s tricky what we can and cannot filter or block or what have you but we can give priority uh based on application and we run into the challenge that a lot of organizations do as far as so many things being encapsulated into https so you know it makes it a little harder to aggregate but um we are using some of that functionality and do see the benefit.
Speaker 0 | 34:12.740
Well, Michael, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for being on.
Speaker 1 | 34:18.042
Glad to.
