IT BS thread

3/4ths have been pulled because of age, and the others turned off. I have to walk 1/4 mile inside my own building to get my updated recall rosters, which are the only printed materials I need.

Well, and the memes I put on my office door...which have been replaced my lethal threats for non-mask use.

 

surely you can find an old regular ass printer and plug it into your pc with a good ol usb cable vs walking 1/4 mile for a piece of paper lol

 

Surely you don't operate in a secure enterprise environment where all you have are "strategically placed" multi-function network printers the size of smart cars. There ain't no such thing as a local printer, even for execs. All print jobs go through the print server unless you're printing to PDF.

 

I guess that was my follow up. is your environment so locked down a usb port/local printing is blocked.

yes would be the answer. probably could have surmised that from the number of end points you mentioned earlier...

 

USB storage is bad. A thumb drive will get your account locked and a visit from the guy who replaced me. All devices are “trusted.” If the device isn’t, it doesn’t work.

We handle about $1B a day in financial transactions, so our security is pretty tight.

 

well that answers how secure your environment is haha

are you a senior SA or something of the sort?

 

Security management, formerly ISSO.

The armed security keeps the visitors out - everybody should have some. Still, coming into the building is not unlike going through an airport, but at least I can have liquids and I don't have to take off my shoes.

 

It would be really interesting to work in an environment like that and that size, to see how its all done and the processes set up at that scale.

 

It is. We're a data center, currently running around 1000 hard servers and 7000+ virtual servers just in this facility. Our SAN is insane, and recently graded from spinning drives to SSDs. There are current 40 30-ton air handlers running, plus our location in relation to the city grid (we could lose one entire power station and not have to go on backup power), and we still have two locomotive engines as backup generators.

I think the best part is that no one is alone in working on anything - we have lots of teams working collaboratively to monitor the boundary, maintain internal security (all environments are separated, as are application operating subnets), internal firewalls, IDS/IPS platforms, system auditing, scanning, vulnerability remediation, assessment and authorization, and compliance auditing. It's a LOT.

We have a sign up in our security monitoring floor that simple says "they only have to get lucky once." Our mission is to keep them from getting lucky.

 

ya thats just a whole 'nother level, staying on top of all of that 24/7. really impressive skillset for sure

 

Ain't no CORNET DRAGON here. That's for the currently military types. Just so long as no one gets into the financial or health records systems it's all good in the hood.

 

Your catching up to where we are. Except have to have temperature taken before entering now, because medical. Got notified by FBI of increased ransomware attacks on medical institutions so on high alert. Then again we always are being the #1 target.

Back when we went to SAN I was the robocopy bitch and wrote scripts to write scripts to copy files from DASD to the SAN. Well some of them then trained interns to do it. A long time ago we broke a petabyte and it blew me away then. Genomics, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Warehousing alone now dwarf that. Can't imagine not working in an Enterprise Environment anymore after spending 20 years in it.

Now the push is on to move everything to the cloud. Can't wait for that latest fad to end. NO ONE cares about your stuff as much as you do. We already have something better than a cloud damn it. Midwest, Southeast and Southwest with XXXX pipes between them and data centers at each. First breach in the cloud I will do my best to not say I told you so.

 

I fucking hate cloud. HATE IT. I’ve argued repeatedly with senior executives that delegating hosting does not delegate responsibility - they are still on the hook to Congress for anything that happens in that cloud location. It’s already happened - had a 48K record breach of banking details because the CSP contractor mis-configured a data connection on their end. OIG is still dealing with it.

As management I have to go through whistleblower training and guidance every few months, but no one is even listening to whistleblowers anymore.

I’d say more but it’s [REDACTED].

 

Building, operating, and securing services in a public cloud requires a different set of skills than securing services hosted in an on-premise customer managed facility. In my experience customer managed facilities tend to overly depend on traditional perimeter network security that's trickier to achieve in public cloud. I do think that for the large portion of workloads, public cloud providers do bring a lot to the table that could not be as easily achieved in an on-premise facility, especially when you start moving beyond core products such as virtual machines, object store, load balancing, etc. The management overhead is less as you move from SaaS to PaaS to SaaS, but you're right in declaring that it doesn't delegate responsibility for anything which can be an easy trap to fall into.

Years ago I went from working in IT for a large company that self hosted everything to embracing public cloud, learning how to do some basic coding, and moving into Site Reliability Engineering / DevOps. It was absolutely the best decision I ever made for job satisfaction, employability, and compensation. While I don't know your personal or work circumstances, I would encourage you to perhaps look at public cloud as a professional growth opportunity before dismissing it broadly.

 

Federal government, with multiple legal requirements for personal and health data protection. Any of a number of system outages gets us dragged before Congress immediately, as does any data breach.

We have as much infrastructure already as a CSP, and had been an internal provider for years. Being as we still haven't seen any cost savings, many of us are anticipating the pendulum swinging back.

 

Moving workloads to public cloud shouldn't be about cost savings as a primary goal outside of trading capex in favor of opex depending on what your finance department wants. Oftentimes cost savings may not be achieved if not closely and smartly managed, which can be tricky! Migrations to public cloud are often about process and cultural change and improving time to deliver. They can also be about achieving more leverage by using PaaS and SaaS offerings from the public cloud providers.

Not saying this is your situation by any means, but if there's an IT department running a self-hosted data center that is difficult and/or slow to support needs of developers, business, etc. embracing public cloud can be a means to kickstart change (involving or not involving that IT department).

I've never worked in the government sector, but I do know that all the big public cloud players have dedicated FEDRAMP regions and invest in products specifically targeted at various levels of government. Beyond FEDRAMP, it's been an open secret that AWS has been a vendor for the CIA for a many years as an example.

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/government/
https://www.oracle.com/industries/public-sector/government-cloud/
https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/government-public-sector

Not trying to convince you you're wrong, but felt compelled to post for others who might not have experience with public cloud.

 

What does this mean, and how do I get it to stop. Running Chrome and I get this on several sites that I know to be safe.

 

As near as I can tell the computer certificates are out of date. I am having that exact issue on a home system with both Edge and Chrome. No matter what I do, nothing is updating. It pissed me off so much that I have gone straight Firefox on that home box and have had zero issues.

I've wondered if it's related to Windows 10. Don't care enough to run it down because that computer is temporary until I get off my ass and finally replace it.

 

It's not just me then. This is on my refurbed Win7 machine. It doesn't happen on my laptop, also win7.
Thanks for the reply.