I Won

I just finished one of the most draining things of my career. As I have mentioned we are making BIG changes at work and part of that involves bringing our WAN infrastructure under our control instead of an outside entity. There was a fight to let our telco manage the whole thing verses having it brought in house. I wanted in house for several reasons and fought long and hard to convince management that it was worth it. We looked at numbers, pros, cons, scenario A - Z of what could go right or wrong. Just when we thought that one side was going to win something would change or a new a new pro or con would come up that gave new life to the other sides argument. It was mentally draining and consumed way too much time. Well we finally reached a decision today and my argument prevailed. I was able to convince all of the parties that it was best to bring it in house.

Having the telco manage it tied our hands. We would not have access to the routers and any changes that we wanted to make would have to be submitted to them for review and approval. That could take several days. We currently do have some hosted services at a CoLo and there have been 3 different times when the translation table on the PIX firewall got corrupted and it caused all incoming traffic to our server to be dropped. That doesn't work well when you have customers that use that server to conduct business. All three times I called the help desk and told them what was wrong and what needed to be done to correct the problem. It took them 4 hours each time to fix it. That is 4 hours of down time that we really didn't need. That argument worked in my favor in getting this brought in house.

Anyway, I'm happy now.

Hope Y'all have a great Thanksgiving.