Trust Has Limits

By mwilson | Jan 3, 2009

It’s hard to find good people you can trust. I have always favoured the alternative – put measures in place to prevent people from screwing you over. No one person should be so integral to a business that they can unmake the organization in a single fell swoop.

Let the situation faced by JournalSpace be a lesson to anyone managing other people. Know your staff, but more importantly learn enough about their area of expertise that you can speak intelligently to them. Even if you can’t do their job (that’s why they were hired) you need to be knowledgeable enough to be taken seriously, and to protect yourself and your company from abuse.

From what we can tell, JournalSpace was brought down by an apparently disgruntled employee who also happened to be the person responsible for ensuring the company’s databases were protected from failure. Although the database backup was ineffectual, the real issue is one person acting alone was able to destroy the business’ core asset.

That is a total failure of management. Even if those in charge were not database users, they needed to take responsibility for ensuring the continuation of their business in the event something were to happen to the person responsible for that critical aspect. I understand employee sabotage is the most damaging kind of attack, but if management had put into place a proper contingency plan back in 2002 the company would not have been violently and effectively killed today.

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4 Comments so far
  1. netman January 3, 2009 10:18 pm

    These people deserve this. They allow ONE person in the organization to have this much control without any backups? It’s quite obvious they did not take their customers seriously or act in a responsible fashion. The turnip truck has now left town.

  2. mwilson January 4, 2009 6:58 am

    Management was definitely irresponsible, but I still believe the situation was allowed to happen through ignorance rather than anything else. I feel for the bloggers who have lost years of work because of this.

    From the Journal Space blog:

    http://journalspace.com/blog/

    January 2nd

    This sounds like an ancient Chinese curse: “may you be featured on Slashdot and have 80 Twitter followers.”

    Some more background for the folks who caught the news on Slashdot or another blog: yes, I was a huge idiot, first and foremost.

    It was the guy handling the IT (and, yes, the same guy who I caught stealing from the company, and who did a slash-and-burn on some servers on his way out) who made the choice to rely on RAID as the only backup mechanism for the SQL server. He had set up automated backups for the HTTP server which contains the PHP code, but, inscrutibly, had no backup system in place for the SQL data. The ironic thing here is that one of his hobbies was telling everybody how smart he was.

    This doesn’t excuse what happened, though: I should have taken a better look at what he’d left behind, and fixed all of the things that needed fixing.

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