Wednesday, September 03, 2008

A rare win

I'd almost given up all hope completely, when I was taken by surprise last week, and actually had the gorillas at work make the decision to do the right thing for once.

The owner is very cost conscious - and since it is his company he has that right. A lot of time it goes to extremes, and many others I feel that he is penny wise and pound foolish. In this case he thinks that the integration with one of our partners is costing too much. We are charged on a per transactions basis - and I don't know how we charge back to our dealers. Each transaction can have a different charge based on the type - so he wants to know how many of which type are going through our integration hub.

Not a big deal - except these transactions all contain personally identifiable and sensitive data - so much be encrypted at all times, and we are not allowed to store the data at all.

For other transactions, we store the data so we can mine this to get the transaction, because there is nothing sensitive stored there. But these we don't. It would be possible to turn on debugging and get the information, but it would be in violation of the contract, and possibly against the law as well.

I stuck to my guns, saying that I could not turn that on. The only way we could obtain this would be a program modification to pull this out as it passed through, and save the non-sensitive data that the boss wanted.

Well, one morning last week I had a couple of managers in my cube, asking for the data. I held firm, but really felt the pressure. It felt like there was an unspoken threat going on to do it, or lose my job.

Well, the next day the VP made the call - to make the program mod so that we don't reveal any of the sensitive data. It took me a day and we ran it for a couple of hours today to check to see if that is what they need, but I feel a bit vindicated. It isn't often that the company makes a decision to do what is right, instead of what is quick or easy.

Just a little victory, but a victory all the same. You have to enjoy the few you get.

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