They sound well intentioned but don't work in some backwards Enterprise companies.

1) That'd be great. Except that management refuses to get into the 21st century; everything is virtualised but no you can't get a sandbox, that's a 3 month requisition that needs a business case and approvals all the way up the line - even though we have a unlimited licenses for OS and databases.

So no you can't have sandboxes that work that way.

Also we know servers can't be restored piecemeal like that. Why?

Well I don't know what wonderful world you're living in, though I would like to live there, but our management is 100% focused on REDUCING NUMBERS. What's our server count? 3000? They want that count reduced to 5.

I'm not joking. That's a meeting with senior management and a set KPI.

We actually haven't managed to reduce server count because they also keep authorising so many new servers for "special projects" of their own, but we have consolidated servers that run 30-40-50 different applications now...

Except that patching and rebooting them is a nightmare as you cannot get 30-40-50 product managers to agree on downtime to do so. You can't restore it piecemeal for testing or anything like that either. And... well we know it's not backed up... I mean the databases are but nothing else is (because Infrastructure agrees with us that nothing should be on a database server except the databases)... and that's not my problem...

2) I consider it. And then I consider the fucking joke that is the rest of the business, and that the second we try to introduce some kind of key into the situation, it's going to be lost, and then the data will be lost. Lost inaccessible data is a far more serious violation that insecure accessible data - that's a fact. One will get you fired immediately, the other will be understood.

It doesn't help companies often don't have easily accessible PKI; not in any way we can automate and use and trust and know and be trained on and rely on, in the database space. The way Enterprise I see works would put it behind a firewall and have you requesting a key using a filled out paper document and waiting a few weeks of authorisations to get it. Now how the fuck are you going to roll that into your automated backup strategy across a couple hundred servers and rotate keys every few quarters?

3) Hahaha. Okay for mom and pop stores, sure. But you have to realise that Enterprise carves out every fucking piece of the pie for a different person. This team looks after databases. This team looks after applications. This team looks after the underlying infrastructure. This team looks after storage. This team looks after DR. This team looks after LONG TERM BACKUPS.

And then the long term backups team does whatever the fuck they want, has zero accountability, and literally nobody in management cares or wants to touch it because either a contract is in place or "they like that manager" or "that manager is on the same level as me so I can't do anything", and the manager above is their friend who got them in ;-)

And then, sometimes, sometimes, it's not even their fault. They get some order from some miscellaneous manager at the very top to "start keeping every single backup". But they can't because disk space is finite. And suddenly the entire organisation starts being crippled as disks fill and your normal day to day backups start failing, and then your operational systems go offline! But still - you have to keep every single backup - and so they SECRETLY start deleting the older backups because there is literally no choice, you can't have the business running AND keep those old backups, and because it's a secret they can't tell ANYONE and so those backups are GONE.

(And no, we can't circumvent that process and do it ourselves, because we don't have a spare petabyte of storage, and we aren't the storage team, so we can't just buy it or get it allocated, and management would squash that as inefficient duplication of effort if we tried).

Man I'm really ranting tonight. You all have no idea how bad it is.