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<\/a><\/p>\nWhen I started in IT in 1996, it wasn’t long before I joined a Unix system administration team that\u00a0had an\u00a0ethos which has guided me throughout my career:<\/p>\n
The best sysadmins are lazy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Even more so than system administration, this applies to anyone who works in data protection. The best people in data protection are lazy.<\/p>\n
Now, there’s two types of lazy:<\/p>\n
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- Slothful lazy<\/strong> \u2013 What we normally think of when we think of ‘lazy’; people who just don’t really do much.<\/li>\n
- Proactively lazy<\/strong> \u2013 People who\u00a0do as much as they can in advance in order to have more time for the unexpected (or longer term projects).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
If you’d previously thought I’d gone nuts suggesting\u00a0I’ve spent my career trying to be lazy (particularly when\u00a0colleagues read my blog), you’ll hopefully be having that “ah…ha!” moment realising I’m talking about being proactively lazy. This was something I learnt in 1996 \u2013 and\u00a0almost twenty years down\u00a0the track I’m pleased to see whole slabs of the industry (particularly infrastructure and\u00a0data protection) are finally following suit and allowing me to openly talk about the virtues of being lazy.<\/p>\n
Remember that embarrassingly enthusiastic dance Steve Ballmer was recorded doing years and years ago at a Microsoft conference while he chanted\u00a0“Developers! Developers! Developers!<\/a>” A proactively lazy data protection administrator chants “Automate! Automate! Automate!” in his or her head throughout the day.<\/p>\n
Automation is the key to being\u00a0operationally\u00a0lazy\u00a0yet\u00a0proactively efficient.\u00a0It’s also exactly what\u00a0we see being the focus of DevOps, of\u00a0cloud service providers, and massive scale\u00a0converged infrastructure. So what are the key areas for automation? There’s a few:<\/p>\n
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- Zero error policies<\/a> \u2013 I’ve been banging the drum about zero error policies for over a decade now. If you want the TL;DR summary, a zero error policy is the process of automating the review of backup results such that the only time you get an alert is\u00a0when a failure happens. (That also\u00a0means treating any new “unknown” as\u00a0a failure\/review situation until\u00a0you’ve included it\u00a0in the\u00a0review process.)<\/li>\n
- Service Catalogues <\/a>and Policies \u2013\u00a0Service catalogues allow standard offerings that\u00a0have been well-planned,\u00a0costed and associated clearly with an architected system. Policies are the\u00a0functional structures that enact the service catalogue approach and allow you to\u00a0minimise the effort (and therefore\u00a0the risk of human error) in configuration.<\/li>\n
- Visual Dashboards \u2013\u00a0Reports are OK, notifications are useful, but visual dashboards are absolutely\u00a0the best at providing an “at a\u00a0glance” view of a system. I may joke about Infographics from time to time, but there’s no questioning we’re a visual species \u2013 a lot of information can be pushed into a few simple glyphs or coloured charts*. There’s something to be said for a big tick to indicate everything’s OK, or\u00a0an equally big X to indicate you need to dig down a little to see what’s not working.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n