Think Globally Act Locally in Information Technology

Today, my thoughts move to the frame of reference that works best for Enterprise Information Technology Managers.  There are essentially two points of view in large scale IT deployments.  The first is a global, Enterprise view of the network with local maintenance and execution or the opposite.  I firmly feel that thinking globally and acting locally is the only effective way to do it.

In the early days of IT, people had stand-alone personal computers.  The next step was networking them together into a local area network to gain access to shared resources such as printers and scanners.  From this humble beginning came the expectation from users and many early administrators that organizational networks would place their optimization emphasis on the local, tactical level.

Flash forward to today and the predominant threat to our information security comes from two fronts – the insider and externally.  Neither of these threats can be effectively managed with any sort of local dominating mentality.  Your only chance is to adopt a global view of your entire organization’s network and control user access and external, shell, perimeter monitoring, detection, and action.  This will necessarily mean that you make decisions on execution and efficiency on the greater good instead of the welfare of the user sitting next to you… or in the corner office of your building.

I believe that today’s Information Technology Professionals have a very difficult job here – adopting a much higher plane of reference and communicating its necessity to middle and local management – than many in the business world give them credit for. 

What do you think about this topic?  Do you agree or disagree with me? Please share your ideas below.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for December 10, 2009  by Scott Coughlin.

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