Re:Burning it down on the way out – how can non-tech founder...
by laurentl on Thursday February 07, 2019 @04:51PM
(#19108943)
As other comments have pointed out, there’s not a lot you can do if the technical person wants to bring the house down.
But there are other cases you should cover against, like the techie getting run over by a bus. The first thing that comes to mind is to make sure you have an admin account and/or a recovery procedure (a master password printed on a piece of paper in a safe, access to the account’s email address to reset the password, etc.) for everything.
Everything in this case is at the very least: AWS account (including the root account to manage the bills), e-mail provider, Gsuite admin rights, whoever you brought your domain names from, Dropbox, bank/PayPal/Stripe, GitHub/BitBucket, your telco, the admin accounts on your corporate PCs, and just about all the services you use on a daily basis. The email accounts and DNS are IMO the most critical; you can retrieve a lot of stuff if you control the e-mail or the domain name. BUT this assumes the accounts were set up with a corporate email, which may not be the case if you’re a small company - probably a personal e-mail was used to register the first services, which are also the most crucial. And if the techie knows what she’s doing, she will have enabled MFA, so e-mail alone probably won’t cut it.
Just ask yourself: if the tech person dropped off the face of the earth, what would you be locked out of?
But there are other cases you should cover against, like the techie getting run over by a bus. The first thing that comes to mind is to make sure you have an admin account and/or a recovery procedure (a master password printed on a piece of paper in a safe, access to the account’s email address to reset the password, etc.) for everything.
Everything in this case is at the very least: AWS account (including the root account to manage the bills), e-mail provider, Gsuite admin rights, whoever you brought your domain names from, Dropbox, bank/PayPal/Stripe, GitHub/BitBucket, your telco, the admin accounts on your corporate PCs, and just about all the services you use on a daily basis. The email accounts and DNS are IMO the most critical; you can retrieve a lot of stuff if you control the e-mail or the domain name. BUT this assumes the accounts were set up with a corporate email, which may not be the case if you’re a small company - probably a personal e-mail was used to register the first services, which are also the most crucial. And if the techie knows what she’s doing, she will have enabled MFA, so e-mail alone probably won’t cut it.
Just ask yourself: if the tech person dropped off the face of the earth, what would you be locked out of?