IT Teams are the unseen, unsung engines in a digital enterprise. As the number of applications and infrastructure elements increase, many of them within the perimeter and many outside, the capacities of the team members are getting stretched and challenged. The daily grind of ever-increasing sets of rules and configurations are reducing productivity and killing the innovative spaces. Even as the board is concerned about major security incidents and compliance roadmaps, IT managers are locked in repetitive, high-stakes tasks that offer little rewrun in endless cycles with no assurance of reduced risk.
The Sisyphean Task of Rule Management
CRs (Change Requets) are the transaction currencies that drive configuration and other changes to network security elements like firewalls. The onerous tasks that follow manually take hours and hours. Soon as the CR comes in , there is a trail of actions, mostly manual, that swamp the team. What the enterprise user sees as change finally went through the thorues of painful manual interventions as follows.
Understanding the stated requirements from the BUs (Business Units) which are served in a language which is often subjective- this is obvious given that BU leaders often do not understand security terminology
- Manually scouring through existing rules to check for conflicts
- Making new rules in a maze of IP ranges and port numbers. Very messy.
- Testing is critical before placing in production and nine out of ten times the staging environment does not match production.
And given the need for later analysis, you need to document each step for auditors who will do RCAs and scrutinize these decisions months later
One wrong step and the whole pack of cards including the entire network architecture and hosted applications can cause vicious security gaps emerging out of this dependence on manual tasks.
It is 24X7X365
Unlike other technical work, security rule management is 24X7X365 with no possibilities of letting your guard down. One eye is always on the screens to stay prepared for the worst.
Every "yes" might open backdoors. IT managers lie awake wondering if that port they opened last week could be exploited. The anxiety is constant because threats evolve daily. Each event appears as a singleton but the dynamics between events are worrying.
Every "no" creates overheads that business will not accept. Business teams don't understand why their "simple request" takes days or gets denied. IT and security managers become the organizational fall guys, blamed for both security incidents and business delays.
It never ends; the cycle of maintenance is a continuum. Fix one ruleset, and three more tickets appear. Applications change, teams restructure, compliance requirements shift. The work multiplies faster than it can be completed. Regression is not a choice.
The Learning Curve is Steep
Experience cannot be replaced by skills alone. Learning through fire is a sad necessity. Much then devolves on the experienced members of the team to provide mentorship and hold the hands of the junior members as they go through the rites of security passage. The Operations Centre Manager and lead is forever living through trade-offs- should they delegate, how much do they delegate, what do they delegate.
- Junior team members miss subtle security implications, creating cleanup work.
- Managers can't delegate high-risk changes without intensive oversight.
- Every shortcut or "temporary" workaround they approve haunts them during audits.
The steep learning curve sometimes makes the organization become dependent on expertise of the old-timers, creating a vicious cycle where they can't take time off without anxiety about what might break or what risky changes might get approved in their absence. There is only so much a remote style of management can do.
Too Many Interrupts : Strategic Priorities Suffer
Managing security rules can be so time and attention consuming that a meaningful balance between operational immediate interrupts and medium to long term planning is difficult to achieve. An IT manager might start reviewing a complex network segmentation project, only to be interrupted by:
- An urgent firewall request from sales (they always claim it's urgent).
- A compliance question about rules created by someone who left the company and there are no traces.
- A troubleshooting call because someone's business-critical traffic is being blocked.
- A meeting about the backlog of pending rule change requests- nrule.ot one, but many in a day. IT is forever having to justify every manual.
Each interruption requires loading complex mental models about network architecture, security policies, and business requirements. By day's end, managers feel exhausted yet unaccomplished, they've answered dozens of questions but made no real progress on strategic work.
Audit - Your Reputation Depends on it
Come the half-yearly audit time, the accumulated debt of manual rule management comes due. IT managers must produce documentation explaining the business justification for every rule, demonstrate that unused rules were removed, and prove that reviews happened on schedule.
Cleaning up the incident documentation debris and retaining focus on those which form evidence for audit is a big challenge.
And manual processes mean records are scattered across email chains, ticketing systems, and the unreliable memories of team members. Managers work nights and weekends reconstructing the rationale for decisions made months ago, knowing that any gap in documentation could result in compliance failures.
How the Cookie Crumbles!!
The slippery slope of manual interventions, resetting and reviewing rules to meet business user priorities and the endless cycles of escalations kill the kindred spirit of the IT managers and the team members.
Monday is dreaded; the backlog is simply killing
Volume of issues and their manual resolutions swamp the minds of the members in the operations centre; hurting creativity and space for process innovation.
- Every request from the business user is termed “simple” but extracts the same toll in time and attention.
- The lack of energy for the strategic projects that made IT management appealing.
- The realization that even a vacation can imply the huge pile that accumulates on return.
Eventually, talented IT managers leave for less stressful roles, take easier routes out of the team , or simply go through the motions like robots while their engagement and judgment deteriorate.
The Hidden Organizational Cost
When the engines of operational momentum and business enablement get swamped by an expanding envelope of manual tasks and rules, it shows on business.
Institutional Knowledge Erodes. The person who understood why certain rules existed and how the network evolved is gone. Their replacement will either make dangerous changes out of ignorance or spend months learning through painful trial and error.
Security Posture Takes a Hit. Burned-out managers approve requests without thorough review or implement overly permissive rules just to reduce their workload. The organization becomes incrementally less secure in ways that won't be discovered until a major incident occurs.
Business Slows Due to IT Drag. As IT managers become overwhelmed, their response times increase. Security requests that took hours now take days or weeks, frustrating business stakeholders and encouraging shortcuts and shadow IT processes.
Why Does Showstopper This Not Get Leadership Attention?
The belief that the operations centre dashboards carry the truth of efficiency and effectiveness is wrong. Organizations underestimate this problem because the pain is invisible on dashboards. There's no metric for "hours spent manually correlating firewall rules" or "cognitive load from context switching." The work happens in the background, and when it's done well, nobody notices. And one mistake and it is palpable and widely reported in the organisation.
The executive leadership sees this as a solved problem, wash their hands off after allocation of human resources, tools, and institutionalizing onerous processes. What they don't see is that these "tools" are often just better ways to document manual work, not automation that reduces the burden.
The Way Ahead: There is Light at the End of the Tunnel
Clearly, there is enough empirical evidence to show that throwing more resources, more tools and processes will not solve the problem. The solution isn't hiring more people to do more manual work. It's fundamentally changing how security rules are managed.
Automate With Surgical Focus. Don’t just automate data and process flows; re-engineer and innovate processes for making automation possible. Build robust interfaces
Self-service The Rule, Request Driven Process and Exception Workflows that let business teams request access within pre-approved boundaries; this takes a lot of the load off the teams.
In-House Development of Intelligent Modules that can interface with existing platforms and interface them in a measured, visible manner. They must flag conflicts, suggest optimizations, and enforce policies without constant and manual human oversight
Compliance Assurance Made Easy and that generates audit-ready documentation automatically instead of requiring reconstruction after the fact. Single source of truth must flow out of automated components of the operations centre.
In summary, we need to acknowledge that the current manual approach to security rules isn't just inefficient, it is ineffective, unsustainable and is a block to growth of focused IT teams. This colossal hidden cost of manual security rules can be offset by automation and leveraging the power of AI and ML to transform the IT and Security teams into self-learning, self-healing functions.
