Today was the first company (Secure-24) picnic I have gone to that I was also able to bring the family too. This was a nice change for me, at my old job (Truven Health / Thomson Reuters) the company picnic was always held during the week and during normal business hours, which meant you could only go if you could get out of the office without impacting work and that it was employees only. This was a nice change indeed! Melissa and Kylie were both able to attend and there were lots of things going on. In addition to all the normal picnic foods and drinks being supplied the company also bought out an entire ice cream truck. So we were able to walk up and order anything we wanted that they had, and it stayed there all day until they were out of everything. So they literally bought out the entire truck! The kids all seemed to love this. I think Kylie most enjoyed the bouncy house, as she stayed in there pretty much all day. A number of the management team took turns in a dunk tank and certain people had a very long line trying to dunk them! We stayed for quite a few hours and had a really good time hanging out with my co-workers and friends. So far working for Secure-24 has a lot of benefits and a really great culture and even after 10 months I am still really happy I decided to accept a position here.
Tag Archives: Secure-24
From Backup to Storage
One of the goals that I set for myself when I took the position with Secure-24 was to transition to the storage team within 6 months. This has been my goal because I enjoy doing storage work a lot more than I do backup and recovery. I even mentioned in my interview (for a backup engineering position) that I did not want to do backup work and that if I were to get hired this would be my goal. Over the last few months I have been halfway to my goal due to being the point person for both storage and backups for our enterprise delivery team. In fact this team has had a major project underway for one of our customers that has us implementing two new EMC VMAX arrays that I have been deeply involved with and will begin provisioning storage next week for. However, today, my full transition has been made (sort of) due to a colleague leaving the company for another opportunity. Jon was the NetApp engineer and now that he is gone the storage team will be leaning heavily on me to fill the NetApp knowledge gap, which suits me just fine! Considering another customer is lined up to bring in some new NetApp filers as well, this puts me a great position to build another set of controllers from the ground up. So officially I have transitioned to the storage team, but until they can back fill my position I will be pulling split duty between the two teams. Needless to say I am pretty happy about these circumstances, and I even beat my goal by a month!
First full day of new career
Today was my first full day at Secure-24, and it seems like it is going to be a good place to work. My hope to hit the ground running wasn’t as fruitful as I had planned though. The environment in which the company operates is pretty locked down, which I understand the need for. However, this makes for a lot of jumping through hoops in order to connect to the desired systems where work needs to happen. This means there are also many accounts that need to be configured to allow the appropriate access, and all of mine have not been set up yet. Hopefully over the next few days things will get straightened out. From what I can tell so far working here is going to be an entirely new experience from what I am used to. I already see a lot of exciting challenges and opportunities to learn new skills and improve on existing ones!
A New Begining
My first day at Secure-24 was a typical slow orientation day. Spending the better part of 8 hours in a training room and going through procedures is about as fun as it sounds. There were only two other people in my orientation group; Brian is joining the project management team, and Patti is joining the storage team. I’ll be working more closely with Patti as the backup and storage team work together and report up through the same manager, and our desk areas are right next to each other. I will say that it was nice to see that the facilities team had everything together. We got our badges, our desks, and our laptops and bags all on the first day. At the end of the day we went and spent about 1.5 hours with our teams, meeting everyone and setting up our desks. I opted to configure my desk to be a standing desk, and am looking forward to it. I have the rest of the week off, but now that corporate training and orientation is over I’ll be able to hit the ground running!