Turn an IT Cost Center into an IT Cost Savings Center!

So many times in my career I have heard IT/Ops teams be referred to as overhead. I have also heard IT being described as “just keeping the lights on,” and all the adjacent things one can say similar to this. These type of statements has always made me want to prove that IT isn’t really just those type of things. I have always been trying to implement some sort of cost savings where we can definitively decide where to cut costs. You never want to cut costs around things that have a high positive impact. Since in many ways you do get what you pay for at times, and what you pay for may be very worth it. So, IT is a cost savings center, a service provider, an enabler, an enhancer and much more than some of the stereotypical things you might hear about how people perceive IT.

Many organizations today still struggle with hardware refresh, right sizing hardware specs, and understanding the performance impact of tools and software across their fleet of end user devices. This has been a problem since the beginning of humans incorporating technology into their professional lives. In my 25+ year career I don’t think I have ever had a job where these problems were considered solved, and I don’t think we ever got close to solving them. A major factor we have all faced while trying to solve this problem is the lack of data compounded by the problem of being able to use and leverage the data in a meaningful way.

Getting Application Usage Data at Scale With Munki

Munki is a series of tools and a popular application state management tool many Mac Admins across the globe use. Some out-of-box features of Munki solve problems many commercial MDMs still cannot solve to this day. It allows a Mac Admin to write some declarative data and have Munki takes care of the rest for you. We use it to manage and patch all of our third party apps in conjunction with AutoPKG.

Programmatically Apply FleetDM Labels from Identity Data

For a long time now it has been considered a “bad practice,” to join a macOS computer to any sort of directory service. Long have past the days of Binding to Active Directory, and the ancient lore of the golden (or magic) triangle is nearly lost in time, like tears in the rain. The one thing that we could consider missing from these days was the ability to locally query user and identity data through native tools like dscl in macOS. I have seen very clever replacement solutions over the years to get this data down to a macOS end user devices across various enterprises, but one thing has always bothered me about every method I have seen or sometimes used. The common theme was that they were all not very security focused solutions. At a previous job, LDAP lookups were just straight up open to anyone on network, like it did not have any authentication at all. When I was in vendor space I witnessed customers having various curl solutions to grab that data from some system they could cache locally. Typically, these also were not very secure either.

Success Isn’t Linear, Nor is it Transitive

With the climate of tech workers in a weird state post Covid-19 pandemic, and with the rise of the tech influencer I feel this topic is not only relevant, but also important. There are people who really want to break into a tech career from their current path, and there are people who want to change careers within tech itself. Whether you are looking to level up your existing career, make a move into a different section of tech, or just trying to break into the tech industry any way you can, you have likely heard many other people tell their success stories.

I started working in tech back in 1999. My first tech job was a repair technician at a computer store chain. I did hardware and software repairs, warranty repairs, OEM systems building, and similar support type work. Over the years I’ve likely had a similar experience to most other workers in tech. I have had bad bosses, and good bosses. I also have worked with great people, and not-so-great people as well. I will say that I am lucky in the sense that most folks I have worked with have generally been great, and the not-so-great experiences were very minimal.