Security management Toolkit

Story: PGP: Encryption alone no cure for data breaches

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What he said

Maybe we are reaping our rewards from the modern push to de-skill the IT administration function. We don't want to have to pay people who have deep knowledge and experience. We would rather pay a shedload of money for applications that do all our thinking for us. Fine if we are talking about automating repeatable physical processes. Not so fine when we are talking about complex and highly variable stuff like looking after large IT systems .. particularly secure ones.

I remember a paper from a certain large IT supplier a long while ago that was advocating the removal of the distinction between the IT Technician and the Engineer. It was punting the renaming of the function that used to be fulfilled by technicians to an "XYZ Engineer" and doing away with the top end engineering function. They then went ahead and did it. For a long while it seemed to work.

However, without the deep geeks being involved in the overall systems maintenance, the systems that resulted started to rot. Decisions that were made by engineer level staff, that added time and effort to processes, but were done for good reasons obvious to engineers, have dropped off because the current staff, with lesser skills and experience didn't see the point. Only too late do they work out why it used to be done that way .. if they even knew it did.

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