Do Your Developers Have Local Admin Rights?

plover writes "I work as a developer for a Very Large American Corporation. We are not an IT company, but have a large IT organization that does a lot of internal development. In my area, we do Windows development, which includes writing and maintaining code for various services and executables. A few years ago the Info Security group removed local administrator rights from most accounts and machines, but our area was granted exceptions for developers. My question is: do other developers in other large companies have local admin rights to their development environment? If not, how do you handle tasks like debugging, testing installations, or installing updated development tools that aren't a part of the standard corporate workstation?"

Comments

Virtualization is your Friend

[wwwillem]

In modern times, I would give them no admin rights on the box itself, but you could provide virtual machines for them on which they can do whatever they want. The argument that they need to do things that "really, really" :-) require access to the bare metal, doesn't hold anymore, because the applications they are building will anyway need to be able to run in a virtualized environment.

I've done many audits and project plans on this topic in the past, and the issue is always that developers are split personalities: on the one hand they are standard corporate citizens that need email, calendar and word, which must be rock solid and therefore IT controlled, on the other hand they do their development work that requires freedom over their box. In the past the best solution was always to give them two PCs (or a thin client for the standard desktop work), but today I would solve this all through virtual machines.
 

It's Target.

[girlintraining]

I'm going to end some mystery here: I am guessing the "very large corporation" is Target, a massive US-retail chain. I only know because I used to work on support there, and they tried this crap with trying to delete local admin rights for everyone so nobody could administer their own boxes. Even Microsoft told them this was a bad idea, and you can't remove local admin from a system because it's fundamental to the security model. It was so painful watching the daily e-mails come back from amongst IT and then once every week or two see a management e-mail so loaded in buzzwords I printed it off and hung it on my cube wall next to a train wreck picture and left my coworkers to do the math. They went ahead and tried it anyway -- I've watched whole stores, departments, and even divisions just drop off the network because they rammed some security change through, didn't test it thoroughly -- and now some application is seriously wedged. The days and days of downtime are due to convincing infosecurity that there's a problem and then fixing it -- because they're autonomous to the rest of support and report directly to the board. Which means, no matter how bad they f*** up, it's your fault, not theirs, because they each think they're Agent Smith, saving the corporation from the disorder of computational devices. *face palm*

I feel your pain. I do.

The sad part is, this isn't just that corporation: It's most Fortune 500 companies. Management is so far removed from the IT process that the only input they get is from external sources: Trade magazines and consultants. This, of course, ends in tears. These are the kind of people that read that pen drives are the source of all evil on their network and if you just delete the USB mass storage driver from the system, your problem is solved. I don't know which trade magazine published this idea -- but when I find him, I'm going to end him. Again, not a problem specific to that company -- it's representative of what everyone finds in the field today.

Since corporations with this level of brain damage inevitably give developers underpowered systems, here's your solution: Cannibalize another system, make sure you've got a few extra GB of RAM, and install an virtual machine, then do all your development within that environment. Site licensing is a wonderful thing. Just don't ever join it to the domain and shuffle your test files in and out via a temporary share. Even better, find a standalone system and use that for development so corporate can have their ridiculous security on one system, and you have an unencumbered development platform to develop for and transfer completed work back to the main system.

It's stupid, and you should never have had to do it. But then, what about working for a large corporation is ever simple? So many people trying to ensure they're a crucial part of the business, so few who actually give a damn about it...