One policy, and the places it has to hold
- The branch that got its own firewall
- Bought in a hurry by whoever was on site and never compared against head office. It is one estate or a list of exceptions, and the second is discovered during an incident.
- The lift-and-shift
- A workload moved to the cloud keeps the ruleset it had in the rack. The perimeter around that rack is not there, and somebody else finds the gap.
- The contractor’s laptop
- Not your build, not your patch cycle, and on your network by Tuesday. Access decided by the user and the state of the device, not by the cable.
- The exception nobody removed
- Opened for a migration in March, still open in November because whoever asked has left. One policy means one place to find it and one place to answer for it.
- The audit
- Somebody asks what the rule is for remote access to production. Three estates, three answers and a week of work. One estate, one screen.
- The new office
- The question is how long until it is protected like the rest. The policy exists, applying it is what remains. That is the difference between an estate and a collection.