I am in the same boat, about 30 years of IT and moved to information security 15 years ago because it was a very interesting challenge. I understand your rubbe

I am in the same boat, about 30 years of IT and moved to information security 15 years ago because it was a very interesting challenge. I understand your rubber-stamp thing (I see it a lot with "audits") but I refuse to be one. This is a lot of friction but ultimately I got the trust of the company (a very big company). One of the things I changed about 6 or 8 years ago was the patching process. Patching was done during maintenance windows and froze during quarter ends and similar. OTOH a wormable vulnerability, a ero day or similar will not wait - so I requested a decision of the owners of the data: either availability or security. They asked me all kind of questions such as "what is the probability" to what I answered that I have no idea. But if the recommendation of the vendor is to patch NOW then utr is also mine. And our systems are always patched, and I sleep better, they sleep better, everyone sleeps better. If you work in IT you know what this is either the useless dept that puts barriers, or the saviour when there is trouble. Nobody from these 95% realize that there may be reasons for the restrictions, even if at home they do not need a password or backup or patch or something. It would be much easier to work in some "added values" departments such as marketing and not in the water^H^H^H^H^H IT one.But I love my work.