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by laumars 2098 days ago
A company running on off-the-shelf CMS for a product that adds value but isn’t part of the core business so that they can focus of the hard problems that differentiates themselves from their competitors is absolutely the correct way to run infrastructure.

You do actually realise that a significant amount of national and international news sites are actually powered by offs-the-shelf components and often even Wordpress? Equally true is the number of independent shops that run off-the-shelf applications. Then you have SaaS solutions that run a hosted blog (not everyone has switched to Medium), shops that still run message boards, and so on and so forth.

It’s got absolutely nothing b to do with the organisation failing and everything to do with investing your expensive talent on the problems that differentiate your business.

It’s easy to say “I work in yadda yadda yadda” anonymously but you’re still massively misrepresenting how the industry actually works with your sweeping generalisations. And if you were half as experienced as you pretend, you’d already know that. For example there is another use case of WAFs that hasn’t yet been discussed: automatic blacklisting. If they detect suspicious activity hitting services under the WAFs control they can automatically blacklist that source across all customers using that WAF service. This is similar to how fail2ban works but at a cloud level and with the added bonus of saving your sysadmins/DevOps engineers the pain of adding and maintaining thousands of apache / nginx rules themselves.

Let’s also not forget that there is good money to be made off consulting for those companies that are “fucked” and guiding them through best practices and low maintenance security models. That can often be a rewarding job in its own right (depending on the business).

1 comments

I’ll ignore your condescending dribble but:

> Let’s also not forget that there is good money to be made off consulting for those companies that are “fucked”

Where the hell are your ethics?

No it’s not recommending snake oil and telling them to do things properly instead I don’t. Care if that makes the security industry dry up, my only hope is that if it does the snake oil salespeople die with it.
So your approach of "not scraping bottom of the barrel" and not helping such companies is more ethical?
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