My Mac turned a Mule into an”Ś

Shortly after I began my job as Chief Information Security Officer at Georgia College, it became clear that I needed to find a new way to manage my files and work papers. I had filled my filing cabinets to burst capacity. I archived what I could but between the policies, procedures, statutes, manuals, I needed to have ready access to many documents in short order.

I plugged on for a few more months and one day I scanned our network only to find a vulnerability that I was told had been handled. I fumbled through notebooks of scan results never finding the notebook that I was looking for. In the south we use a phrase, “grinning like a mule eating briars”. This was the look that our lead System Administrator was sporting. Well, I had had enough of this. I had to find something new.

I poked around looking for an easy to learn, rapid development, database management system for my Mac. Admittedly, though it pains me to say so, this is a shortcoming of the Mac. Apples ship only with the core data service, which is NOT a fully fledged database management system. I finally settled on FileMaker Pro (which has a PC version as well). After a lot of headaches, therapy, and scotch whiskey I managed to complete the task of going digital with all of my work papers. Now I simply search in the appropriate database for a record or set of records that I need and shazaam (imagine a poof of smoke here) there it is.

Now I could turn the tables on the System Administrator. I scanned the network again, input the data into my FileMaker Pro database”Ś and waited. The cunning System Administrator, camouflaged with unix shell commands wouldn’t escape me this time. He responded to all of my posted vulnerabilities. The trap was set. I had documentation that he claimed he had addressed the vulnerability. I scanned again. AHA! It was still there, I had all the proof that I needed.

This time when I brought the ever present vulnerability to his attention he wasn’t smiling like the proverbial mule, but he did look like an a__! I have since used databases in my policymaking and planning efforts because of their innate ability to filter, sort, merge, export, and import data. There is an upfront cost in labor to develop the database, but the rewards, in my opinion are phenomenal.