IT Department seeks clowns and jugglers

It's a circus out there

By David Gordon, 25th April 2012

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

Working in IT can sometimes feel like working in a circus. You're expected to juggle the priorities of the business, often based on who shouts loudest or who has the most clout. And you’ve got to walk the tightrope of budget management with your business, IT vendors and the inevitable consultants telling you to deliver more with less. In the case of the latter bunch – vendors and consultants – you’re inevitably going to have to ‘spend to save.’ And you know how the FD loves that principle in recession years..

It’s not that spend to save is wrong per se, but if you haven’t got the cash you simply haven’t got the cash. Worse is the fact that many of these new technologies actually do little to help deliver stuff more efficiently, effectively, securely and robustly.

Take cloud for example, that’s a circus of its own making in so many ways <Insert_own_clown_gag_here>. And if you rush into it a lack of effective policies can leave local departments, individuals even, doing their own thing in an uncontrolled and uncoordinated manner. Throw in consumerisation, BYOD, the inimitable rise of the smartphone, and you have a cacophony of madness to cope with.

Some of the more systems level stuff, like private cloud, looks great to assist with creating highly efficient shared environments. But with ‘shared’ being the operative word, private cloud can be just one short step from terms such as ‘charge back accounting,’ and show me anyone – outside of the accountancy dept – that likes that.

So against all this, how's life in the Big Top of your IT department? You can tell us all about it in our latest reader survey. It's anonymous, don't worry.

Questions include things like:

When it comes to making decisions, how much does the head of IT control things?
In your opinion is the head of IT doing a good job?
How do you feel generally at the moment about life in IT within your organisation?
Is the funding of IT generally on the way up or down?

There’s a bunch of other stuff around shifts and trends that you’ll also find interesting, so click here and tell us how things are in your world.

Once we've crunched the data, we'll publish the free report for you all to look at. It'll give you a baseline and an interesting comparison against your many Reg reader peers. There's already lots of these reports over here in fact, all free, and all pretty damned good thanks to you guys.

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery