In the fall of 2019, a long time friend of 25 years passed away unexpectedly at my former firm. He had taken over most of my duties since my retirement at the end of 2015. Since I was still handling the cybersecurity chores as a part time contractor, I agreed to help out while they decided what to do.
There were two options as I saw it:
- Contract with a recruiting firm to find someone with the necessary skill set. This would be six-figure position and require someone with broad experience and would be hard to keep at a small firm.
- Ditch the on-premise hardware, migrate the remaining functions to O365 and Azure, leaving only client based devices and connectivity.
I strongly encouraged them to take option 2 and they did. Now, 15 months later, the task is done. The majority of the time was waiting - waiting for people to go through 20+_years of files and decide what needed to stay or go and where to put it in the cloud.
When the pandemic shutdowns started in April, the firm was not impacted as we had implemented remote working options over 10 years prior. By choosing option #2, they are now truly location agnostic with full redundancy within the Azure fabric. As long as a user has internet connectivity, they will be able to work safely and securely from anywhere.
As 2020 comes to a close, there will be little about it I will miss, but many things to remember.
