10 Laws of Information Technology

1. Never lose data
2. Centralize when you can, distribute when you have to
3. Standardize when you can, customize when you have to
4. Simple is better than complex
5. Spend as little as possible to solve problem or achieve a goal
6. 100% utilization of IT assets always yield the lowest cost
7. Always have a “plan B”
8. If it CAN break, it WILL break
9. Volume Changes Everything
10. Do Not Be Married To Your Technology

Law #5 may seem very obvious, but it is not regularly practiced in IT.  I have worked at very large corporations where budgets were always “tight” but we always managed to spend big bucks for the things that the corporation cared about.  To be quite honest, however, the money seemed like monopoly money when you throw around such large numbers.  There was more than one occasion where I was confronted with a budget shortfall and I said look, let’s consolidate these functions and you would not need to spend as much on technology.  They wanted to save money, but not at the expense of shrinking empires or losing power.  In general, at large corporations we didn’t have to worry about making payroll, our spending mistakes generally didn’t shut us down or cause layoffs, and “best” vendor criteria was not always cost and performance.

Working for a small business has given me new found appreciations for IT spend.  At small firms, cash is king and it is definitely not monopoly money.  I’ve said on many occasions that we have big company problems with little company budgets and this is true.  Our lack of resources forced us to get creative with our IT spending.  If we over spend, then it could affect payroll and definitely affects how we can compensate our people with bonuses.  Another one of my favorite sayings is “spend as little as possible, we can always spend more if we need it”.  I like to start at “free” and work my way up.  This strategy has worked extremely well for me over my career.  Sure, there may be times when you went too cheap and had to toss the solution but over the long-term, you will have spent much less.

In order to employ this strategy, you have to have superstar, creative IT people.  What might look like a “cheap” product may have disastrous effects on your IT labor and support costs.  So you need to look at ALL the costs and buy accordingly.  The “spaghetti” may be cheap to acquire, but very costly to manage five years down the road.  Here are some of our most creative buys that I can recall.

1. Found an EMC CX700 with 40TB of disks for $15K on Ebay.  There are some good, used equipment out there.  This allowed us to cut-off our EMC maintenance.  Of course, you have to have IT people that are trained and can support this EMC hardware.
2. (4) Brocade fiber channel switches for $1000 on Ebay.  Again, used stuff is very nice.  These are working great.
3. Castelle Fax Server - $1000 on Ebay
4. Sonic firewall – much cheaper than other solutions and worked fine while we needed them.
5. Xwall – email spam filter.  $300 or so and did much of what the big boys can do
6. Microsoft Enterprise Agreement – Love or hate Microsoft, they have good stuff that is cost-effective.  Sure there are other products, but having a suite of Microsoft products that are integrated and low-cost allows us to provide more computing services for less money.
7. PDF Creator – low cost solution if all you need is the ability to create a PDF.
8. Double-Take – industrial strength host-based file replication that is cost-effective compared to bigger, HW-type solutions
9. Enhanced Technology SANs are able to do much of what an EMC can do and may be “good enough” for most businesses.  We use it for our backups and vmware.
10. Disk backups – with the cost of disks coming down, we have been able to eliminate the manual labor of tape rotation and shrink our backup window.  We also avoided costly HSM (hierarchical storage mgmt) solutions by just keeping everything on SATA drives.
11. Dlink gig switches work great and we have them deployed all over.  These are so cheap and work great, that some of this stuff is becoming like disposable hardware.  If they are low-cost, then you can afford to have more spares.  In Cisco’s language, I’d rather have a “spare over there” (on the shelf) than a “spare in the air”.
12. HD video conferencing – sure I would like to have one of those fancy telepresence rooms, but their initial cost is high and so are the monthly recurring costs of 12mb of bandwidth to each room.  Without sacrificing our HD need, we opted for a Polycom HDX 8000 solution and it works great and only required 2mb of bandwidth.

Remember, with this strategy you might not always be buying the most popular or name-brand technology.  Keep an open mind—there are lots of obscure products out there that will allow you to “spend the least amount of money to solve your problem”.