Twisty Little Passages

Most of the healthcare facilities I’ve been to in traveling consultant mode require an employee to escort the me around. This is in large part due to the high percentage of locked doors in the admin and IT areas, but also in part due to the standard hospital floor plan. Fans of interactive fiction would describe the standard architecture as a “maze of twisty little passages, all alike”. One wrong turn and you could be lost for hours, or have your appendix removed.

It’s refreshing to be visiting a small, rural hospital, where I can walk in the back door without being fingerprinted, and go to the bathroom without leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.

A contrast arises because the IT department here has more security in place for the network than many of the places where physical security is much tighter. The use of the IIS Lockdown Tool, the Baseline Security Analyzer, group policy, and software to monitor the network for vulnerable machines on the LAN makes the deployment of a web application a little more challenging. Not that I’m complaining, it’s just the way it has to be.