| 1.
Basic Principals
Computer
problems! - Every company has experienced them. They are a fact of life
and they are inherent to the complexity of today’s corporate
environments. Or are they really?
In
my years as an IT professional I’ve seen so many companies struggle with
the simplest of tasks because their computers “died” on them.
Everything from losing data and jobs due to hard disk failures through
unscheduled equipment down-time due to hardware problems to catastrophic
virus infections requiring massive clean-up efforts to get things back on
track. The reasons are as many as there are components to the company’s
infrastructure and yet, most companies sit and wait for the catastrophe to
happen. But are these situations really unavoidable? Is the effort
necessary to prevent them really that unreasonably high?
This series of
articles is intended as a guide to producing a stable and protected
computing environment in your small or medium sized company
without breaking the bank. It will give examples and provide some
explanations on common reasons for computer problems and show alternatives
to avoid them.
In
this first article I want to talk a little about the criticality of
components and what causes them to fail. Surprisingly enough, it is not
really the hardware or software itself that is to blame for most outages.
In my experience it is change that causes the most problems. The IT
industry uses the humorously intended phrase “don’t touch a running
system” but many do-it-yourselfers should actually take it quite
serious.
The
ease of use and the computer industry’s “you can do it” approach to
what they call “plug and play” have created a mind set that implies a
much higher degree of simplicity than is actually the case. By allowing
everyone to customize their computers a system administrator has a
nightmare of one-off systems at hand and no effective way to control it.
For that very reason it is imperative to keep as many systems in the
company at the same level of hardware, software and configuration as
possible.
(read
on ...)
Copyright (c) 2008 by In Scope-Solutions,
Inc.
|
