This is the 269th article in the Spotlight on IT series. If you'd be interested in writing an article on the subject of backup, security, storage, virtualization, mobile, networking, wireless, cloud and SaaS, or MSPs for the series PM Eric to get started.
Back in the day, I was the king. I owned and ran the network, and no one else could do what I could do. They knew it, and I knew it. I couldn’t sell stuff, or manage accounts payable, or whatever they did, and they couldn’t set up VLAN trunking on a managed switch. It was fair, it was understood, and everyone was happy. Everyone was an expert at his or her gig, or we got fired.
It was a simpler time.
Because I was the networking guy, everyone had to come to me first. When someone needed help with the VPN, the corporate wireless, accessing some web application—you name it, I was the place to go. I helped, they worked. Done and done.
Then, almost overnight, everything changed.
Everyone started getting wireless home “routers.” And smartphones. And tablets. And personal computers for each of their kids. Tablets for their four-year olds. Buffalo NAS boxes at the house. And home media servers. And a really bad $39 “router” that needed rebooting once a week to connect it all… with firmware from 2009.
OK, fine. 173 people in the world have built a fully integrated home network, with decent hardware running DDWRT, that they use to connect their Windows machines, an Xbox One, a Roku box, a ChromeCast, and two Android tablets. For those guys who happen to be system administrators with strong networking backgrounds, sure, it all works.
They happily steal torrents and pirate software and share media between home machines, until they realize that it’s easier to just use Netflix and Plex, and slowly even their super powerful home network just becomes a central device that hands out DHCP, DNS, and a default route to the Internet.
But we aren’t talking about them. We are talking about people who really don’t get “home networking.” And they can be forgiven, sort of.
Home networking — no matter who you are — has a misleading name. It sounds like “building a network in your home.” But really it’s “plugging your computer into the Internet.” No one builds a network in their home. Not for home networking, at least, and likely not on purpose.
But we in IT, we actually build networks, and we do it for a reason. We know what a router ACTUALLY is. We know why we’d use that instead of a switch, and we know that a network is about devices and services getting to each other, even when the Internet isn’t involved. (Gasp!)
I used to be able to spend the time it took (or at least, the time I had) to build reliable business networks that performed as well as they can, so that people could get their jobs done. They could access files, and those files could back up to tape. Engineers could access code repositories and check in builds. Finance could use Oracle for… the things that Oracle did. It was all local, it was all networked, and it was all me.
But then, some clown (by which I mean, some esteemed coworker), who had built his “home network”, decided that he would implement some Internet service, and that I should have to manage it. It was “just going to be part of our network, right?”
I had to explain, many times, that the plain ol’ big-bad Internet was never going to be part of our network, and that there were things like firewalls, anti-malware, AV, encryption, and all kinds of powerful security technologies that were explicitly built to keep the scary parts of the Internet out of my servers and desktops. But the “home networker” who has a “router” and connected his own Macbook to the Internet to browse Yahoo in 2005 never really got it.
I had to balance the new wave of consumer-grade IT services with the business-grade tools and services I knew I had to provide. I couldn’t have our business switches require a reboot once a week like a crappy home router. I had to have full redundancy and reliability for all the services on my network. I had to have failover and backups. I knew, and still know, that a home network and a business network are related in name only.
I needed to make sure that the business understood the value of reliability, backups, and business-grade networks — and that I did my best to keep those running quickly and at a reasonable cost. But it was a constant fight in the face of growing consumer-grade services and ubiquitous Internet access.
For me, many of my coworkers (and execs) thought they were networking experts because they had home networks. They thought networking meant “connecting to the Internet,” and it could be done by buying a cheap piece of hardware at the local Best Buy. They thought networking should be simple, take no time, and leverage instant services in the cloud.
… And I had to admit, the idea that networking could be simpler, take less time, and provide managed, secure access to services in the cloud sounded like a pretty cool thing to me.
But, that’s a different story — one that led me out of IT and into Product Management…
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So, how has the consumer network impacted you? Chime in in the comments below!