I start to run my own company, what is the basic I need

Starting to run your own business and company is not an easy decission to be made. When the decissions all paper work has been done there is a new challenges to get everyting in place that you can run your business from communication and collaboration view with your customer.

The question is not to get all the services, connection and devices you need, it is more how difficult it is and why I cannot get those from one shop door.

Let's start:

1. First I need a phone, a smart phone. I have some model on my mind and look the cheapest version to buy it from the store. Drive 30 km to get it 10€ cheaper.

2. Next I need a PC or Tablet and again use a short time to search  and drive some km's to get it maybe 40€ cheaper or order it from the online store and wait couple of days to shipped.

Wow, fantastic, now I have PC and phone but can I make business no. So lets go to 3rd shop to by mobile and home connection

3. Next i walk to store to get the SIM card with number and data connection with 23,00€ per month with unlimited amount of data but

4. I take home ADSL from other ISP while they have the best offer compared to ISP I took the mobile connection

5. And in worst case I will start to use the "Free" email available on both mobile and ADSL connection, and actully got good offer for 4G USB Dongle from 3rd ISP only 30,00€ per month including the dongle.

Great, now i have connection, as far someone come and configure the WLAN at my home to be secure and not using standard setting that all my neighbours use too - but dont go there yet.

No I can use email where my email address is like petri.aalto@operatordomain.com - fantastic but my company's name is Pete's Custom & Consulting not @operatordomain.com - so should i do someting better - YES.

Ok but how and what.

6. I need to register the domain for me (so was told) so I use my credit card and register my domain @Office365-expert.com and I got now the email address like firstname.lastname@office365-expert.com from DNS service vendor, correct?
Yes not No - you have the email working for sure but what are the features you got, calendar, integraton, storage and so on or public web site even and what about Social media like Yammer and Twitter for example.....

7. Ok back to basic. I was told that Microsoft Office 365 is great service with bunch of features and even evergreen - wow. So use again my credential to purchase one Office 365 license with Office client application too for example and

8. order local IT vendor to do all the domain mappings and license activation, guide me how to configure my Outlook, Skype for Business and OneDrive for Business at the client side. But they could not guided me how to use SharePoint ONline, Planner, Flow, Delve, Skype for Business Broadcast and other services so I continue to use my time and find.... and they also ask if I should allow open federation or block all expect listed but I have no idea what he was talking about and thank's God i seleted open to all.

9. a company who can make me nice "intranet", team and project site with external access, configure Yammer allowing me to create external group like in SharePoint Online.

OK now I'm ready to start my business but how do I invoice and get the money from the work I do at the customer side. Well I need

10. POS devices witch can be separate using own Data SIM or USB device connected to my Phone with some card limitation. So I have option to take the own device from the ISP or the device and cloud service liike iZettle. Yes, I can now get the money from the work but still how to handle the invoicing well

11. so spend again some time and maybe more time to see what's good and cheap. After hours work in found service called Heeros as and example. But someone told to me also that why you dont take Dynamics 365 while you use already Office 365 witch was great thinking. So sign on to my Office 365 portal and after hours find what I need and order it. So maybe in the first time I was able to use someting that I already have except

12. I was forced to purchase some consulting work to my CRM and Invoicing to work.

13. and for all these I would also get some training easily or access to on demand videos and training materials with low price.

Shortly - I don't even want to count how much time I have used to be able to run my business but shortly I count that at least 80 has gone for not valuable and chargeable work.  Second option is the word cheap, cheaper or cheapest witch does not work with the word good, better and best unless you purchase the cheapest and the best ones same time. There is no good and cheap unfortunately but of course some exeption can be found.

So question is that why there is no vendor in place (or at least I have not found from the globe) who offers everything as a service - device, connection, POS, communication, collaboration and financial services fro monthly based pricing with portal where I can easily order new one's when hired new people.

14 OMG, I forgot the security and how to manage and patch the devices and deploy application and even run selective wipe. So there is Mobile Iron and others but some one told again that actually you have subscription based license for Intune and just order it from the Microsoft portal. Wow, this is 3rd time I can use same service to login and purchase without new contract to new vendor.

Next I would need to show my company's presence in Twitter so creating new twitter account or using Azure AD for authentication - I would select that and lucky me, I can select now also Twitter and x amount of other application from the portal - how cool is that?


So maybe, just maybe there can be in the future a service provider who will offer this type of end to end services for Small and Medium size Business with 1-50 employees for example. And yes those will not be the most cheapest but I recommend to look and calcute where the hours is worth to use - chargeable work or hated back office work at night and time away from your wife and kids - remember that too. What is the the value of the private life.

Almost forgot the picture - not my favorite but can feel the power....

All opinions are my own..

Judgement day - are you ready to make the the change in organizational culture, management and infrastucture

The Truth - does it looks familiar?

You cannot hide it.......
You cannot run away from it.....
You cannot forgot it....
You cannot be compliace without doing it...      
You cannot leave it behind..... 
You have dublicates from it....
You have it in multiple storage (file server, email, backup (email & file server)

You have known it!
You have accepted it!
You have been too nice!
You dont want to disturb your end users...
You don't know who owns it?
You have migrated it without any clean up action multiple time!
You are paying from it?

Part of it does not have any value anymore!
Part of it should be saved to somewhere else, the right place!
It is growing more faster...
It is changing the format and requiring more storage..
It increses your cost for nothing -- more hardware...
It, unvaluable is located in SAN storage behind high available setup (controllers and disk cabins)
It has always been transition during hardware upgrade...
We have not  really questioned it why we migrate all...
We have used both copy and move to migrate the data (Last modify date older than create time stamp)..

You have lacked of policies and governance...
You have lacked of tracking and automation...
You have no BYOD view....
You have not communicated...

IN THE FUTURE YOU MUST KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE...
IN THE FUTURE YOU MUST BE ABLE TO SHOW WHAT YOU HAVE OR NOT...
IN THE FUTURE YOU ARE ACCOUNTABLE.....
and
IN THE FUTURE THERE IS A RISK FOR A ADMINISTRATIVE FEE IF NOT DOING ANYTHING


and for sure, you don't know what you have in your file servers 🙈🙉🙊
 

There is no escape except shape up, make decission and pay the bill, it's pay day - from your old legacy data I mean. It is a risk of deleting or keeping data

Nevertheless of  the decissions, business cannot expect IT to make the clean up decissions for the data owned by the business. IT is a enabler, responsible from the old and new platform aligned with organizations digital workplace and digitalization strategy - how  organization will work in the future world.

Business cannot delegate or ask the IT to delete the old data, instead business should start clean up process to delete the old data and together with IT think the user profiles, governance, metadata, retention and e.g. understand from where the unstructured data is coming.

So deleteting data from 2003 now without any changes for the future does not fix anyting while it does not drive the change.

You can expect to to have more questions than answers and to all questions you cannot find the information in reasonable cost, and it is more to identify the risks, make a decission and execute.

Starting is actually not so difficult but you can spent all time available to discuss and try to fine world hugging solution and ensure that all exceptions is taking care before you start the migration. But still you will find solution and user scenarious witch you have not been able think or even more identify, like broken inheritance at the ACL level, Access / Excel files in file share with only link in user desktop etc...

So for the beginning witch you should start regardeless if you have defined the target or not is to:

0. Get commiment from both business and IT.

Without clear commitment and statement from the business, this will be agaiin one IT driven try / attempt with no clear impact except cost only.
Business' role here is critical to understand the pros and cons and impacts of the decissions while selecting this or that there is concequence  from the decissions. It can be final while we need to create something valuable what was deleted or administrative fee based on the EU GDPR starting from May 2018 or risks where user makes syncronization possible from organization data using OneDrive for Business to to their personal, consumer OneDrive for purpose or accidentally.
Discuss with your CISO and Data Protection Officer to get their view to support the decissions, and DOCUMENT THE DECISSIONS with signature to show the selected activities.

One key here is to get approval for transformation and not transition only, while without transformation there will be no change in behaviour, only lift and sift like moving data from Windows 2008 file cluster in EMC storage to Windows 2016 in NetApp Storage. Only new cost.

1. Communication plan

Create communication plan explaining why this must be done and making the work meaninful. Involve the end user to clean up activities through gamification with awards (expect to get technical limitations and Access Denied issues when collecting amount of files and total size of users personal folder as and example)
Prepare your self to get resitance and negative feedback and how to resolve and answer to those to change to attitude to right direction.
Leave some room for ad-hoc communication while all the user scenarious are not know but be ready to responce in timely manner.

You cannot success without right communication.

  2. Share and find the owner

List all servers with share name and ACL's in the share level --> try to avoid opening the discussion from folder level ACL's unless you unlimited budget (in that case pls call me).
Parallel run the scripts to find unwanted file formats like movies, files with illegal characters and if migraton target is SharePoint also to identify possible files with long url risk (combination of basic URL and migrated data path)
One observation also has been how easily it is to find from the data mass when the last server upgrade has been done. You can find thousands or hundred thousands file with same creation time stamp like 23.7.2005 were the last write time stamp can be earlier like 2.3.2002 or later 3.10.2016
You might also found ACL with SID number string instead of group name what might be  SID history or deleted group, forgot to delete from share too.

Also check if Last Accessed time stamp available, there, if remember correctly can be some changes in different Windows Version how they handle the last access time stamp. (use Google)

Make the list available and editable in SharePoint Online or On premise, where you can use the SharePoint features to automate and collect data from multiple users parallel. At the minimum you should have:

• Country/Location - if not able to identify from the server name
• Server name
• Share name
• ACL's from the share level (assume everyone or domain users with full controll at the share level)
• Responsible IT person (known person)
• Owner(-s) of the share (when local IT has found must added here)
• Normal status (Not started, Work In Progress WIP, Completed, Closed, Pending)
• Share type (application, project, departement, local, temporary, personal....) 
• Secure must be protected and cannot be migrated to cloud (Yes / No)
• Free comments / Notes

 If targets and migration approach has been selected then to same list can be added

• Target (SharePoint Online, On premise DC, Backup, Azure File Server, delete...)
• Migrate (all, from year xxxx to zzzz)

To get answers to the basic question will be challenging and requires on going management and support to local resource and also communication with hosting partner to resolve all ACL based issues.

When done, you should have better understanding of what you have who is the owner and also might been able to identify mismatch in security level like user based ACL's or wrong group added with full access. Usually one question is that does Local Administrors or Domain Admins require the access to file shares owned by business. Question is good but for me on observation would the usage of domain admins group while part of the Local administrators group already. So lots of valuable data showing the behaviour from the history.

Gentlemen, Start your engine.

More coming later

All are my personal opinions

My first car was like this Toyota Crown Wagon fromyear 1966-67 and I was 15 years old only. I bought it while couldn't by a  motor bike - thank's to my mom :-)

Toyota Crown Station Wagon

Save to death or enabler for Digitalization PART i

Save to death or enabler for digitalization is the questions every organization should ask them self when constricting IT budget.

Without Business there is no IT but also without IT you cannot do business anymore and some years ago the change happens where the IT is enabler and not only costs as seen so earlier but why did we understood that.

Digitalization and getting the benefits out from the existing or new information cannot be done without investment witch actually restrict the organization to value from information and data. Pragmatic we can reduce our cost, we can optimize our work or we can create new business but why it is so difficult to make decisions witch reduce the cost, influence to our end user performance and might create new value.

Example, what has been the benefit for automating car manufacturing with robots's. I would say huge, and background to realize the benefits has been the decisions to make investment, spent money to build capabilities or reduce cost. Quite simple everyone can agreed - hopefully. To get minerals you need to have tools to dig - invest / spent money to get something.

Are we still in the mindset that business leadership does not understand the benefit of the data (to saved and deleted) and change in the end user behavior - with prioritizing of course.  Data witch has no positive value and not deleted turns to high risk of negative value through the EU GDPR requirements to prove and demonstrate the data usage or not. 

Some smarter has said that success starts from our own employees, when they are happy, your customers are happy and share that on the feedback, it is easier to get more business with good feedback witch means higher turnover with should mean better revenue and profit.

So we came back to basic questions, how we will offer the best tools, communication and collaboration setup witch fits best based on the user role and responsibilities regardless what device they use. 

How we made the accurate information available for the users instead of making available bunch of unvaluable data.

So where the data is stored. Application with data bases, network shares, local PC and cloud both consumer and business version.

Example how the data can be a risks regardless how it will be seen.

1.  End user use dropbox or OneDrive at his home PC saving legal and illegal data to PC
2. Cloud service will syncronize it to cloud witch is the reason to use those services
3. User configure the OneDrive or DropBox to work PC syncing the personal data from cloud to on premise
4. This folder might then be copied with scripts to corporate network share and backup systems OR folder is synced to OneDrive for Business to corporate Office 365 tenant.

So we can clearly see the security risk and risk for saving personal data - both legal and illegal - in corporate storage from where the organization does not have any information. From GDPR point of view and IF something happens, organization must go through these file to confirm that there is no personal data to to data subject who has made the request or who is part of the security breach. All these equals to cost and is a risk witch should be identified and discussed.

Users are smart and they try to find the way how they can work if organization does not allow for example way how to share data with partners and here the risks is that the corporate data will be synchronized via cloud services to their home PC witch should not allowed in any how.

And coming back to basic question, what we have done to protect us from this, what we have done to communicate with the end user what is allowed and what not, how we try to ensure that we don't have data in wrong place and keep unvaluable data in our storage. Normally the hardware upgrade means pragmatically to copy the same unknown data to new storage every 5 years. 

So what can be done to get the data visible and available, reduce the costs and automate the data archive and retention and does it make any value for us. I would say absolutely Yes, the legacy data can be available from one common connection point like SharePoint even if the data is stored to Azure blob storage. This is one example how to use Azure PaaS and Storage in the background. Moving the data to cloud also should have change impact to network connectivity, why to use more expensive MPLS connection while data is available from public cloud. 

What we have seen is the change in the small offices where the local file server and MPLS connection has been changed cloud storage and xDSL connection with Site to Site VPN solution through internet to corporate regional or main data center to allow the access to internal business application -witch actually can also be published through Azure services and fits nicely to web services.

Everything is related to everything

I recommend you to read the Avanade's blog by Wictor Wilen from Sweden, while it really works as a eye opener in many ways.

From Baby Boomers to Generation 2

It explain how different generations works and familiar with, witch actually opens great opportunity to change management for service adoption and penetration.

Second topic it brings is the idea what to use and when BUT here one key is the information not the technology.

As we can see Wictor has wider view and perspective to what tools used and where and linking it to the generational preferences and Priority/time sensity.

This is awesome and started to work when deployed BUT what happens to old legacy solution and data witch is the issue. Too often the transition project does not include funding to move the data from legacy to new to help organization to benefit from the investments.  End user experience cannot be seen very great if they have data what they use daily in File Servers, SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online witch correlate to save to death but the root cause is deeper. It's the mindset to save all and it has been the way of working from the history together with open policy allowing users to save everything to everything and parallel to bemoan while not find the data or it's not accuracy and cannot find people who knows from the topic she/he is looking for.

Using monthly, subscription based services one key is the user profiling, so to add one additional layer to picture above is to profile users. What they services they use now, what services they will use in the future and then map to right monthly service subscriptions.

Secondly we can also mirror the information value compared from individual to organization and there understanding the usage of information means a lot. Different departments handle different type of information with own requirement to save the data. Finance has it own laws describing how long data must be saved where R&D must save technical data with it's rules. There is mandatory data witch can or cannot be deleted but there is huge amount of draft and temporary data with no need to save but still saved. This is creates the snowball effect and data berg (Veritas) like iceberg - only small part of the data is known and there is more data from where organization does not have understanding.

 

If you noticed, today's workplace also have bot's helping the user daily work witch means increased performance witch equals better productivity witch means better profit - simple or not?

So what to do if saved to death? Start to get together and agreed that now we need to use the saved money from earlier years - there is no free cheese like Rainmakers say..

So make a decisions, get the funding's and start to work, there is no short cut - unfortunately except bankruptcy if administrative fines set while not done anything.

So everything is related to everything but also the greatest benefits come from bigger change in both technical, process and user experience view. Still it is only work and mostly the technology is there, some available from OOB in latest Windows Server version or through commercial applications like Veritas Data Insight and Enterprise Vault for archiving with multiple storage option like SharePoint Online, Microsoft StorSimple with Azure, Azure Blob Storage and local SAN and storage system.

Weekly theme: Less Data is smaller risk

All thoughts and are my own

Following pictures shows what can be achieved with hard work witch also works for this article.

American Car Show Helsinki, Finland 2016 "Make it shine"

Why organization does not take the benefits from Office 365 new features?

Benefit from Microsoft Office 365 evergreeness

How often your organization Office 365 Service Manager has visited on the following page explaining the Office 365 roadmap Office 365 Roadmap ?

Very simple questions what every CIO should ask from the team. "Hi Team, please explain the new features m & functions Microsoft is releasing from Office 365 and included to our current subscriptions with no financial impact?"

Unfortunately the answer can be something what the CIO does not expect to get and this is a huyge problem and slow down the organization's path to digital master or journey to digital workplace, and impacting to the the user daily work and perfomance.

Based on this the CIO might also ask a question why we moved to cloud if our internal behavior in evergreen service is based on working and collaboration with the local outsourcing provider on the history, where nothing came free and it was also project to upgrade the version or add new services.

How we realize the cloud benefits?

How we support our business and how they benefits from new services in their daily work?

So, couple great question for CIO's table and team agenda - but this is not the end - it just the start.

CIO is responsible to offer services witch usually equals to financial costs and here we should change the hat and think this from CFO side.

The CFO might ask from CIO that how the benefits, TCO and ROI are based on the business case and based on his/her knowledge from cloud he/she should be also interested of the cost versus benefits to avoid paying from nothing. If i would be CFO i really like to know that if we are paying the next 3 years fixed price per month per user from the service in contract sign date but the service will have more richer features available with no cost. So you would get more with same money but you don't want and use them. This is like investing money, put one million dollar to shares and in the next three years we are not interested of dividend or the appreciation of the shares- No No, we just want to get our 1 million dollars back after three years.

Sounds scary if CFO will accept this type of spending but again unfortunately through. So some very actully stupid question from financial point like

How much we are paying without using the features and services available for free? (Like owning and retail but not renting that, just keeping it warm and clean and paying from the insurance and
electric - you got the point)

Next questions is a little bit tougher and requires good understanding from the organization's business and employees and how we personalized or profiles those. Below is very very small analysis for three years using user based monthly subscription and what is the impact if done in more detailed way even that it take more time to established.

In our Office365-Expert organization we 34 000 Information worker, 10 000 field worker and 20 000 factory worker.

So we can clearly see the financial benefits from user profiling but of course this does not come for free and requires hard work and have extra cost to do the required changes in the existing legacy solution and IAM systems.

The user profiling partially brings on the table the third part - the business and it's VP's, Executives and so on, from where everything starts.
Without business there is no demand for any IT services - none, njet, no, Ei.... but also thinking other side how IT can be business enabler and enrich the users daily work and work performance or generate totally new business opportunities.

So pragmatically we have three CxO level persons who don't know or have the visibility how the increase the user performance witch is the key, how to be more innovative and collaborate more, not the technology.

couple questions the board of executives can think might be like

How we collaborate globally?
How we found right resource to support the business using our tools?
How we share information at the right time and way?
How we simplify our technical architecture and utilize more cloud services?
How we build the model to share the business requires and Office 365 new services aligned with financials?
How we can utilize Office 365 in our journey to EU GDPR compliance
Do we use other cloud based applications like SalesForce and ServiceNow witch can be configured to use Azure AD for user authentication?
Do we have services witch can be replaced with Office 365 and out of the box features included in our monthly prices?


To be able to realize the evergreen cloud services benefits you need drive and have the ownership for the change, You can call it Center of Excellence, Cloud Excellence, Digital Excellence  and they key is the team with talents from different technologies like Office 365 is based on, it starts from identity and security and goes through communication and collaboration to analytics and software development skilled people from your own organization or from selected partner.

For the change you need the boost and right attitude like the blower below above the V8. You cannot get speed and horsepower for free and same works in organization, instead you need to make investment and in digital work learn how to fail and learn from it and do it faster and faster parallel to create business value or more speed :-)

Car show Helsinki Finland

All pictures and thoughts are my own

Remember and learned something from year 2000 change --> Be smarter with EU GDPR

From year 2000 IT change to next big change - EU GDPR

How many of us remember the IT workload when we came from history 1900 to new and magnificent 2000 century and Windows 2000 Active Directory and changes in the application and so worth - was great time for trainers. Running from customer to customer and keeping Microsoft MOC 1560 NT 4 to Windows 2000 Upgrade and our own Windows Server 2000 courses.

That was the history part and lets keep it there - but this brings at least to my mind how we have prepared to May 25th 2018 when the EU GDRP comes in to effect.

The answers varies, some organization does not even know from this and others have started to prepare and others are between and or does not do anything.

Other questions is the possibility to use the law wrong way where criminal organization start to recruit people or asks people to go from one organization to another ask's them to show what they have from them and please forgot me.

Sound's like DDOS Denial-of-Service-Attack's and all based on law.

How many requests one organization can carry and use resource for this? How many resource and FTE's time they can spend to go through the request and understand if there is any risks that yes there might be some personal data from that user user who made the request.

What if I will pay 5$ per user to make the query to any global services offering organization like eBay, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix - you know what I mean. Let's assume that someone invest 10 000$ and get 2000 users to make the request to three company Amazon, eBay and Netflix and find data from them. Based on the law they need to analyze what they have from those user's and it might be nothing - those users has not even create account to any of those services but the labour cost to do the analysis is somewhere. Then investing another 10 000$ for the same user to register and create account to those services and make the request to be forgotten after registration. Can they say that we dont have any data from your while we did the check earlier and based on law -- wrong answer. They need to do the analysis again witch equal to labour cost, time away from more productive and so on.  Then after being attacked this way too many times they answer to next user that no way, go away - we are not going to analyze you and forgot you - but this time the request like forgot dead relative

This is only an illustrative example where organizations needs to prepare and the question stays still - are they ready 25th of May 2018 unless the law.... who know's


Nevertheless, this brings to quite major topics on the table:
1. Do we know data we have and where?
2. Is our applications supporting this, application done and published earlier and/or applications in development phase?

Let's take other illustrative example using Facebook as an example. Your husband or wife has been active in Facebook and suddenly he or she died and husband or wife has to fight to get the account and profile deleted (witch opens other question of groups he/she has created and is the owner for it - what happens to those groups and data insight them witch mostly might be personal data - but that is another story and let's go back to org example) and finally got confirmation from it. Then, suddenly something happens to at the Facebook service and they are forced to restore the data - what happens then?

I don't know - sorry.

But I can bet that for relative's, it's not fun at all to see the wife or husband back and active.

This is just and example based on no knowledge how Facebook works to avoid this kind of situations but again bring the same questions to my mind - Are they ready?

So if go back to the key questions and start to think those two and start from knowledge. Structured data is easier (or not) to understand and know what we have while it is usually in database and we know where the application and database is used - correct?. The opposite - unstructured data is or should be big head ache to organizations business, risk management, security and IT.  While this is not related only to data, it's not enough that you analyze what you have in your collaboration tools and file shares but it goes also to identity and now talking privileged accounts running applications witch might user file shares as part of the small, legacy applications, do you know those, when the password has changed last time, do you have any detect and control process in place.........
The world legacy and history have huge weight here where the data has been migrated from upgraded storage during years without deleting - usually - anything.

It's payback time -unfortunately. Same way that organization using legacy Notes mail and application has explain that they saved them to bankruptcy while staying in the same license and hardware too long - it was good idea and the cheapest in short term but there is no free cheese.
It cannot be expected that if we stay in the same version, others will also do, and that there is no influence in today's social world to the brand where people to share the they are using old tools and techics in their daily work. To days digi native will vote with their feet and we can bet that their social friends will now the reason per yesterday.

Let's get back again to the unknown unstructured data and what it is. So data migrated between years from old to one without deleting together with growing data trends and user behavior. Traditional file shares does not have - usually - data classification, index and search capabilities, versioning, available from mobile - you know and can name those - there is not unless you have purchased 3rd party like Veritas Enterprise Vault archiving tools, tool you have tried to get way during email migration to the Exchange Online as good example.

So you find anykind of, age, usage and amount of data, from where you might use and know about 10-20% and other data is just storage cost - and now we are back in business - Euros, Dollars, Pesetas, Ruplas  you name it  - Money talks and in here with small example.

Assumptions:

• 24000 users
• 50 GB average disk quota per user
• 20% active and valuable data
• 3,5$ / GigaByte the managed storage cost (can be from 2-5$ per gigabyte)

Calculation (24 000*50GB*3,5$)=4 200 000,00 dollars per year - not bad.

But lets calculate what is the Dark Data size and price - so the data without any values (note here that even if old data it can be valuable like old product drawnings, contracts and so) 24 000*50*0,8=960 000 GB = 3 360 000,00 dollars for nothing. For me it sounds quite good business case.

As said, theoretically it is easy show the business case but this really requires more analysis while the 80% of total storage usually includes installation medias, backups, virtual machines disks, .ISO images, zip files and so on and today and even more in the future movies and audios files and of course including unknown amount of duplicates.


So if look back to title and year 2000 there are some common like

• Yes, it impacts to whole organization
• Yes, it requires change
• Yes, it requires finance or you take the risk of penalties. Recommend to read with your risk organization together with business, legal, security and IT.
• Yes, it include your directory services
• Yes you need end user training and communication

If done correctly with right partner you might achieve benefits like

• Yes, you can sleep your nights
• Yes, this is the time and place to upgrade and adopt governance and start to monitor
• Yes, you increase your security
• Yes, you make your or increase your data's value
• Yes, the data in static file server should be available from any device and any time and any where (who remember this from Microsoft and who and when?)
• Yes, might reduce your storage cost
• Yes, this time to create and adopt workflows and retention polices to start know the data and let automation to take care unvaluable data
• Yes, your outsourcing contracts will safe you
• Yes and No - you might need to run project to change the partner or hosting provider to sleep your nights
• Your data is available
• Better user experience and work performance while data can be found.
• Yes, you stop the snowball effect where the situation creates exeption witch creates exeption witch makes everything more complex, increase the security risk and time consuming equals to money, frankly.
• and much much more.

But this was today's story.

Todays picture brings the summer, sun and hot roads.. Feel it.

Shortly - I would

"All comments, thoughts and pictures are my own and I don't have legal background"

Benefits of social networks and sharing blogs and articles in twitter for example.

Social and Share

I have never understood people - expect me - who think that only the work I have done, is the best or the coolest in the world.

What this actually mean is that everyone try to invent the wheel again witch is not so smart and valuable. Of course the wheel can have different angle, behavior, features and blah blah but the wheel is the wheel and to reinvent the wheel I think more valuable is to enrich the wheel with something others has not created yet but still link the new to the old one.

Example, I could start to write document and blog from (maybe will later on) from Azure AD and it's new capabilities as Jesper Ståhle from Sweden has explained in his blog. Jesper Ståhle O365 MVP blog
Who is very talent and valuable resource to follow based on his technical articles with valuable project experience.

Going back to the first sentence - there are people with same mindset respect only those who has build their house or car or summer cottage with their own hand and those who has purchased are nothing.
It is like someone liking Chevrolet Camaro '69  and another person from Dodge Charger 426 Hemi '69 and who cars if they have build those by own hands. Both cool car and funny to drive compared to Kia i30.

I give my all respect to people who has the talent to build those cars, summer cottage, write SAP article and blog from it or anything but also understanding that not everyone have those skills.

We are unique and have different skills and talents - actually enriching our life by allowing us to accept different people with special skills.

So back to topic where Jesper's blogs and articles works brilliantly in the Digital Workplace communication and what features Microsoft cloud services support now.

Notice the world now while one benefits of selecting MS ecosystem is that they are expanding their cloud service all the time with cool new features.

"All thoughts and opinions are my own like pictures too"

With daily picture - not Camaro or Charger but still from US!

Finnish Hot Rod Association Car Show - Helsinki Finland 2016

EU GDPR will be there but how to start the journey - Chapter 2

How to understand what data our employees are sending and where those are used.

Last time we looked the life from understanding what is happening inside our network, let's extend our mindset also to understand how to protect the information moved inside and outside our network and how to understand and make visible, where the file is opened. Cool - is in't?

One additional thing bringing more complexity is of course the hybrid setup. Our planet is not so black and white instead it have some shade of other colors between black and white :-).

So the identity is not black white, the data location is not black and white but the IT still lives in black and white to manage same resources with less money - you got it.

So if we start from basic we need to understand the data and classify it, witch makes this big change management and communication issue from the end user view. They have been familiar to save data where ever they feel comfortable or has been used to - even that there might been some guides and policies to store the data here and there without able to reuse what colleagues has created - mine is always the best and that's why I started from scratch or use only copies what I have created.

Back to classification  - in very pragmatic view the data classification can be defined to couple class:

• Secret
• Confidental
• Internal
• Not restricted / Public
• and Personal witch makes this even funnier based on EU GDPR - nice word again.

 Sounds clear and should be easy after we have configured the new classification to our organization and when people are starting to create new document those will be classified but what about the 345 Billions old, legacy file we have like Summerparty2001 pictures and invitation and food list. In this time youngster usually says OMG - still saving so old data - you are so old school. True unfortunately - organization has migrated data transition after transition after transition from NT 3,51 or maybe from OS/2 or WARP to Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000 to Windows 2003 to Windows 2008 to Windows 2012 R2 file servers and now thinking to migrate the data to Windows Server 2016 R2 and so on. And every transition we purchase more storage, build and configure more sophisticated storage solution with maybe dedublication to save the storage but still not touching the root cause.  Let's avoid opening the backup discussion here - sorry we can't. We backup the local branch office serves offering local network share to the users for data parallel to be the first place for user desktop backups - ups, same file in X:\data\path\salespresentation.pptx Drive as file and in in X:\Backups\GasMonkey\backup22022002.something and so on. While we don't have back up solution and tape's in branch office we some how copy the data to central data center where the both files and backup files are copied to tape and archive it. Simple, nice and easy - well no.

Let's take one variable here and call it human, you know the person who talk and walk do all kind of funny things. So it saves the file created in it's PC to local drive and copy it to the local network drive parallel to send it in email to 20 best friends who might need that file or maybe not and each of these best friends save the file to their local PC and maybe even in the local network drive in their office witch is then backed up to the central data center in that region not forgetting the automated backup scripts copying the file to local network share, from where other scripts copy the file to data center were it will be backed up to tape witch maybe never ever has been really tested from bottom up.

And suddently the file is 2, 3 5, 10 or 45 times stored and using the storage capacity with value of 0 when we looked the name of the file - salesguide_2005draft.doc - frankly for this does not sound fun instead.....

And short conclusion is that technology is not limiting and root cause for this - it is the human and lack of policies and governance with data classification with retention/archiving period, detect and control and proactive communication and owned by business, lead by example with commitment.

Sounds familiar - be honest.

You got the point, we need to classify the data and we must have meta data witch triggers and is used in retention. Like start workflow to get approval to delete or save other 6 months to all files classified Internal/security and have Draft Meta Data attribute. This actually come back to the terms workflow - automate - process witch are not technical IT terminology only and we might ask from our self that are these features normal disk systems and file share give to us if your answer is yes - are those in use, if answer is no - only questions is why?

So classification is needed and it must be able to configure it automatically during document creation based on the data content like social security, bank account, credit card and so on but also allowing users to overdrive the automatic rule.

Check more data from Wikipedia using following link - if it just work.
meta data
or using following link to digital guardian  digital guardian data classification


Will continue next more from Meta Data in next article and as usually

"All ideas and thoughts are my own like pictures unless told the source"

To be Continued ..

Biker's meeting Haltiala / Finland August 2016 - approx 200 bikers ( mostly age over 40)