I recenty wrote this paragraph below. The context is a discussion on mismanagement of Active Directory in Enterprise companies.
“In my dreams, one day, people will not consider AD a commodity or utility service. They will look at it as the integral piece of their corporate security and stability it truly is. AD often gets bumped up to be a critical app because of Exchange needs it but realistically, if you lose Exchange, so what, you can’t do email. You lose AD, you can’t do anything except maybe play with your own laptop.”
While I would like to see a day where AD just runs itself regardless, we aren’t there, I am not really thinking we ever will be for the larger companies, we need people who know what the hell they are doing with it and are supported in their efforts to support it.
joe
Amen, Joe.
A VP in my previous company’s IT (since let go, but not because of this) told our team’s management, “Hey, AD is just a database and it’s running okay. Why should we spend money on expensive tools?”
You mean, other than because every production and office effort in the company depends on it?
Sheesh.
My manager tried telling me this once. After ranting for a solid 5 minutes, about how nobody thinks about plumbing until their shit is on the floor – He promised NEVER to use this analogy again.
I think a big part of it is that most of these enterprises have never really lost AD so they don’t know the pain and thus the non-technical managers/decision makers will never truly realize how important it is.
They have all at one point or another probably had an email outage. They start calling the CIO right away asking why email is down. RIM loses blackberry service for a few hours last week and it makes national headlines, again they feel that pain directly. The ISP goes down and they feel that pain right away. “Why is the Internet down†Oh no I can’t get to my fantasy football scores.
AD doesn’t go down in that same manner.
I would say that most of the non-technical decision makers who push money down the pipe have never even heard of AD.