System Administration Ethics: Ten Commandments for Security and Compliance in a Modern Cyber World

Successfully navigate through the ever-changing world of technology and ethics and reconcile system administration principles for separation of duty, account segmentation, administrative groups and data protection. As security breaches become more common, businesses need to protect themselves when facing ethical dilemmas in today’s digital landscape. This book serves as a equitable guideline in helping system administrators, engineers – as well as their managers – on coping with the ethical challenges of technology and security in the modern data center by providing real-life stories, scenarios, and use cases from companies both large and small.

You'll examine the problems and challenges that people working with customer data, security and system administration may face in the cyber world and review the boundaries and tools for remaining ethical in an environment where it is so easy to step over a line - intentionally or accidentally. You'll also see how to correctly deal with multiple ethical situations, problems that arise, and their potential consequences, with examples from both classic and DevOps-based environments.

Using the appropriate rules of engagement, best policies and practices, and proactive “building/strengthening” behaviors, System Administration Ethics provides the necessary tools to securely run an ethically correct environment.

What You'll Learn

• The concepts of Least Privilege and Need to Know
• Request change approval and conduct change communication
• Follow "Break Glass" emergency procedures
• Code with data breaches, hacking and security violations, and proactively embrace and design for failures
• Build and gain trust with employees and build the right ethical culture
• Review what managers can do to improve ethics and protect their employees

Who This Book Is For

This book’s primary audience includes system administrators and information security specialists engaged with the creation, process and administration of security policies and systems. A secondary audience includes company leaders seeking to improve the security, privacy, and behavioral practices.

About the Authors

Igor Ljubuncic is a physicist by vocation and a Linux geek by profession. Igor comes with many years of experience in the hi-tech industry, including medical, high-performance computing, data center, cloud, and hosting fields, with emphasis on complex problem solving and the scientific method. To date, Igor’s portfolio includes 15 patents, 16 books, several open-source projects, numerous articles published in leading journals and magazines, and presentations at prestigious international conferences like LinuxCon, CloudOpen, OpenStack days, IEEE events, and others. In his free time, Igor writes car reviews, fantasy novels and manages his award-winning blog, dedoimedo.com

Tom Litterer is a business leader and a future-focused thinker with three decades of experience in the industry. Tom spent the first six years of his career as a UNIX system administrator, transitioning from novice to expert. He has since managed each of the key areas within IT, including help desk, site operations, high performance computing (HPC) services, identity and access management, lab operations, internal cloud deployment, engineering tools and licensing. He was also the global manager of Intel’s HPC servers and storage chip design environment. Tom is currently the Associate Director of Data Center and Cloud Infrastructure at Portland State University (PSU), Oregon, US. In this role, he is responsible for all Linux, Windows, virtualization, storage, backup, and HPC services in local data centers as well as the university’s cloud infrastructure.