3 ms·

What kind of data is worth at least a million dollars and isn't properly backed up? Unbelievable. Some heads should roll .

duxup 6y ago
It's a university, university IT is often ultra political and those who win the various battles make the rules, regardless of competence... and often without IT's sign off. Some universities generally have done better about such things and are making progress... but generally there is a push and pull for IT dollars by unversity departments who want to spend that money as they wish for their given programs and then that money comes FROM IT ... who down the road are then tasked with the costs related to maintaining it and the terrible decisions a department made in the meantime... or in the worst of cases tasked with securing that data and / or making it work at all. It's the same story for IT in the private sector to some extent, but it is way worse at many universities. Imagine if your HR director got to pick the PCs to support, networking equipment, software, backup methods (if any) all on their own and wanted zero input. That's kinda how it is at many universities. I spent months helping a large university dig out from a program where they hooked up some super special microscopes worth millions of dollars ... to low grade network switches and storage. I got to try to explain why you can't put 10,000 pounds of data into a borderline consumer grade network ... in all of a couple milliseconds.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > It's a university, university IT is often ultra political […] While you're not necessarily wrong, another option is budget. If this is academic- / research-generated data, then it could have been paid for by grant money, and most of the cash goes to paying grad students and perhaps some computer equipment. IT may have chargebacks (they have bills / cost centres to pay too after all), and no one wants to "waste" grant money. Often these things are 'shadow IT' run in an ad hoc fashion by just throwing together some PCs. If the group's expertise is in medicine / biology, how many members want to give up their day-light research hours to run the computer infrastructure? I've spent about half my IT career in the academic sphere, and cheap solutions can be a fight to implement even if they solve the problem; even free (open source) ones can be an effort if they take time or slow down the workflow. And these people aren't stupid: they 'know' they should do some of these things. But people 'know' they should get exercise, and how many folks do that?
rovr138 6y ago
> academic work I actually know a few people working on their PhD’s that have nothing backed up. Their advisors buys servers, the university’s IT sets them up, they get access to it and work on it without backups, local copies or anything. They have grants that they may have to provide results for. As time passes, there are more people working in that lab that get access to the machines. Multiple projects being worked on for multiple grants. I also know people running unsecured stuff on public ports for easier access. Another thing, it could be that the data sets they where working on where given to them under a condition that they wouldn’t be shared, exposed or something. I don’t know anyone in medicine or healthcare and no one at this university, but that’s what I’ve seen from people I’ve met throughout the year. (I have also seems people loose their thesis because their laptops died on them and they didn’t have a backup or for their Word file getting corrupted.)

duxup 6y ago

It's a university, university IT is often ultra political and those who win the various battles make the rules, regardless of competence... and often without IT's sign off. Some universities generally have done better about such things and are making progress... but generally there is a push and pull for IT dollars by unversity departments who want to spend that money as they wish for their given programs and then that money comes FROM IT ... who down the road are then tasked with the costs related to maintaining it and the terrible decisions a department made in the meantime... or in the worst of cases tasked with securing that data and / or making it work at all. It's the same story for IT in the private sector to some extent, but it is way worse at many universities. Imagine if your HR director got to pick the PCs to support, networking equipment, software, backup methods (if any) all on their own and wanted zero input. That's kinda how it is at many universities. I spent months helping a large university dig out from a program where they hooked up some super special microscopes worth millions of dollars ... to low grade network switches and storage. I got to try to explain why you can't put 10,000 pounds of data into a borderline consumer grade network ... in all of a couple milliseconds.

throw0101a 6y ago
> It's a university, university IT is often ultra political […] While you're not necessarily wrong, another option is budget. If this is academic- / research-generated data, then it could have been paid for by grant money, and most of the cash goes to paying grad students and perhaps some computer equipment. IT may have chargebacks (they have bills / cost centres to pay too after all), and no one wants to "waste" grant money. Often these things are 'shadow IT' run in an ad hoc fashion by just throwing together some PCs. If the group's expertise is in medicine / biology, how many members want to give up their day-light research hours to run the computer infrastructure? I've spent about half my IT career in the academic sphere, and cheap solutions can be a fight to implement even if they solve the problem; even free (open source) ones can be an effort if they take time or slow down the workflow. And these people aren't stupid: they 'know' they should do some of these things. But people 'know' they should get exercise, and how many folks do that?

rovr138 6y ago

> academic work I actually know a few people working on their PhD’s that have nothing backed up. Their advisors buys servers, the university’s IT sets them up, they get access to it and work on it without backups, local copies or anything. They have grants that they may have to provide results for. As time passes, there are more people working in that lab that get access to the machines. Multiple projects being worked on for multiple grants. I also know people running unsecured stuff on public ports for easier access. Another thing, it could be that the data sets they where working on where given to them under a condition that they wouldn’t be shared, exposed or something. I don’t know anyone in medicine or healthcare and no one at this university, but that’s what I’ve seen from people I’ve met throughout the year. (I have also seems people loose their thesis because their laptops died on them and they didn’t have a backup or for their Word file getting corrupted.)