Supply Chain and Infrastructure Limits

 

It often starts with congestion: a cough, a blockage, or a restriction in a pathway we depend on to function. I am not talking about COVID-19 in the human body. I am talking about the effect the pandemic had on the systems that keep our communities and businesses running.

In many ways, the same idea applied. As demand increased and normal patterns changed, supply chains and network infrastructure became congested. Things we had always assumed would be available suddenly were not.

The early warning signs

In January 2020, the CDC issued a travel alert related to Wuhan, China. At that point, the United States had only a small number of known cases. By the end of January, the U.S. government had begun issuing travel restrictions related to China.

In February, I moved my home internet service from Comcast Business to Xfinity Residential. At the time, it seemed like a practical decision. The service offered more bandwidth at a lower cost, and it worked well for my family. 

Then, in early March, as head of IT and the Facilities, I needed to purchase hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes for the office - to replenish our stock. I searched through Amazon and other suppliers, only to find that delivery dates were more than 30 days away. Soon, sanitizer, wipes, and toilet paper became difficult to find almost everywhere.

These were ordinary items we had always taken for granted. We still had some supplies, but not in the quantities we wanted. For me, that was the first real warning sign that the supply chain was under strain. It was the first time in many years that a common item had simply disappeared from online retailers and local stores.

A sudden shift to working from home

By mid March, an incident at our San Jose office required us to begin working from home before the Bay Area issued its shelter in place order. Soon after, California followed with statewide restrictions.

My children were also sent home from school. Two attended Leland High School, and one attended De Anza College. Beginning March 16, 2020, they joined millions of other students across the Bay Area in trying to learn and connect from home.

At the same time, Silicon Valley and much of the region moved to remote work. We did not immediately realize how much pressure this would place on our network infrastructure.

Millions of people were suddenly working from home, attending online classes, streaming video, and trying to stay connected. Children who could no longer see friends in person turned to Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, gaming, and social media. Adults relied on Zoom, GoToMeeting, Webex, and other platforms to keep their jobs moving.

All of it created a massive and unplanned stress test for the internet.

When home internet became a business problem

My move to residential internet had seemed like a good decision in February. But once nearly every household in the area was relying on home connections throughout the day, the service became slow and unreliable.

I had to rethink the setup quickly.

I brought Xfinity Business back into the house because I could no longer depend on a connection that slowed down during the middle of the workday. The contract was not perfect, but it gave me a dedicated 100 Mbps connection, an LTE backup modem, and battery backup for about $120 per month during the first year. The installation and configuration took about two weeks.

In the meantime, my wife and I relied on mobile hotspots to keep working. Sometimes they worked well. Other times, they did not.

The experience made it clear how dependent we had become on systems that were never designed for everyone to rely on them at once.

The growth and growing pains of video meetings

As people adjusted to working and learning from home, platforms such as Zoom became essential. They gave families, schools, and businesses a way to stay connected when in person meetings were not possible.

But the rapid growth also exposed weaknesses. Zoom had been designed for ease of use, and some meetings lacked basic security settings. This made it easier for disruptive people to enter public meetings, sometimes sharing offensive sounds or graphic images.

The platform improved over time, adding stronger security options and better guidance for meeting hosts. Still, the early days were a reminder that rapid growth can reveal gaps in security, capacity, and planning.

Planning for the next disruption

Things are more stable now. Zoom is more secure, and my home internet is generally reliable, even though outages still happen from time to time.

The larger lesson is that we need to look more closely at the capacity of the systems we depend on. Businesses, service providers, schools, and governments all have a responsibility to consider what happens when demand reaches unexpected levels.

Few people imagined that tens of millions of students would need to learn online at the same time, often through video calls. Few expected entire workforces to depend on home internet connections overnight. Yet that is exactly what happened.

One positive outcome of 2020 was that it forced us to rethink what is acceptable and what we need to build for the future. We may not know exactly when a crisis will end, but we can prepare better for what comes next.

That means protecting our supply chains, strengthening our infrastructure, and planning for capacity before we need it.

Cloud Strategies and Authentication Methodologies

 

Making the Cloud Work for IT

Like most forward thinking IT teams, we are always looking for better ways to connect people with the data, tools, and services they need.

“Do more with less” is a phrase no IT leader loves to hear, but it is a reality in many organizations. After more than 25 years working in startups, I have learned that efficiency is not simply about reducing headcount or spending less. It is about using automation to handle repetitive work while protecting the reliability, security, and integrity of the systems the business depends on.

Moving toward the cloud

Many organizations have adopted cloud services for systems that once had to be managed on site. Ten years ago, I was hesitant about that idea.

Why hand over control of a system to someone else? Hosting a service internally meant control over the hardware, software, configuration, management, and customization. Giving that up felt risky.

My first real experience with cloud services was hosted Exchange, before Office 365 became widely available. As a systems administrator, the idea of no longer managing an email platform myself was uncomfortable at first. I worried that my skills would become less relevant.

Instead, it gave me room to focus on more important work.

Exchange is a complex system to operate well. By using a hosted service, I no longer had to spend as much time on day to day maintenance, disaster recovery planning, and troubleshooting every technical issue. When a problem occurred, the provider became the first level of support.

That freed me and my team to focus more on the company’s needs, rather than spending all of our time maintaining the underlying tools.

The value of cloud services

Today, cloud strategy is common across many organizations. Cloud services can take critical systems that might otherwise require several administrators and make them easier to manage at scale.

For example, our Exchange environment supports roughly 375 active email accounts and uses more than 3.3 TB of storage. It serves a global community of sales, services, and support employees, with availability close to 99.99 percent.

Running that same environment on site would require substantial hardware, dedicated storage, replication to a secondary location, backup and recovery systems, and likely one or more full time administrators.

Cloud services do not eliminate responsibility, but they can reduce the operational burden and allow IT teams to focus their time where it matters most.

Too many passwords

The move to cloud services also creates a challenge. Each platform often comes with its own login, password, and user management process.

As companies adopt more applications, this quickly becomes difficult for employees and IT teams alike. People have more passwords to remember. New hires need accounts in multiple systems. When someone leaves, IT needs to make sure access is removed everywhere.

Single sign on platforms such as Okta and OneLogin help solve this problem. They allow companies to use one identity system across multiple services, including Atlassian, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, NetSuite, Dynamics 365, and many others.

At Virtana, we use Okta to support authentication, multi factor authentication, and automated user provisioning and deprovisioning. This reduces the likelihood of manual errors and makes it easier to manage access consistently.

We have deployed this approach across more than 20 services used by the company. When we evaluate a new platform, such as SurveyMonkey or Monday.com, one of our first questions is whether it supports SAML and can integrate with our single sign on environment.

The goal is simple: make access easier for employees while keeping company systems secure.

Monitoring the cloud

As cloud environments grow, visibility becomes just as important as access management.

Virtana’s acquisition of Metricly added cloud monitoring capabilities for services such as AWS. The platform became part of our broader CloudWisdom offering and helps organizations understand how their cloud infrastructure is performing.

One of the most valuable capabilities is cost optimization. It is one thing to know that AWS cost $50,000 in a given month. It is much more useful to understand what drove that cost and where changes could reduce spending without affecting performance.

Those savings can be reinvested in innovation, infrastructure, or people.

Cloud services are not a replacement for thoughtful IT leadership. They are a way to spend less time maintaining routine systems and more time helping the business move forward.