Know Your Limitations
At the end of the 1973 Clint Eastwood movie Magnum Force , after Dirty Harry watches his corrupt police captain explode in a car, he says "a man's got to know his limitations." I thought of this quote today as the debate rages about compromising municipalities and other information technology-constrained yet personal information-rich organizations. Several years ago I wrote If You Can't Protect It, Don't Collect It . I argued that if you are unable to defend personal information, then you should not gather and store it. In a similar spirit, here I argue that if you are unable to securely operate information technology that matters, then you should not be supporting that IT . You should outsource it to a trustworthy cloud provider , and concentrate on managing secure access to those services. If you cannot outsource it, and you remain incapable of defending it natively, then you should integrate a capable managed security provider . It's clear to