Thinking Out Loud: You Can Skip This

Friday, November 16. 2007

Thinking Out Loud: You Can Skip This

It's well known in the IT industry that security is a process, as opposed to a product or something. By this, we mean that there's no such thing as a boxed item that can fix problems, no matter what the reassuring face of Mr Norton might imply. It is an ongoing saga, in which ease is traded for safety, and back again, and adapted again as new information comes to light.

Often, what causes this information to come to light is a disaster. A loss, or a scare, or just an uneasy feeling that something's not quite right. In the course of disaster, lines of communication open and data gets shared; "Is this happening to you too?"

In the course of these exchanges, the ideal security process takes new data in, asks questions that this data raises, an often brings things to light as potential matters to incorporate, even if they're not directly related to the immediate issue at hand. The security process is, of course, driven by people. This sort of brings me towards my point.

So now let's talk about people ...

It's easy to think of people as items. A person has a definable physical location, and have quite definitive boundaries. Well, that's true at any given point in time, but over an extended period it gets fuzzy. I'm not made of the same molecules as I was when I was five years old; the majority is probably not the same as when I was twenty five. I'm still the same person, though. Or rather, I'm a progression of a process that started when I was conceived. Even before then, I'm part of the process of all my ancestors and interactions of particles back to the point where everything starts, and ...

I digress. Oh, and let's not get into "souls" here, OK? Whether you like to believe that some part of you is a beautiful and unique snowflake drifting through eternity, all of this still stands.

OK, so; people are a process. Even beyond our own bodies, made up of parts that have probably been involved with many, many other bodies in the past, our exchange of abstract information also affects our personal processes and becomes part of a larger one. We can isolate ourselves to an extent, but then we miss information that can shift our lives around. One of the major catalysts for stimulation of information exchange is disaster. See? It was relevant.

Communication in times of trouble and the exchange of information, which has been seemingly inconsequential in the past, can lead to unexpected discovery and radical changes to a process, or a person, if you prefer. Maybe "a life" would be a better term, as a term for a given person across time.

I think that's a long-winded way of writing "one door closes, another opens", but I hate falling back on trite clichés when I'm trying to get my thoughts in order.

So, with that background in place, here's my blog for the last week:

Communication was initiated after a crash, resulting in information previously discounted as inapplicable being shared, and discovered not to be irrelevant after all. Processes are being adapted to take this into account, and may lead to improved performance in general. Careful staged testing outside of a production environment may proceed if some small incompatibilities with current systems can be resolved.

So, what did you do?

Posted by Mike in Random at 21:18 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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I see what you did there.

Oddly detached, you say? Whatever gave you that idea?

Snerk.

#1 Anonymous on 2007-11-17 13:24 (Reply)

PS. I didn't mean for that to be anonymous, but now that it is anonymous, I think I'll leave it that way. You know who it is anyway. :p

#1.1 Anonymous on 2007-11-17 13:28 (Reply)

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