Comment by andix
9 hours ago
What would happen if the director suddenly gets sick or decide not to come to work anymore? A lot of people assume that humans are reliable, they are not.
9 hours ago
What would happen if the director suddenly gets sick or decide not to come to work anymore? A lot of people assume that humans are reliable, they are not.
Exactly: limiting access is fine, lack of contingencies is not.
Some systems and services still only allow for one owner though (I'm not going to name names), which can be a big problem when MFA is mandated. From what the poster I responded to said, I'd be very surprised if that were the case for them though - just slightly daft policy.
This is where tooling like 1Password or Apple Keychain that lets you "share" MFA comes into play.
It doesn't allow sharing SMS, email or proprietary app based MFA.
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One of my first boss called it the bus factor, not sure where the term comes from. What's the minimum number that need to get hit by a bus before it's impossible to keep things running. He used to say "you always have some bus factor, but it should never be one unless you're alone, otherwise you deserve whatever crap is going to rain on you someday".
I've found that to be incredibly true in my career.
If you're optimistic you call it the "vacation or lottery" factor - if Bob wins the lottery tonight, will our shit still work tomorrow?
And if the answer is no, well, then Bob just got Hotel California'd and can check out but can never leave.
Help Bob; help yourself.
We call it the HB3 (Hit By Bus Binder). Aka keep a document containing what to do if someone of your team gets hit by a bus.
My team rotates 1 sacrificial member every week to be on call with prod k8s access. It limits who can just push things to prod at any given time while making sure everyone on the team has experience. If someone is out sick or on vacation we do time trading, it works out for everyone.
Have lived this when a seeming healthy mid-30s man dropped dead. Nightmare.
Implemented a lot of “just in case” policies after that, which seemed obvious but oh well.