Start-Up Secure

CHAPTER SEVENInformation Technology

Don't assume a crack is too small to be noticed, or too small to be exploited.

– Rob Joyce, Tailored Access Operations, NSA

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, OR IT, can mean different things to different people. We'll refer to IT in this book in the sense of the technology and people that are part of our corporate environments. We are specifically excluding cloud environments like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) when talking about IT.

Things we might associate with IT in a typical corporate environment might be people like helpdesk staff, network engineers and administrators, desktop engineers and administrators, and the like. Some technology associated with this team are our laptops, printers, network switches, and Internet access, among other things.

As a scaling start-up, you probably won't have these people or teams, but most likely will have a laptop and Internet access. So, you and your co-founders will be the ones doing tech support, along with securing your start-up while you build your product. IT, however, is not what it used to be 30 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Reporting structures have shifted from chief financial officers (CFO), because IT was once the largest cost center, to the chief information officer (CIO). IT was also responsible for data centers, but with the advent of cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and DevOps, the responsibilities have bifurcated. DevOps and the site ...