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Oh RFPs are an everlasting source of fun in B2B. Like, we've received the wrong questionaire once. It contained the question what we would do if armed forces i
by tetha 5y ago
Oh RFPs are an everlasting source of fun in B2B.
Like, we've received the wrong questionaire once. It contained the question what we would do if armed forces intruded into our secured facilities to seize assets. We eventually settled on the answer "Run or hide, while calling the cops". At that point the customer noticed their error and it was pretty funny.
In other areas, the consulting teams and us are developing some degree of a safe word system. Ask us in operations for something the right way and we can give an annoying answer how nothing is possible due to security policies and compliance and further discussion requires meetings with people with long job titles. And suddenly, deal breakers aren't that important anymore. And sometimes you can even team up with the customers infosec department this way in order to simplify things into a both more secure and easier path.
The best way we've found around this is to write white papers for commonly asked questions and topics, like storage security. It's great for our sales guys to be able to answer common questions with a PDF with a bit of glamour, but with enough incomprehensibility density to look important and to get forwarded to infosec / CISOs. Yes I'm a bit jaded about the process.
- spc476 5y agoYou didn't reply with "Witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational sysadmin!"? (ref: https://xkcd.com/705/ https://xkcd.com/705/)
- jrumbut 5y agoPeople who write those white papers deserve everything good in the world. Being able to answer a whole genre of questions with an email attachment is a wonderful feeling.
- na85 5y ago>Oh RFPs are an everlasting source of fun in B2B. Not just B2B. I've worked the technical requirements side of government military procurement. I routinely had people telling me I was "too junior to be this jaded" and the experience probably prematurely aged me 10 years.
- greggsy 5y ago>”developing some degree of a safe word system. Ask us in operations for something the right way and we can give an annoying answer” This is genius and I must know more..
- tetha 5y agoAs an example, many customers are asking to connect our SaaS solutions to their internal network via some site2site tunnel, so they can just keep their legacy databases like they are. However, our implementation consultants have tried doing things like this and it's ... not pretty. Like, it's possible, but hard to manage and hard to maintain. However again, it's hard for a solution consultant or development team directly involved in the project implementation to say no and it always results in discussions that are hard to do, because your only real argument is "I don't want to implement that". And that's when it becomes helpful to refer to us in operations/security as some external authority. Suddenly "I don't want to implement this nonsense" becomes "Sorry, but our plattform operations team is blocking this implementation due to several internal security policies. There is very little I can do, except for trying to setup a call with them, but you know how busy security folks can be".
- f0e4c2f7 5y agoWriting the types of whitepapers you're describing is an art, and not a holy one.