After self hosting several services for a few users, with SSO, backups, hardware issues etc, I really appreciate how good the IT was in my old company. Everything was connected, smooth, slick and you could tell it was secure. I had very few issues and when I did, they were quickly solved. Doing this all at scale for thousands of employees spread across the world, it is a wonderful sight to see.
Now at my current company, it’s at the opposite end of the scale where I almost believe that I could do a better job by myself! They’ve trying to do everything you would expect but somehow doing it wrong. They are so heavy on security I have a Citrix environment that takes me 3 logins to get to, fails constantly and means I can’t work without internet (like on a long train journey for work purposes recently), and on the other hand they’ve only just turned off admin rights for users so we could’ve installed anything we wanted!!! All our attachments (incoming and outgoing) are saved to a secure website (like OneDrive) and replaced with a link. It doesn’t save the file names on the email so it’s really tricky to find old emails if it’s a document you’re looking for. I could go on but just venting at this point as it’s so frustrating!!!
Thank you to the good IT people out there. Your roles are so important but not appreciated enough!
Hahah, omg don’t they realize people are writing that shit down?
I’m big on proper security for business, but holy cow that’s nuts.
Guess I’ve been fortunate to work at some huge, well-known orgs that also really understood how to do these things.
One, in the 90’s,had already developed an early form of SSO for the 20 backend systems that all had unique username and password requirements. Their call center agents really appreciated it.
The early US phone numbers were from a set of a few names, and the 5 digits, because they thought people couldn’t remember 7 digits.
And now people have to remember several sets of at least 8 random symbols, and change them every 60 days.