I have witnessed a very short talk between a network engineer and a top-level manager at a client’s Christmas party. The network guy explained that the firewall adds about 0.2 milliseconds latency to each round trip between the application server and the database, which adds up to some hours in one particular case. So the manager asked what could be done and the network guy provided two solutions:
- Change the application to make less round trips
- Accept the security risk and don’t put a firewall in between those two tiers
Funny enough the network guy explained that the second option needs the managers signature because it bypasses the corporate security guidelines and somebody must take the responsibility for that.
Consider you are the manager, would you sign that a paper?
