Finally, a sensible security scheme

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No OS is infallible

No OS is infallible, but some have better security than others. When the PC came out, it provided what seemed to be an inexpensive tool to increase productivity. It also gave people a way to get around the MIS group. Back then, MIS had nothing to do with PCs. The PC was something that an individual bought to do Visicalc or Wordstar. The MIS group maintained the infrastructure or minis and mainframes and got in everybody's way with procedures.

The reality is that mainframes were and still are more secure. They are more robust. They have a mean time between failure of less than once every 50 years. They are backed up regularly. They are kept in secure rooms that are often guarded and require an encoded card key access to gain entry. The backups are stored in an encrypted form in a fireproof vault, and a second copy is kept offsite in a different geographical location in a secure facility.

All that infrastructure came at a price. Because of that, mainframes seemed a lot more expensive. If they did not need the infrastructure (it was possible to keep mainframes unsecured and to do backups irregularly and to have no security administrator) then things would have been much cheaper.

When the world moved to PCs and Windows, we gave up security, reliability, good documentation, on-demand support, fixes and patches that were made for you ASAP if you found a single bug, the ability to recover from a crash with no data loss (except what was on the screen at the time, if the user had not pressed Enter) and more. What we gained was a lower cost, faster time to production, (not that the software had to work correctly, or that any purported feature would ever work properly if the company considered it low priority) quicker development time of in-house software, cheap or free software that can be downloaded (actually, mainframe developers had their own network of shared utilities available for download, and they had the source code to integrate into systems as needed) and the ability to add software that an individual user needs, not one that the MIS group says that everybody must use.

But as we move more and more toward stability and security, we find that the PC is back in the hands of the MIS group, many users have no say in what OS or software they can use, or how backups work, or even what hardware they can buy.

So you can say that nobody has to do Windows, but many people go with the corporate standard because they have no choice. Imposing these standards on top of Windows may not be the best choice, but there is often no other choice for the end user.

Posted by: wresnick   Posted on: 12/14/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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