This is a timely placement we got for the client, and one that IT and non-IT folks can appreciate. Happy reading! What IT folks can learn from the acrimonious Arizona Immigration debate Max Huang says the biggest lesson is that one-off solutions can bring about more problems than solutions September 02, 2010 — I'm not much of a political junkie, mostly because I think a great deal of the discussion ends up being a shouting match between people of different parties and loses its solution-solving capabilities. Nowhere have I seen this more apparent of late than with the heated debate related to the Arizona Immigration Law. To be honest, I'm no longer really cognizant of the substantive points surrounding the issue. However, it dawned on me recently that I've seen this saga before, but in a different context. On certain occasions, I've seen CISOs execute well-intentioned responses to one particular threat or instance that fall outside their existing security policies and leave other aspects of their networks exposed or, at the very least, disconnected. The discovery of this back draft usually precedes a "finger-pointing" evolution, pitting employees and supervisors against one another with the underlying question being who didn't see the negative effect coming. Here's the bottom line. IT security cannot and should never be conducted in a vacuum. Instead, strong care and consideration must be taken to ensure that not only does it fit within a more comprehensive communications infrastructure, but also one that directly benefits the organization's overall strategic goals. It's easy to follow the latest threat, but the real benefit is in a security plan's preventative capabilities. So before the next CISO starts a heated argument with his CIO counterpart, I would suggest that person count to 10 and ask themselves these three basic questions. Read the rest of the article here.