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!

  • @[email protected]English
    12•9 months ago

    And they believe all employees actually remember so many wildly different and long passwords, and change them regularly to wildly different ones? All this leads to is a single password that barely makes it over the minimum requirements, and a suffix for the stage (like 1 for boot, 2 for bitlocker etc), and then another suffix for the month they changed it. All of that then on sticky notes on the screen.

    • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬English
      8•9 months ago

      I’ve seen plenty of solutions. Sticky notes, a simple text file. External tools like barcode scanners. Using all letters and just 1! at the end (not that this is less secure on technical level than a completely random string, but it’s easier to bruteforce - theoretically), etc. Some people use KeePass (with a stupid 5 letter password).