The irony in this is absolutely hilarious. I remember we were all praising the city for having such forethought and for doing their due diligence (unlike most of these cases) and keeping backups of their data.
I wonder how the IT director was hired and who monitored what the department was doing. I worked at a place that hired a MS system support person but no on one knew anything about it and he seemed to know more than they did. He was fired a couple months later as he actually knew nothing and spent all his time making support calls trying to get someone to tell him what to do. He was on the phone for hours every day. Then when he was fired no one changed passwords so he logged into the DNS server and randomized all the IPs, leaving the whole company without networking. Hopefully not the same person...
https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-johnson is the guy. Typical suit found in many exec positions, looks perfectly legit, fine credentials, a little heavy on the sales stuff.
CIO for an acutely underfunded department in large but very poor city is not an easy job.
From the profile
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About
I am a visionary leader that quickly grasps near-term initiatives and opportunities while foreseeing long-term opportunities and how to achieve them. I bring a unique blend of expertise in building and developing winning teams as well as building and scaling businesses.
...
I have strategic technology discussions with the public and private organizations in the Baltimore City area every day. Put simply, I assist the Mayor discover how technology can deliver value and competitive advantage to Baltimore City and transform the lives of people that live, work and visit Baltimore City.
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Try as I might, I would never be able to come up with something like this, even if you held a gun to my head. There surely must be a small industry of HR consultants who specialize in writing this kind of drivel
Baltimore has been through a good amount of IT Directors who were caught up in scandals/corruption. Not surprising as in the past ten years we have had two disgraced/corrupt mayors abruptly leave office.
IT Directors? Many of Baltimores mayors, councilpersons, police chiefs, police officers and detectives, public works heads, etc have been scandalous, crooked, incompetent, etc in recent years. Its the norm, not the exception. Its a crooked town.
It is a corrupt town the facts/history clearly show this. It's where I was grew up/live/work; all within in surrounding counties, which is solid living! Though Baltimore isn't the only corrupt US city!
as a city? probably status quo: continued grift and unaccountability as a once proud manufacturing town decays.
it's somewhat attractive price wise simply because it's a very affordable urban east coast city. there's a vibrant/edgy art scene (to include drama, etc.) that's attractive to younger artists, sort of like what detroit is going through (as i understand it)
Baltimore county, Howard, Harford and everywhere not Baltimore city is good living. High paying IT work is readily available and you can work at many well known Govt agencies. Cost of living isn't too bad as well you can get nice inexpensive new single homes near the MD/PA line and commute in (30 to 40 minute commute).
Twice I've been at companies where we lost some storage due to a hardware failure and it turns out the backups were missing or didn't work. And both times, nobody was fired.
In fact, if you haven't tried to recover from a backup, it probably doesn't work. Like most recovery/data integrity hardware/software, if it isn't being (regularly) tested, it probably is misconfigured, not running or broken. Like all software.
I've seen many PC-raid hardware solutions that simply didn't work. A drive fails, and the machine becomes unusable, fail to recover when a good drive is inserted, or crashes/hangs and the data is lost.
Yet people keep buying raid solutions for PCs. I recommend: pull a drive from your raid hardware and see what happens. If you're afraid to do that, then you need a different solution.
I used to work at a RAID hardware company (since bought by SUN, now Oracle though I have no idea if that model is still sold). Salesmen were told to demonstrate the system by pulling a random drive from the production disk and put it on top. 15 minutes latter someone from support showed up with a new disk (not IT, support), the salesmen made sure they were still next to the machine to show off that support knew about the failure and could replace it quickly.
If you don't have the same confidence in your systems you need to fix that.
Heh. I visited a colleague and they had a fancy new netapp and he demonstrated pulling a drive, status light change and notification, reinserting it, status light change and notification.
The next morning he got a fedex from netapp... a replacement drive.
This was hardware raid. There were two parity disks per stripe as I recall. This was about 20 years ago and I didn't work on that system: my memory of the details is probably wrong.
Now at my 3-person startup, we test our backups once a week! Really.
I once took over management of a startup that was just acquired (this was back in 1999). The people there never did backups. Ever. They told me with a straight face: "We have a RAID. It doesn't need to be backed up."
I would take the $18 million "cost" with a grain of salt. It's not easy to come up with an estimate for the actual cost of lost files and delayed revenue.
It could have been some trigger-happy accountant just tallying up stuff left and right.
Some organizations need a disaster to provoke change. Hopefully, they'll do the right thing now and transition to something that works.
