Sneaking off Server 2003: Indirect Migration

You’ve may have heard of shadow IT. It’s where users do an end-run around IT department policies and spin up their own servers in the cloud or use file sharing services to store organizational files. IT departments constrained by management foot dragging on Server 2003 migration can, to an extent, take matters into their own hands.

While I don’t recommend ever doing anything that would get you fired or reprimanded, if your organization has a history of being tolerant of “shadow IT” type practices, you might consider the steps that you could take to migrate workloads away from Server 2003 even if you don’t have explicit permission to do so.

For example, many server administrators might not even start thinking about how to perform a migration task until they had the green light. If you can figure out what needs to be done, perhaps even spin a test migration solution up in the lab, you’ll be much further along when you get the green light than someone who only gets started when final approval rolls down.