Yesterday, the Internet was abuzz with the news that Google was shutting down Google Reader and several other apps whose popularity was waning. Some would call this an unnecessary move by a company with more money than God; others, NYI included, would see it as some early Spring cleaning.
In the course of our technical lives, we accumulate a lot of junk. Photos, more songs than we will ever listen to, email dating back to the AOL days. Similarly, in our network lives, files build up, specs are changed, needs change. The result is that what seemed necessary only last quarter now needs to be repurposed or perhaps even removed entirely.
When was the last time you took a cold, hard look at your infrastructure? Uptime is only half the story. You owe it to yourself and your bottom line to have a look at power-consumption, disk-space – in short, all the housekeeping items that make for a clean, effective deployment.
At the same time, you also need to ask yourself if this would be a good time to add some managed services to your offering. Would you benefit from additional backup and storage solutions? Have you considered a managed firewall, load balancing or perhaps a VPN? If you’re looking for a better account of your infrastructure spend, the inclusion of monitoring tools is the best way to go.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter where you stand on Google’s decision. But it’s as good a reminder as any that a periodic evaluation of one’s footprint is a good idea.
