Web protection: A flu mask for the internet The internet is no longer optional for organisations. It is where business lives. Unfortunately, it is also probably the worst neighbourhood on the planet, filled with cybercriminals, hacktivists, and corporate and state spies. And the internet is both the largest and the smallest neighbourhood. All of these people live just …
This article does not appear to be aimed at the traditional Register reader.
Add to that the fact that it is proselytizing cloudy services means that it is, IMHO, a below par article.
Is it really the case that we now have people who could derive benefit from this type of overview article reading the Register? If so, I need to find another site to get my tech. news.
I'm guessing they were just some leftover notes...
You mean from the author's previous article? Yeah, pretty much.
Well, someone had to say it, and unusually, I had the chance to be the first.
Cleverness is relative. I only claim to be a Register reader for some years, not that I am particularly 'clever' or 'bright', although I do value my silver badge. IMHO, this type of article is poor compared to previous articles, so I was commenting on whether the type of reader The Register is attracting is going down.
One international corporation I worked for had an inflexible approach to this. The security people were based in the US and not sympathetic to the needs of the UK's software developers. Much of the internet was blocked out by the corporate firewall; especially any pages showing any program code. This was a serious pain in the bum. On one occasion I was having problems with a specialised third party software component and tried to view the associated troubleshooting page. "Access forbidden". The firewall wouldn't allow me to see the sample program code to work around the problems we were having. A whole day was lost until I got home and was able to view the page at home and copy the text and code to a USB stick to take back to work the following day. One more day behind the development deadline.
"Not having web protection online is like working in a flu lab without a vaccination or a mask. For a while, you might get away with it. But sooner or later, you will start sneezing and wish you had taken some simple precautions"
To which, from an IT pro's viewpoint I have to say:
"Having web protection is like working in a hospital where you need to fix people's medical conditions.
But where all the detailed patient notes, help manuals and medicine bottles are kept in a permanently locked cabinet with a 5-step procedure to obtain a key to see any specific item of information"
Must admit, I had a "what the actual fuck!?" moment reading that final paragraph. Yeah, in an ideal world there are some advantages to using a cloud; but at the end of the day some other bugger is controlling your access to your own data which -for me at least- is a strong counter-argument. There's also no mention of the risks....even if your cloud provider is kosher and that is not going to change ever (snort!), you still have to ensure that your computer, router, ISP, intermediate hops and cloud are all secure.
We know intermediate traffic is being interfered with, by spook agencies, if nobody else. At best, using the cloud means there's an awful lot of components that have to be working perfectly and you are exponentially increasing your attack surface compared to a local server option.
Cheaper, the cloud may be. More tax-efficient, yeah, probably. Safer? Fuck no.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
