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Team Veritas joins the Corporate Esports Association to take on Overwatch

cusimano
Level 1
Employee

Who’d of thunk you’d read a blog post on gaming today?  

Recently Veritas signed up to participate in the Corporate Esports Association Overwatch tournament. CEA is a friendly gaming competition for folks working in corporate America. The prize: all entry fees are donated to a charity of the winning team’s choice. Our team, Sombra De Veritas, competed against the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft (who absolutely destroyed us), and many others. We faced off every Saturday at 3 PM Eastern to friendly games of Overwatch on the PC. 

Our team — Marketing: Anthony Cusimano, Alex Restrepo, Jonathan Brown, Anuwat Sisaleumsak, IT: Tyler Harmon, Sales: Greg Fernandez, Dan Rodriguez, Michael Bongiovanni, Support: James Xi, Development: Donald Thomson and Pujan ParikhOur team — Marketing: Anthony Cusimano, Alex Restrepo, Jonathan Brown, Anuwat Sisaleumsak, IT: Tyler Harmon, Sales: Greg Fernandez, Dan Rodriguez, Michael Bongiovanni, Support: James Xi, Development: Donald Thomson and Pujan ParikhWe played round after competitive round until our fingers ached, and our eyes bled— okay, that might be an exaggeration— but we did give it our best effort. What surprised me was how I began to see the value of not just this teambuilding activity that connected various passionate gamers across orgs in the company, but also the greater story of Overwatch, competitive gaming, and the solutions Veritas brings to the table.

Overwatch is a game of great skill and strategy. There are over two dozen individual heroes and almost as many maps— all unique and play entirely differently from each other. The amount of knowledge needed by a team to be competitive grows every time Blizzard adds something new to the game. General gameplay changes, map routes change, and heroes become buffed or nerfed (made less powerful) as they deem appropriate. It is up to the teams playing to keep up with this knowledge and exploit it to the best of their ability.  

Matches all have different objectives but play similarly. A team of six heroes must push back an opposing team to capture objectives and points. Some heroes are very durable and hard to defeat, where others are agile and can scout ahead. Some even act as healers or supports and keep their team alive through all manner of impossible survival scenarios. Team composition is crucial to succeeding and knowing who to play when can mean the difference between defeat and victory.

Succeeding at Overwatch is not so different from performing as an IT team. With the sheer amount of choice regarding infrastructure, clouds, apps, storage, etc., a good team must stay up on their research and work together to make decisions. Operating in a silo will only result in the inevitable slowdown of progress, and can even hurt the surrounding organizations. Teams must work together to come to an informed consensus when it comes to how to manage their data, or the business could suffer. 

Ensuring data can be protected (Reinhardt), available (Tracer), and recoverable (Mercy) is a hero’s worth of work. Cloud architects, virtual admins, Dev Ops, and backup admins must all come to an agreement when it comes to selecting a solution to ensure all of their data, regardless of type, quantity, and location, is held to the highest standard. The same way our team practiced and identified who would play which hero to be competitive, a successful IT team must consider their end goals and pair themselves with the right solution to ensure the needs of their data are met, and the business can continue to succeed.

When it comes to competing in the tournament, Sombra De Veritas did a pretty good job in the tournament— I’m proud of us! When it comes to protecting data, gaining insights, and attaining near-downtime, let Veritas be your hero in the datacenter.