Posts by VeryOldFart 9 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2015
My last organisation has used it since 2012 and it has been transformational (in a good way). There was some pushback to it from some managers, but this was mostly because of Workday’s excellent security and auditing. Basically, you can’t hide stuff you should have done, but didn’t.
I recommend that anyone considering and new HR/Finance system includes them in they evaluation list.
I retired four years ago so have no axe to grind here.
I'm not sure what they mean by 'remote control' but in principle there will already be a TCP connection from your PC to them so they can potentially do what they want with it. Your setup stops external TCP sessions being initiated but can't protect you from sessions initiated from your machine. You would need to block all of the outgoing 'telemetry' traffic at your router to stop internally initiated sessions.
What they can actually do depends on the 'telemetry' system that is installed, which can in turn be updated at will.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
I spent 45 minutes trying to get one of these 'second socket' machines working - monitor on desktop, tower under desk. Ended up calling supplier asking where the 'jumper' was in the tower because the screen worked but the tower wouldn't power up. "What on earth are you talking about" was the reply.
Very red-faced, I realized that, in the mess of cables under the desk, I had plugged the power cord for the tower back into the second socket in the tower and the power cord from the wall directly into the monitor.
Weirdly, a month later, a colleague had a similar problem with two Ethernet cables and two computers. Computer plugged into computer with one cable and wall socket to wall socket with the other. He was amazed how quickly I worked this out, until I told him about my previous experience.
I wasn't offered any gifts for solving that one.
in some circumstances, yes, but in others, no. We use Workday, multi-tenant, SaaS. Because they have have a single line of code, they been able to deliver new features regularly, several times a year. The fact that they have a single code-base must make it significantly easier to develop, test and deploy than either single tenant SaaS or in-house systems. Their security is good and regularly audited by third parties.
I agree, cloudy stuff can be done badly, thereby introducing extra vulnerabilities, however, if done well ( http://diginomica.com/2013/09/06/workday-cloud/#.Vgl_JflVhBc ) the benefits, to both vendor and customer are significant.
We had an outage a couple of years ago. Failover to the backup site took four hours and we didn't lose any data - I thought that was impressive as we run HR, Benefits, Payroll, and all financials for multiple companies. Been using it for 4+ years now and consider it to have been a very positive experience.
I am troubled because it appears that they were targeted specifically because they were Brits. If they happened to be killed as part of a wider operation, then yes, the 'being in a war zone' argument holds up but I suspect that killing them because they were Brits may have been done to make an example as much as it may have been to stop a future operation in the UK.
My strongly held belief about this is that anyone who has strongly held views that this was either absolutely right or absolutely wrong ... is absolutely wrong.
I agree completely. Our approach uses a slightly different definition of Business Continuity to the one in the article. For us BC is the starting point and is done by the business. They determine how they will survive in the absence of the IT systems and what they will need to do merge the results of this back into the IT systems when they have been recovered. This focuses the business on how they will continue to operate while the tech is unavailable and consequently helps them identify the maximum acceptable RTO and RPO and balance this with how much they are willing to invest to meet them. I have led several desk-top exercises taking people through this process.
I am one of the lucky ones who was a client of theirs for years. My concern is that in 2, 3, 5 years from now someone will use my details for to get credit and screw up my credit rating. I will be at a different address by then so I won't see the bills coming in for my 'new' credit cards. I probably won't know anything about it until I get a credit application rejected. I am not a happy bunny.
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