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

They seem to have a strategy

[cold fjord]

Apparently they look for clues to organizations that have solved similar problems.

NSA Boosting Automation in Wake of Snowden Leaks

The agency has created a private cloud using OpenStack, a Web standard developed by NASA and Rackspace Hosting Inc. Analysts say this lets the NSA run its IT operations in a way that more closely mirrors that of Amazon.com Inc. or Google Inc. Previously, it took weeks or months for employees at NSA to get access to computing resources, said Nathanael Burton, a computer scientist speaking at the OpenStack Summit in Portland in June. The private cloud “let us grow to a scale that a very small team of 12 to 15 people could manage,” he said.

“We’ve transformed the NSA and over the next few months we’re going to be working with the larger intelligence community to roll out our OpenStack system across the entire intelligence community,” said Mr. Burton in a video of the conference. The NSA did not respond to requests for comment.