Seasoning Improves Taste and Quality of Life

Presented at ArcticCon 2018, Oct. 4, 2018, 11 a.m. (45 minutes).

In business, the use of the term ROI is very popular. After Return on Investment is a direct indicator of how profitable something is. The higher the ROI, the more profitable a firm can be. But what about ROE? Return on Effort? That is meant to qualitatively determine how effective something is with regards to how much effort you put into it. Security is difficult at best to maintain when a large number of systems exist that require constant use of resources to maintain. Implementing changes across those environments is all too likely to result in misconfigurations and incorrect application. Those not only result in increased man hours in trying to troubleshoot and alleviate, they are a drain on the emotional well-being of those involved. Through the use of Centralized Configuration Management, a Single Source of Truth and Peer Review of proposed changes many of those headaches and heartaches can be eliminated. This talk will discuss the use of SaltStack as a solution to those issues as well as its strengths in eliminating shared user credentials, multiple users having access to devices all across the environment and maintaining a more cohesive concerted control of workflow and processes.Seasoning, just a few sprinkles of Salt, that nasty taste in your mouth will go away each day and you'll be a bit happier with your lot in life.


Presenters:

  • James Siegel - Alaska USA
    Starting from the Sinclair ZX81 until now, have never been without a computer. Programmer in high school, avoided that career path since in those days most programmers ended up in bank or insurance company basements without windows. Have always been involved in one way or another in PC and server builds and OS exploration. Took my personal passion and eventually made it into a career when the economy tanked in the not so recent past. (circa 2009). So now I get paid to do what I would normally do for fun, and often do anyway. My passion for security comes from seeing that the whole world is becoming more digitally connected. That's scary when you realize that so many people leave the doors and windows wide open and publicly lay out their own dirty laundry for all the world to see. Philosophically that scares the daylights out of me. Let's see what we can all do to work on making the world a bit safer place for our children, their children, and the children still yet to come.

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