Boiling The Ocean

Boiling the ocean is one of my favorite phrases. As the phrase connotes, boiling the ocean is a process that will likely never converge to success, nor end. I am reminded of this phrase as I attend FloCon this week. The vast majority of people I work with professionally understand the need to make compromises and accept some imperfections in order to make progress operationally. In my experience, operational progress, though often imperfect, still leads to improved network security monitoring and security operations in infinitely more cases than taking a "boil the ocean" approach. In other words, an 80% solution at least gets you 80% of what you want and need, while waiting for everything to be 100% perfect will always get you nowhere. There are a few in attendance at FloCon for whom the compromises that operational personnel must make is lost on them. I can't think of a way to show them the other side, other than to put them in an operational environment for a year (or perhaps longer)....