”Meet Acubiz” is a series of articles that’ll take you behind the scenes at Acubiz. They’ll tell the stories of the everyday heroes. In this article, the spotlight is turned towards René Elgaard, who is IT & Infrastructure Consultant and whose main job is to maintain the heart of Acubiz.
How long have you been at Acubiz and what’s your role?
I’ve been at Acubiz for three years and I work with IT-operations for all our customer servers. This includes both front-end servers for web access, mobile servers for the app and the support servers. We’re responsible for more than 40 servers, that’s keeping our 170.000 users live. I have two colleagues in IT-operations. We share the responsibility and help each other in keeping the IT infrastructure of Acubiz running and stable.
When did your interest in IT start?
My interest in IT began more than 30 years ago. I’m an educated data technician from Brüel & Kjær and during the last year of my apprenticeship, I was expatriated to a department north of Boston. At that point, I started working with IT-operations. It quickly caught my interest and I’ve been working within this field ever since.
Is there a difference working with IT at Acubiz versus your previous workplaces?
Yes, there is. Quite a lot actually. We have users on our system 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Except very few hours. This gives very special requirements in terms of our planning and server work, compared to what I’ve been used to. At my previous jobs, it was possible to maintain servers outside working hours, early in the morning or during lunch breaks. However, at Acubiz, we have users all over the world, so we need to have detailed insight into server load and plan for when there’s a minimum of users on the system. There’re very few times during a week, where we can restart the servers.
You can say that the servers are the heart of Acubiz. Because there’s no application for our users without them. Therefore, my most important task is to keep the servers running all the time.
How do you ensure the best possible uptime on our systems?
It all starts with our planning and meticulousness around the servers. We have monitoring systems in place, continuous controlling procedures and an eye on the individual server’s workload. This ensures that we’re being advised on any suspicious patterns. All of this contributes to a high and stable uptime. In addition, we carry out scheduled restarts on an ongoing basis which helps to keep the servers up to date.
How do you see IT’s role in Acubiz?
IT-operations plays a central role for the delivery to our customers. As long as the systems are running, everyone is happy. Every day we are trying to influence our mindset in a positive direction. My personal goal for our customers, is that they have a better experience with Acubiz today than they had yesterday.
We are also playing a significant role in Acubiz’s ISAE 3402 Type II certification. The certification can only be obtained by IT suppliers who can demonstrate a very high standard in terms of procedures and control mechanisms. In IT-operations, we’ve worked hard to achieve this and I’m extremely pleased to have contributed.
Does an IT guy digitize and automate as much at home as at he does at work?
I want to digitize and automate as much as possible. It’s a central part of my understanding of how the everyday life runs smoothly. And this counts both at work and at home. It can be anything from my golf GPS, key card from NemID and a shared family calendar to automated monitoring of our systems.
