Meet our Advisory Board: Interview with Andrew Warby of Charles River Associates
Describe for us what your company is involved with?
CRA is a global business consultancy firm. We offers economic, financial, and business management expertise to major law firms, industries, accounting firms, and governments around the world.
What is your background?
Spent 5 years in the Royal Australian navy deploying networks around the country. Left the service after they civilianized the IT support and returned as a contractor. Finally was able to step foot on a ship, something I had not had the chance to do during my enlistment. Spent the next three years installing networks on all major fleet units. Migrated to Canada and worked as a Network Field Technician for 7 years before migrating to the USA. Most of my work now with CRA is supporting their server infrastructure and ongoing development of our virtual environment.
How large is your IT staff?
In North America we have approximately 20 people.
What are the most significant business challenge that you face today?
Cost containment. Any new project must be evaluated to determine what is the most cost effective way to implement it. This includes looking at both in-house and hosted solutions.
Do you have key initiatives planned for this year and what are they?
Migration to vSphere 4.1 and implementing VDI.
Are you using Microsoft Hyper-V today?Any plans to do?
No. We are only running VMware. I feel it is the most mature virtual solution in the market and provides an excellent feature set and support.
Your thoughts on “The Cloud”?
It’s currently a technology undergoing a lot of development. Concerns are speed of access, security and cost effectiveness. There is definitely an advantage for Disaster Recovery, but the other issues must be addressed and access must be seamless before we could move our larger business processes to ‘the cloud’.
The IT project that you are most proud of?
Of my recent projects, the migration of most of our services to our virtual environment. This has resulted in significant cost savings for our company which has helped during the current economic climate.
If you had a magic wand that could do 3 IT tasks for you instantly what would they be?
- High bandwidth, low cost data connectivity to give users LAN like access to all points of our network.
- A completely replicated virtual environment providing seamless business continuity.
- A printer that could pump out perfect $100 bills to pay for all the cool IT toys our upper management craves.
With 15 years in IT, Andrew is currently working with Charles River Associates supporting their North America offices. He has been heavily involved with the virtualization of the environment, with over 50% of systems now virtualized. This has proved to be very interesting work due to the rapidly evolving nature of virtualization tools and technologies.
