The Career-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

The Career-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

As published in the September/October 2020 edition of InfoSecurity Professional Magazine


By Anita J. Bateman, CISSP


We are all plagued by technical debt in the form of legacy systems that can no longer be patched but must be kept up and running. Critical business processes, legacy data retention, lack of system knowledge or “pet” projects might keep us from retiring these difficult-to-maintain systems. From the very first operating system updates on the original IBM 360 to the latest Windows 10 updates today, we still struggle with this common challenge to fully patch and maintain our technical systems.


Might there be a different way to approach this perennial issue? Might we invoke some of the philosophies, principals and methodologies of organizational experts when it comes to ridding IT systems of so-called junk?


Patching alone will not solve this


How did we end up with so many unpatchable systems in the first place? Mergers and acquisitions have brought us systems that may not conform to our standards of maintenance and lifecycle management. “Shadow IT” and our own lack of discipline may be additional sources. Ongoing challenges to “do less with more” may have forced us to make prioritization decisions to defer regular maintenance activities on lower-priority systems.


We know that we can improve the situation with well-defined processes, dedicated teams, smarter tools, more budget and better discipline—all the usual best practices. But it is rarely this simple.


Some industries, like ..

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