Clay Shirky: Network Security will be a joke until IT departments recognize users’ power
Clay Shirky: Enter the Decentralized Zone
“The IT workers of any organization larger than 50 people are now in an impossible
situation: They are rewarded for negative events-no crashes or breeches-even as workers
are inexorably eroding their ability to build or manage a corporate sandbox. The obvious
parallel here is with the PC itself; 20 years ago, the mainframe guys laughed at the
toy computers workers were bringing into the workplace because they knew that computation
was too complex to be handled by anyone other than a centralized group of trained
professionals. Today, we take it for granted that workers can manage their own computers.
But we still regard network access and configuration as something that needs to be
centrally managed by trained professionals, even as workers take network configuration
under their control. There is no one right answer-digital security is a trade-off. But
no solution that requires centralized control over what network users do will succeed. ”
