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Losing your phone after a distraction can be a harrowing experience. Almost as harrowing as sorting out your network when a similar distraction causes policies to be changed. Calum Macleod, Regional Manager for Tufin Techologies, explains how both problems can be dealt with. It happens in a moment – playing with my mobile before going into a meeting; I put it down for a moment and suddenly my host is standing in front of me. Two hours later I’m desperately searching for my phone. Rush back to reception but it’s not there. Here I am in Dubai and my phone is gone! I need to call my provider to block it but the provider’s number is in the phone. I have visions of my wife calling and suddenly panicking that the Somali pirates have got me – like the time I forgot to call from Dublin and she’s waiting for the ransom demand – still living that one down but that’s what happens when you go on a business trip to Dublin the week before Christmas!
My host comes up with all kinds of useful suggestions about who I should call but since my whole life is in that stupid thing I can’t remember any numbers. All my contacts, email addresses – like I said my life is in that stupid thing!
All it takes is a small distraction and before you know it you’ve disconnected your business critical applications. One small change on the firewall or the router and suddenly you’re users are disconnected. If you’re a service provider just imagine the revenue loss! If you’re an airline taking online bookings, or a bank, or any kind of business suddenly you are losing money and/or customers just because of a momentary distraction.
And like my phone, recovering the situation is not necessarily that simple. Logically I could say that my phone was somewhere, but where the somewhere is, is the other question. You would think that if one of your admins made a simple change to a firewall or a router you could just immediately reverse the process, but in reality it is often like looking for a needle in a haystack. Some organisations have hundreds or thousands of rules in their configurations and they are being changed and modified constantly. Maybe even worse they are being changed at weekends when everything is quiet and then the proverbial hits the fan on Monday morning!
Maybe you didn’t change anything, you only upgraded to the newest release from your supplier. Only to discover that there are problems because the new release has different defaults to the old release. So how do you now validate your baseline configuration against all the devices that have been upgraded?
And of course someone is always looking to place the blame! I have to say my initial suspicion was that my telephone was in the “careful keeping” of one of the guys at the security desk. Frequently I hear network and security administrators complaining that as soon as something doesn’t work the firewall guys are always the first to be accused. Network connectivity problems are some of the most common – and aggravating – for business users.
