New Year’s Resolutions for IT 2017

Now that you have settled into the New Year it is time to focus on you New Year resolutions for IT or you risk a bad year. It is February 1, 2017 and you now have all the year-end closing of the books, inventory, etc. behind you. Now that your head is cleared up it is time to get more focused on IT.

This blog is a compilation of ideas from Team Alvaka Networks:

1.       Roger Nixon said, Keep moving forward by backing up… the importance of good backups for sustainability of a business when things go wrong. Actually almost everyone at Alvaka said something similar. Roger is right. If you have not recently done a complete review of your back up systems you are at great risk. Ask yourself and test whether –

a.       Is your backup system running? Is the scheduler running backups at the appropriate intervals?

New Year’s Resolutions for IT 20172024-04-21T19:33:36-07:00

DFARS pre-assessment questionnaire

Los Angeles, CA - Tonight I am reviewing our new DFARS Pre-Assessment Questionnaire that has just been updated for 2017. It is a very compact 30 questions in a four page document. It of course is not a full DFARS assessment, but it is step one of your process you must do before anything else on your DFARS compliance journey.

DFARS is the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement. It is a supplement to the FAR that provides DoD-specific acquisition regulations that DoD government acquisition officials – and those contractors doing business with DoD – must follow in the procurement process for goods and services.

If you are an aerospace company, Department of Defense contractor or another type of organization that falls under....

DFARS pre-assessment questionnaire2023-02-07T08:01:16-08:00

How Frequently Should I Do a Review or Assessment of My IT Systems?

...this then puts all the burden and stigma on Alvaka, our engineer and our NetPlan program.  That fuels some of the debate we have with some clients.  I remember two separate debates with a controller at a 20 year long client.  He said he “should not have to pay for us to check our own work.”  I have two answers for that objection:

1.        He has two of his own guys that work on his IT system, along with other vendors.  His employees can do things unintentionally, etc.  This is not about checking on our Alvaka engineer.  It is all about checking the overall integrity and operational state of his IT system, which has changing needs over time and changes due to different people touching it.  It is simply a matter of doing a periodic review to make sure nothing is getting missed or looking for things that need to be done a different way.  Changing and updating tape/disk backup jobs to accommodate new servers and software is a classic example.  Without review these jobs don’t often get updated and that leads to tragic results down the road.  I have seen it way too many times in 30 years.  It is preventable.

2.       Even if a client does not have their own IT staff, it is prudent to periodically check IT systems to make sure everything is working right, that the current needs are being met and that important requirements/practices are not getting overlooked or wrongly....

How Frequently Should I Do a Review or Assessment of My IT Systems?2014-12-04T16:00:00-08:00