Don't even get me started about trying to email a customer about their MSEXCHANGE domain...
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How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to typographic excellence?
This allows them to drastically reduce costs of administering them as a t1 connection is about 1/10 or less of the cost of one of several IT staffers that would be required to maintain them at local only access.
Until someone cracks their way in. Then the falsity of this economic model is exposed.
Another reason is that some SCADA systems aren't actually purchased. They are sort of rented and need to contact a server in order to validate their installs and operate periodically.
This can be done over something other than the Internet, as several people have explained.
The people who run the plant are trying to squeeze the maximum amount of yield from their plant.
Very laudable. That's their job.
Shutting down a SCADA system so that it can be patched and tested may literally cost them millions of dollars per hour.
That cost should have been factored into the financials from Day 1. It's usually omitted by managers and accountants because with it, their projections wouldn't look as good.
Furthermore, the cost of upgrading is not looked upon kindly unless it's going to help you create more of product X at a lower price.
Bear in mind that the cost of not upgrading may be the end of the company.
In Economics 1.0, business students get taught that the primary objective of the corporation is to make a profit. Most managers believe this. Wrong. The primary objective of the corporation is to assure continuance, even if that means a couple of years of losses from time to time.
Failing to recognise this is usually among the early symptoms of eventual failure.
The nation that controls magnetism controls the universe. -- Chester Gould/Dick Tracy