467- Show Me the Riser Room w/Zack Miller

GUEST BIO

Zack Miller started at 13, watching his dad tinker with computers at the kitchen table, then fixing the neighbors' things. After high school he got a smart-hands job at Cisco, earned his CCNA, worked through a couple of MSPs and settled in biotech and life sciences, where a client hired him away. Consulting showed him the patient impact of the work: sitting with a client about a new biologic for cancer patients, he thought, "my keyboard strokes can help them." He built his career on VMware and Azure engineering and has done 11 data centers, "from literally nothing but dirt in the ground to fully functional GMP data center." Today he runs global infrastructure at Catalent, across four regions and over 60 sites.

His framework starts at the door: "Go into a new environment. Show me the riser room. Where does it come in?" In shared buildings the handoff is often a 15-year-old Cisco WAN aggregation switch that serves every tenant, and the first problems are no UPS and a single WAN aggregate. From there the conversation repeats: what do you want to pay for, what level of redundancy, what capacity at the edge, whose firewall. "The technology is easy," he says. The hard part is getting people to believe you and give you their money. So he turns the network into a town, with neighborhood roads, stoplights, a fiber highway and an airport at the edge, then adds 15 years and 2,000 new residents until "that is tech debt." And he asks the business for the cost per hour and the EBITDA per day, so he can name the cost of the risk.

In life sciences the rules come from the FDA and the DEA, with 21 CFR 210 and 211 as the main compliance set, and his advice is to involve IT before you source lab systems. With CFOs at early and growth-stage biotechs, he starts with one question, how much do you want to spend on IT in the next three years, then backs into what you can afford, including whether you can afford to exit it: "You don't have to start with the Ferrari." He also shares what he'd do differently with his own consulting firm (find a sales leader), why context switching is a skill to build, and the advice he'd give his younger self: anger is a six-second chemical reaction.

Episode Show Notes

Navigate through key moments in this episode with timestamped highlights, from initial introductions to deep dives into real-world use cases and implementation strategies.

[00:00] Cold open

[00:47] Meet Zack Miller: from the kitchen table to Cisco smart hands

[05:31] The network needs focus, across four regions and 60 sites

[13:34] The plumbing, and who answers the door when the FDA shows up

[17:01] Show me the riser room

[23:48] The technology is easy, getting the money is hard

[27:22] Tech debt as a town, and the cost of an outage

[32:54] What AI is doing to the network

[39:11] FDA, DEA and GMP: involve IT before you source

[43:11] Running his own firm: find a sales leader

[49:12] Align with the CFO: the Ferrari or the Corolla

[54:26] Context switching, and advice to his younger self

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Start every new site at the riser room. Find out where the service actually comes in and whether the handoff is a shared WAN aggregation switch you don't control

Check the basics first: UPS, a single WAN aggregate, the physical security and the environmentals of the riser room and the data center

Ask the business what it wants to pay for before you design: redundancy, capacity at the edge and whose firewall all follow from that answer

Pull finance into your world. Ask for the cost per hour and the EBITDA per hour and per day, then state the cost of the risk

Ask your CFO how much the company wants to spend on IT over three years, then back into what you can afford, including the cost to exit

Involve IT before lab systems are sourced, so the next FDA audit doesn't find a computer system validation problem built in

467- Show Me the Riser Room w/Zack Miller