Bring Your Own Disaster

The story is that the IT teams are detached completely from the reality of their end users and are driven by compliance box ticking, off the shelf corporate malware sales marketoids, incompetence and ignorance.

Any attempt to confront anyone on that is met with defensive use of politics and budgetary concerns which don’t make logical sense at all. In reality the staff aren’t very good and can’t cope with the requirements of the organisation and this is being carefully hidden by the folk trying to protect their positions.

Thus we have several hundred people with inadequate hardware, inappropriate poorly configured software and friction so bad that doing an hour of productive work is a miracle. Of course corporate surveys that are sent out never address the concerns because that would mean someone has to be accountable for it.

At the same time IT teams are pushing BYOD for mobile devices because you can push a policy out which fucks the end user’s devices once a week and causes actual data loss on the personal side of things. So no one uses BYOD because it risks their own personal stuff and no one carries a corporate phone so no work gets done on the road.

The end game is I use my own hardware and do everything in clean room and push it to GitHub and pull it back into corporate env for integration.

The scary thing is I know enough people working at different organisations to know that this is the status quo. You can blame Gartner, Microsoft, the whole security sector and the army of solutions providers for mandating this mess.

When you run your Windows 10 with four zillion applications and twice the number of drivers, you have a continuous queue to the help desk. Sometimes from reasonable users, sometimes from bozos.

Now imagine I come with my favourite Atari 400 and the 10 Gbps driver does not work.

It is easy to dream of users being self-managed, but this will not happen, ever.

Most of the friction I bumped into is about their phone, not their laptop. Most people are just fine having a corporate laptop.

But most don't want their "preferred equipment" for mobile, they want their own singular phone and nothing else. And that's where the issues all come into play.

It made a huge difference in the quality of life of all my coworkers with which I spend hours peer coding or in conf calls.

It's also better for myself, as my client takes me more seriously because in a meeting, as I'm the only one with good sound and image.

Were I to use only approved hardware, I would not be able to make our work life better.

There are some challenges to overcome.

First, success will require that leadership within an organization understands that we cannot simply throw more technology at the problem. We need good security professionals who know how to educate the general public. Organizations need to find creative ways to make it part of their cultural DNA to learn the skills required for breach avoidance.

Second, as any medium advances it takes time for people to catch up and approach it in a way that is not so naive. If we are honest with ourselves, technology is as much a medium as it is a tool. For example: When a film of an oncoming train was shown to early audiences who had never seen motion picture before it made them instinctively duck as the train approached them. It was like a thrill ride today. It takes time for social groups to desensitize from a new medium. We took the naive approach with social networks, and now we are learning the consequences.

The problem is that technology is introducing new mediums at such a rapid pace that many people don't have enough time to become more sophisticated in its use.

Oh but they'll surely try. You can't say that small things like "reality" ever really touch corporate IT and box ticking auditors.