Leadership Laboratory

Leadership Lab: STI Degree Candidates' Leadership Essays

SANS Technology Institute's mission is to develop the leaders of the future for the information security industry. One of our admission requirements is that an applicant complete an essay describing leadership qualities they have demonstrated in the past.

Leadership in Consulting

Jun 8th, 2007
By Rob VandenBrink

There are several facets of leadership in a consulting role. The leadership roles I see in my daily responsibilities as a consultant include technical leadership with clients, leadership within my team of consultants, and leadership in the larger technical community. In this essay I’ll utilize a specific technology - VMware ESX Server - to reflect on leadership in consulting as I see it daily.

Technical Leadership in Consulting encompasses the traditional technical and project leadership that a consultant offers their clients as their primary deliverable. As an example, a large industrial supply firm contacted us with a Disaster Recovery requirement. Their corporate target was to recover roughly 35 servers in a 24 hour period at a remote Disaster Recovery Facility. These 35 servers had been identified as providing the basic services and key business systems required to operate the company. Of these, 25 servers were standard Windows servers. Traditional tape-based restore exercises to dissimilar hardware had failed in the past for these systems.

The solution that I proposed used VMware ESX as a key component in meeting this target. We expanded the client’s existing VMware infrastructure to ensure that all of the identified business critical systems were virtualized. We enhanced their backups to include vmbk, an open source image backup for VMware infrastructure. With vmbk implemented, we now had image backups of each virtual server in the VMware farm. The technical recovery of these servers then became largely a logistic issue in scheduling the backup media and image restores.

As with all DR exercises, identifying the business requirements and designing the technical solution was only the beginning. A large part of the ensuing effort included meetings to schedule the 24 hour recovery window, identifying and scheduling equipment resources and defining network requirements at the disaster recovery facility. In addition, primary technical resources and application testers were assigned to each server identified. For final testing, test procedures were developed and test windows were scheduled. My experience in past disaster recovery exercises with other clients was useful in streamlining this process.

After all the planning, the actual recovery day was almost an anticlimax. We successfully built 2 VMware servers, and successfully recovered our 25 virtual machines in roughly 16 hours.

This successful Disaster Recovery test has grown into a successful exercise that is now re-enacted every 6 months. The documentation and training that was completed during the first exercise has been sufficient to the point that I am no longer involved in the actual exercises, which in my mind is the best measure of success I could have in this case.

Another important leadership component is Leadership within the Consulting Team. I have been involved in design and consulting of virtualization solutions for roughly 4 years (since early 2003). In that time, I have been an advocate for the technology internally within our team of 65 consultants as well as within our sales organization. I have seen our group of virtualization consultant grow to 17 certified VCP’s (VMware Certified Professional). We now see virtualization as one of the key parts of our consulting practice, and are one of the larger VMware partners in Canada.

I authored the initial set of VMware ESX build standards and templates for our consulting group, which ensures that our clients see a consistent deliverable from our team. This document has since seen extensive collaborative input from the team, and is now "owned" by another consultant.

I would also consider participating in the VMware 3.0 beta program as an example of team leadership. As part of the beta program, I was able to provide valuable information on the new version prior to its general availability from VMware, both to my team and to our clients. As part of the beta program, I had the opportunity to provide direct feedback to the developers at VMware, specifically about "bug" issues around feature support of various network cards.

Finally, Leadership in the Larger Community is also very important. As a result of SANS education and participation in the SANS mailing lists, I was fortunate enough to make some contacts at CIS (The Center for Internet Security). This has led to participation in the process of creating the initial CIS Virtualization Benchmark document. In this iterative process, we are creating the initial CIS security benchmark for Virtualization, which is drawing from several pre-existing source documents as well as the first-hand experience of the list participants. The first product specific section in this document covers VMware ESX Server, but other virtualization technologies will be included in future releases. At this point I’ve contributed direct material for the collaborative document, and hope to contribute more. Of equal importance has been participation in several lively discussions, notably about security implications of Virtual Machine detection on the network.

Successful consultants exhibit leadership daily. Technical leadership with clients is a primary and daily requirement, but leadership within the consulting team and the larger community are worthy ambitions. The facets of leadership I’ve described in this essay are what make my job the rewarding experience it is.