Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Category: IT Leadership

You Need On-Site Time

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You can work from home as long as you also put in 40 hours at the office. That’s official policy at Tesla, where Elon Musk has thrown down the gauntlet at his executives. The factory workers put in 40+ hours and their managers should, too.

There are some jobs that lend themselves well to remote working, and some that don’t. Elon has a point that managing people involves being visible, and much leadership happens outside official meetings. Nobody has figured out a way to simulate the informal encounters of the workplace in Zoom. That is why some on-site time is necessary for everyone inside the organization. We are seeing that fully remote workers never assimilate the culture of the organization, don’t feel a sense of belonging, and quit much faster than people who still have an in-person connection to the organization. People who are 100% remote should be contractors, not employees.

Are You Making a Fool of Yourself?

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You’d think that an official digital ID project would be subject to a careful security review. Not in Australia. The government of New South Wales in Australia has rolled out a digital driver’s license that contains no less than five different security issues. Together, these make it trivially easy to alter any data on your ID, effectively creating a fake ID. That is good news to Australian identity thieves and underage would-be drinkers. The official response is “it’s illegal to make changes to your ID.”

Are there any embarrassing security oversights in the products you roll out? How would you know?

Don’t Use Illegal Defaults

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits,

You would never implement a system programmed to break the law, would you? The municipalities in Denmark did. If you get social security in Denmark, you are supposed to work at least 225 hours per year if you can. Those who can, and don’t, get less money. Those who cannot work are exempt from this deduction rule. The IT system has been programmed to automatically start reducing benefits unless a caseworker remembers to manually keep pushing the deduction date into the future. This means the municipalities save money by illegally reducing benefits for those citizens who do not have the energy to complain.

When you automate a process, your users will quickly come to accept the decision of the system. Make sure you have good defaults. At the very least, make sure they are in accordance with the law.

Control Your Tools

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits

Do you know which tools your developers are using? Many of them are using low-code/no-code (LCNC) tools, whether officially sanctioned or not. The latest State of the Developer Nation report from SlashData delves into LCNC tool usage and finds that 46% of developers are using them. 12% of professional developers use them for more than half of their work, but developers with 10+ years of experience shun them.

Developers can pick up cloud-based low-code/no-code tools without anybody noticing and deploy production applications using free-tier functionality. By the time IT management figures out what is happening, you might have dozens of small and medium-sized applications running.

You cannot prevent these tools from being used. You can get your developers to decide on one tool and make that the officially sanctioned low-code/no-code platform. That means you can manage all the applications on one platform, and developers can help each other use the tool. Trying to ignore these tools does not make them go away.

(image source: SlashData State of the Developer Nation, 22nd edition)

Are Security Issues Ignored in your Organization?

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Delete production database, go to jail, do not pass GO, do not collect $200.

A disgruntled Chinese sysadmin wiped his company’s servers after feeling ignored. He had complained about a lack of basic IT security, but found no understanding from his boss. He then wiped out most of their infrastructure, paralyzing a $6 billion company with 120,000 real estate brokers. He did prove his point. He was rewarded with a 7-year jail sentence.

The person with the most detailed knowledge of the vulnerabilities in your IT landscape is not the CISO. It is the database administrator or the network engineer. Do you have a process to ensure that potential security issues can be raised anonymously and will come to the attention of the CIO?

Are You Still Building Things That Don’t Scale Automatically?

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits

There is no excuse for a modern system to be slow. I’m at a 5,000-people conference this week, and their official networking app is totally overloaded and almost unresponsive.

You might still have legacy systems with scalability issues, but everything you build today should be cloud-native. As a first-class citizen of the cloud, a modern app has access to automatic scaling, monitoring, robustness, and many other features.

Ask the architects building new systems in your organization about how the application will scale. If the answer is that it will scale automatically, good. If the answer is that somebody has to notice response time increasing and manually do anything, you are still building to the old paradigm.

Do You Understand What You are Running?

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Don’t run systems you don’t understand. Some people had placed billions of dollars into a cryptocurrency called TerraUSD. They were told this was a “stablecoin” that would keep a value of $1. Underlying this claim was a clever algorithm that interacted with investors and another cryptocurrency in complex ways. Until its magic no longer worked and the supposedly stable TerraUSD dropped 80%. Trading in it is now halted.

In the global financial crisis of 2008, people had invested in complex financial instruments that they didn’t understand. Many billions were lost and large institutions went bankrupt. The banks who came out of the crisis unscathed were those who had stuck to simple banking products that everyone could understand.

Take a look at your IT landscape. Can you find somebody who understands your operating infrastructure? Or have generations of DevOps engineers just googled problems and tweaked your Kafka and Kubernetes configuration until it somehow seemed to work?

Perimeter Defense is Dead

IT Leadership

Yet again, a critical vulnerability in commercial, high-end network equipment. This time, BIG-IP gear offers any hacker the ability to remotely access the management interface. The intruder doesn’t need authentication and can run any command. It’s rated a scary 9.8 (CRITICAL) on the CVSS scale, and it is being actively exploited.

If you still needed convincing that your network needs micro-segmenting or a zero-trust architecture, here is another piece of proof. This is not cheap consumer-grade gear. This is a highly reputable vendor of expensive equipment used by most large companies around the world. They can’t keep their devices secure, even though they are supposed to implement best practices in secure software development.

Depending on perimeter defense today is like being France in 1939 believing in the Maginot line. If you are a CIO, today would be a good day to chat with your network team about just how securely segmented your network is.   

Why Employee Surveillance Doesn’t Work

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Do you know what a “mouse jiggler” is? Your most innovative employees do. It is not a device to shake a rodent in a cage. It is a small USB device that sends random mouse movements to a computer.

Who would want such a thing? Employees subjected to tracking software, that’s who. With the mouse moving, the software will record “productivity.” The pandemic led to a boom in surveillance tech, euphemistically called “employee productivity software.” As workers return to the office, that tech is not removed from corporate laptops. But workers are pushing back, in accordance with Newton’s Third Law of IT systems: Whenever the organization implements a policy, the employees will implement an equal and opposite workaround.

Techno-optimists keep trying to replace humans with technology. There are some places where that works. Replacing human leadership with surveillance technology is one of the places where this strategy doesn’t work.

Security is Somebody Else’s Problem

IT Leadership

There is good reason security is invisible: It is Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP). In his geek classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe,” author Douglas Adams describes how the secret to making something invisible is to surround it with an SEP field.

Security is not actually invisible – I’m at an event in Copenhagen with 3000 security professionals this week. But it is still considered Somebody Else’s Problem by the rest of IT. Except for basic Authentication and Authorization, security is not on the minds of developers and system administrators.

We cannot magically make people care. We already know that to get good testing, we have to add professional testers to each team. To get a good User Experience, we need to add UX professionals to each team. We won’t get improved security until we also add security professionals to each team.