Why the NSA Can't Replace 90% of Its System Administrators

An anonymous reader writes "Curious about the recently purposed NSA cuts, Courtney Nash explores a few myths about systems automation 'In the aftermath of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA's domestic surveillance activities, the NSA has recently announced that they plan to get rid of 90% of their system administrators via software automation in order to "improve security." So far, I've mostly seen this piece of news reported and commented on straightforwardly. But it simply doesn't add up. Either the NSA has a monumental (yet not necessarily surprising) level of bureaucratic bloat that they could feasibly cut that amount of staff regardless of automation, or they are simply going to be less effective once they've reduced their staff.'"

Comments

Re:Only one thing is for sure...

[Colonel Korn]

Probably hundreds of thousands of people have worked for the NSA and only a small hand full of them have betrayed their country, stole secrets, and defected.

Working for the NSA is a betrayal of country, so I think that 100% of those people have by definition earned your disapproval.

Re:replace Windoze with Linux

[cusco]

It's really useful to be able to manage access, user permissions and configure updates across a couple hundred servers at a time, isn't it? Oh, that's right, you don't have a good LDAP implementation, or group policies, or an update server, so how do you do it? Do you have a magic wand? There are reasons why most of the truly large installations run Windows, it's because it was written with manageability in mind from the beginning. If I had a dozen systems I'd consider Linux, if I had a hundred there's no question which operating system would be more appropriate.