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by cbs 4928 days ago
Its fun to rail on internal IT. Most organizations inadvertently set the department up to fail and then find themselves shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that they have failed to deliver.

The boys in the basement aren't a bunch of Luddites, before the upstairs staff has even heard of the new tech out there, they're already dependent on it in their personal life (or have demoed and tossed it to the curb).

Spoilers: They actually can stop it, they're the ones managing firewall config after all. You should ask yourself "Why haven't they?" Probably has something to do with the fact the buisness requirements and/or budget preventing them from using the tools everybody would prefer.
2 comments
akira2501 4928 days ago
I'm not anywhere near the firewall team, but my company seems to struggle with blocking these services quite a bit. In particular, google drive is very hard to block: they use HTTPS and they don't have a fixed set of addresses that the service is delivered from.

Their solution? Add a GPO to all our windows machines to force a '127.0.0.1 drive.google.com' entry into all the HOSTS files on our network.

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KThornton 4928 days ago
Hadn't really considered things from this angle - I'd be happy to see a win-win-win for the people, IT, and the company.
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cbs 4928 days ago
If you want to solve the problem you're discussing in this article, you seriously need to talk to some dejected netadmins.

Most corporate technology problems where a solution exists but isn't used aren't technology problems at all, they're office politics problems (for the sake of argument I also consider business requirements / SOPs to be under the office politics umbrella, if you've ever tried to change them you know this is true).

It's rare that more technology actually fixes the problem. Usually getting more/new technology is a catalyst to changing the underlying social problems, or is just a workaround.

For example, my alma mater wants to implement a new thing to make service better on campus (sorry about the vague-ness, its about privacy of the people involved, and I'm not even supposed to know this). If the project goes through as originally planned, they'll save money and greatly improve services. But, it will never be approved without letting the CIO win a turf war in the process, so the project will end up spending an extra >$500k on unnecessary tech to do it her way. Did I mention this is a public school that really can't afford to be paying that much just to feed egos?

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