Consumer Technologies Driving IT 116
fiannaFailMan writes to point out The Economist's reporting on the way consumer-driven software products are increasingly making their presence felt in the corporate world. Some CIOs are embracing the influx while others continue to resist it. From the article: "In the past, innovation was driven by the military or corporate markets. But now the consumer market, with its vast economies of scale and appetite for novelty, leads the way. Compared with the staid corporate-software industry, using these services is like 'receiving technology from an advanced civilization,' says [one university CIO]... [M]ost IT bosses, especially at large organizations, tend to be skeptical of consumer technologies and often ban them outright. Employees, in return, tend to ignore their IT departments. Many young people... use services such as Skype to send instant messages or make free calls while in the office. FaceTime, a Californian firm that specializes in making such consumer applications safe for companies, found in a recent survey that more than half of employees in their 20s and 30s admitted to installing such software over the objections of IT staff."
my users do whatever they can get away with (Score:1)
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Don't make them power users, and they won't be able to do this. Power users are unable to install programs (according to MS), but they are able to modify the registry. What does this mean? They are able to install programs.
I have had no user-installed pr
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Now THAT'S funny
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2) BIOS Password and restricted boots options.
3) Group policy specifying the hash of executables allowed to run
4) Further restriction in group policy of which DLLs they can load, in case you get some cute browser helper object you *have* to have.
5) As stated by other, encrypted hard disk.
6) Thin clients.
7) Better : PXE booted thin clients
8) All : BIOS-Passworded Anal-Retentively-Group-Policied No-Local-Admin Hard-Disk-Encrypted PXE-Booted Thin-Clients.
9
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True, it's not "cracking" the password but you have a null admin password in just a few minutes. (google for "hiren's boot cd" for one example)
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At my company, they expect you to work at home after you have finished working at work for the day, and I don't see how that could happen without them either buying me a computer at home that has access to sensitive data at the office, or buying me a laptop which has access to sensitive data at the office, or possibly even locally.
Until companies decide that a hard days work is suff
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We'll be returning to pen and paper inside of three years!
Since the only "Safe" computer is one that turned off.
I could spend hours going into the various espionage methods like "Van Eck Phreaking" or it's parent "EW, ECM, ECCM, EWM" but hey how many corporations value their data so much that they will build Faraday cages and all optical infrastructure? Risk is a reality, now living with risk is a CIO's job.
Ok so you need the "hinternet" at your desk, and you being a good
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for a reason (Score:2, Insightful)
what do you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
When you lock down the machines, of course people are going to be driven to web services like the apps that companies like google offer (mail / office / etc ) .
Re:what do you expect? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I've worked for many financial corps (writing webbanking applications), and most of them don't have Internet access *at all*! Try doing your web-based job without the www. (Okay, they had "internet stations" for research, but it was a hassle.) Especially as a consultant, you can be lucky if you can send email to the outside. Usually, it's internal-mail only.
The banks where I have worked that have Internet access, usually have heavy filtering. I still have the find a bank that blocks my own domain a
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Have you read the federal guidelines that IT must follow for the financial industry? I have worked as a email contractor at a mutual fund company that had traders and a research department. We had to track every email and IM for seven years and had to produce them whenever requested to be in compliance. All it takes is one tech-savvy and crafty employee to put the entire company at risk.
Just because you can, does not mean you should. Most companies will give you whatever access you need, if you need it
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I don't think that I have to read "Federal Guidelines" because I am not employed in the US. ;-) But, yes, I know I did something I shouldn't have done, but getting approval for that CD burn would have taken two weeks and they needed that CD *now*. Never underestimate bureaucracy in the banking sector. It wasn't even for me: I'm one of those guys that don't even bother to take the code he wrote with him (Which is illegal, you made it for that company... It still is common practice amongst IT consultants)
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Just because you can work around the enforcement of the regulations doesn't mean you should.
a) because the regulations are there for a reason
b) because you signed up to them
> It was a no-brainer to put a cross-cable between my bank-desktop and m
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See reply here [slashdot.org]
The funny thing is that I was a consultant. I couldn't get fired, in the strict sense of the term. My company wouldn't have fired me for bending the rules in order to *please* the customer. (Reason found in link above)
As for "I signed for those regulations": no I did not. Typically they make you sign a paper that everything you see and hear should stay confidential, but that's it. That's what the law says here because of "bank secret". I didn't sign anything else.
Oh, and as in p
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This is new? (Score:2)
Re:This is new? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Ah, arcnet. (Score:2)
Kind of like... sex? (Score:1)
Before that we did not exist, as the matrix had not finished updating the virus definitions as part of the boot process.
Makes Sense (Score:2)
Really this is just outsourcing particular aspects of your business to specialists which is something a lot of companies now have a lot of experience in.
For example the company I'm currently working for develop so
Stalinistic IT practices... (Score:3, Interesting)
And if the reason for locking users out of their PC configuration is configuration management and not protection, then why not just let them at it... have a standard PC configuration, a standard image, and partition their drive. All user files are on the 2nd partition, and all system on the first. If they dork it up instead of spending hours troubleshooting, just image the primary partition and move on.
That way you reduce the overhead of your IT group and allow users the freedoms we expect. I'm not talking utopian - I'm just talking simple things like being able to install a firefox major version update without calling the helplessdesk, or installing any other app I need to do my job (not wanted things like IM clients - real job needs). Instead I have to call the helpless desk wait a damn week while I play phone tag and then sit there for an hour as some monkey figures out how to double click "setup.exe".
It all seems so unnecessary to me. Get a clue and a plan and have a modicum of control - not the communist variety of control.
Re:Stalinistic IT practices... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Your symantec doesnt catch everything, even if its in its definitions files. It may run before the av can scan it. It may come encrypted. It may be part of a larger spyware payload. "Edge" is buzzwords for "buy our scanning proxy." Its not 100% protection.
2. Your system is locked down not because the "helpdesk monkey" enjoys visiting self-entitled misanthropes like yourself but to keep unauthorized software off your machine. Your manager doesnt want you playing games all day, IT doesnt want to image your computer every week because of all the spyware you download, and the helpdesk doesnt need more of your whiney complaints. Not to mention legal/finance dont want to get stuck with a bill/lawsuit for the software you pirate and put on a machine that isnt yours.
3. The partition idea has already been done. Its called network drives. You still are responsible for the PC.
At the end of the day, when you screw up a perfectly good machine because youre so much smarter than your IT deparment and its monkeys, you end up calling them, expecting them to fix it, and blaming them. Now multiply yourself x250 people and think about why you have to wait so long for service or why some of these policies exist.
>Get a clue and a plan and have a modicum of control - not the communist variety of control.
Lastly, this isn't soviet russia. Dont like the work environment? Quit.
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1. Your symantec doesnt catch everything, even if its in its definitions files. It may run before the av can scan it. It may come encrypted. It may be part of a larger spyware payload. "Edge" is buzzwords for "buy our scanning proxy." Its not 100% protection.
Nothing catches everythhing. Only clueless CIOs and non-technical middle IT managers think that happens. Security is a state of mind - not a reality. There will always be someone smarter with more time or more resources that can beat your "best practices".
2. Your system is locked down not because the "helpdesk monkey" enjoys visiting self-entitled misanthropes like yourself but to keep unauthorized software off your machine. Your manager doesnt want you playing games all day, IT doesnt want to image your computer every week because of all the spyware you download, and the helpdesk doesnt need more of your whiney complaints. Not to mention legal/finance dont want to get stuck with a bill/lawsuit for the software you pirate and put on a machine that isnt yours.
So you can't place - as I said before -a modicum of controls on users and still allow basic functionality? You can't set SMS to go look for installed programs and remove anything not in the list? (you can - I've done it)
At the end of the day, when you screw up a perfectly good machine because youre so much smarter than your IT deparment and its monkeys, you end up calling them, expecting them to fix it, and blaming them. Now multiply yourself x250 people and think about why you have to wait so long for service or why some of these policies exist.
Been there -
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Historical posting practices... (Score:1, Insightful)
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The 'Sisyphus' method catches everything you're likely to care about:
Every desktop should be created via disk image, as a clean install with all the applications that the employees are supposed to be using.
Every night, when everybody's gone home, the image
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I said "everything you're likely to care about". Why does the IT department hate people installing software? Because it messes up the machine. If they're just running Thunderbird from a USB stick, it doesn't cause support burdens for the IT department, so they don't care about it.
The important thing is t
Re:Stalinistic IT practices... (Score:5, Interesting)
That lets those of us who know what we're doing and have never needed to call the support desk for anything other than hardware failure get on with our jobs with the minimum of inconvenience, while protecting those that clearly need to be hand-held.
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When I migrated the company to windows 98 my policy was you're responsible for the computer. That just totally didn't fly. Then with windows 2000 we actually had passwords and supposedly had accou
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If they logged in, that should be recorded; if the user let them use their own account, they will know who it was.
maybe they had the user's password
Password sharing should probably be a disciplinary offence, precisely because it allows users to act maliciously then plausibly deny their actions - "It wasn't me, but a few people know my password..."
often no one logged off so ANYONE could install stuff on the computer
Again, leaving your machine logged in, unlocked
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That lets those of us who know what we're doing and have never needed to call the support desk for anything other than hardware failure ge
The New Normal (Score:2)
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and IT departments who've forgotten their reason (Score:2)
IT exists to make a company more efficient. One way it does this is by making it possible for users to hook up with the services required to permit users to communicate with each other and with the outside world and to gather information. Some of the new technologies used for this are not well understood by IT departments. Figuring them out and how to secure them is part of a sysadmin's job description. At least if that sysadmin wants to keep working.
If industry pros are using, for instan
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All user files are on the 2nd partition, and all system on the first.
No, all user files on a *network server* because hard disk crashes happen and servers are backed up. It is trivial to map "My Documents" to a network share.
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Ideally it'd be possible to create different profiles, ie standard locked-down user, developer, etc, and some companies do do this. Obviously, there is a cost associated with this.
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Are you in charge of stating the completely obvious at your firm?
Try looking at it from a different viewpoint. (Score:1)
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There are ways to install software such as Firefox without needing administrator access (portable firefox for one IIRC) so approve certain software such as firefox and say "if you want to use firefox and can install it without needing admin access or help from IT, go ahead and use it but note that IT wont support it" or something.
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The one problem area were the sales force. Since they had laptops, worked out of the office for long periods of time, and always needed help, we had to leave them with rights to the
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You just remember one thing:
The computer is there for the guy with the brain who will use the machine to help his brain figure out then implement a plan to have people pay good money into the company coffers to pay a good return on the investment and incidentally pay for the IT department's salaries, hardware, and software.
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Hey you kids. Get off my yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yup, Sneaking PCs into an all-mainframe shop (Score:2)
I did the POs for everything except the case. I got the monitors, power suppies, motherboards, disk drives, keyboards, mice, and cables no problem. But if I tried to get a case, red flags would have flown. With amber monochrome monitors they didn't draw too much attention. The other montors (from Data General and IBM) were all green screens. The MIS dweebs were clueless. (Management Information Systems - now called "IT"
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Driving IT - to a rage (Score:1, Interesting)
Personal != corporate liability (Score:3, Interesting)
As a member of a rather small "corporate" IT department, I can appreciate the difference between using certain programs at home vs at work. The number one rule people need to understand, don't expose the company to legal liability, ever. The number two rule, don't do anything that will risk bringing the network down (or critical servers, though most people don't appreciate the difference).
The order of those may change depending on the nature of the company, but those pretty much account for 99% of the "stupid" IT rules that people don't like following. Sure, you run BitTorrent at home and have never had a problem. Perhaps you even use it legally (riiiiight... But hey, I'll admit it could happen). Move that into a corporate environment, however, and your "just a tenth of my bandwidth, and low chance of getting caught pirating music", times 50 users, turns into "why does our network suck so much" and "I have the RIAA's lawyers on line 2...".
Additionally, most people absolutely suck at protecting their home PCs, and in my experience, they take even fewer precautions at work. Now, we run all the standard protections, such as AV, AS, mail and web filtering, and so on. But no amount of automated protection can ever suffice to stop determined insiders from managing to crash (or worse, compromise) their own workstations. Sure, you can fire the malicious ones after-the-fact (and the threat of that at least encourages some cooperation), but that doesn't undo the damage.
As an aside, I consider myself something of a "dark-grey hat". I will gladly teach my users how to do things so they stay juuuuuuust barely on the right side of the law. But even that doesn't always help... It lets people know that when I do give them rules, I most likely have a damned good reason for it; but you'll always have people who just don't "get" it, and don't understand why installing every toolbar, cursor enhancement, and systray bug they can find makes those fascist IT guys so annoyed.
As another aside, I've worked the other side of the fence as well, an engineer working as not part of the IT department. As for how to deal with that situation - Well, let's just say I thank Zeus that I don't have someone like myself as a one of my users.
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I'm one of those users you'd probably be on the fence about.
Granted, I don't install every toolbar and stupid web-widget available. That said, I routinely need to run software which IT doesn't have the time to approve and install. Fortunately, I'm usually able to install it myself, and know enough about the machine not to screw it up.
However, users like me aren't your problem. In fact, I'd go farther and say that users like the ones you describe aren't the real problem, either.
Your problem is w
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NT4+ requires administrative rights to install most software, and does a fairly good job of protecting the registry from casual tinkering. Additionally, admins can make the "Program Files" folder RX only. Meanwhile Unix allows (encourages?) users to install any program they wish in their home directory, and the nature of OS is such that there are no controls whatsoever aside from
Try this one (Score:1)
Everyone hates a slow computer.
The magic behind consumer applications ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Here's a non-software related example of price gouging on a corporation. Recently at my job I moved offices. During this time the director noticed that my chair was too low for my height and not good ergonomically (which is true, it's a really uncomfortable chair). So the solution w
Predictable... (Score:4, Funny)
In another recent survey, eye drop manufacturer Visine, has released a survey indicating that most marijuana users suffer from bloodshot eyes.
I like truly enforced standards (Score:1)
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Populism has always driven this revolution (Score:2)
COMDEX is dead. CES now rules in terms of innovation because people now have technology in their hands. Consumer demand means US, not the MIS directors of old, whose high and mighty mainframes and pitiful minis used to rule the black art of 'data processing'.
So much the better.
It's not a PC, it's a WORKstation... (Score:3, Informative)
In the locked-down world, our firm charged for repairs to "non-standard" machines: anything with user-installed software, even if it wasn't the cause of the problem. We were forbidden to use the terms PC or computer, instead calling every desktop and laptop a "workstation." People who downloaded stuff from the Internet often found themselves explaining the $300 repair charge to their boss, and were subject to termination at the company's discretion. (As desktop techs, we were very powerful... one guy I worked with actually received "personal services" in exchange for not reporting a young woman in the call center).
In the open environments, stupidity flourished. People would install Kazaa (with its load of spyware) and put their shared folders on the servers. Executives would download GoToMyPC and use their names as the password. During downtime, I would use PSList to remotely check computers for spyware, and remotely delete anything I didn't like. A few people complained about losing their Webshots and other crap, but the CIO was an old friend of mine and fully backed my efforts.
One day, I claimed in a weekly meeting that spyware and adware were consuming 50% to 70% of our Internet bandwidth. The head of the network group immediately heaped scorn upon that statement... until the CIO asked him to check into the claim. He had to stand up the following week and say that I was wrong: the figure was closer to 90%.
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so which company was (Score:2)
If you don't know, if they were public, go to http://www.sec.gov/ [sec.gov] and check their filings via EDGAR (something every IT pro needs to get a clue about. . . if you're dubious about a vendor. . . or about the future, if any, of the place you're working at. . . this is one place where companies are compelled to tell the truth.
It isn't about network efficiency, it's about the bottom line. Show that a company with draconian IT policy is more profitable, if you can. If anarchy i
What was that? (Score:2)
[Puts down nail gun. Stops fragging n00bs.]
Users? Real admins don't have users.
--BOFH
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A very apropriate quote from BSG
Apollo: You know what gets me? I know that in two weeks, I won't remember his face. I can't remember any of their faces after they're killed. No matter how hard I try, they just fade.
Starbuck: I don't even remember their names.
No BOFH Comments Yet? (Score:1)
I have a sign on my office door at work that says:
"Sometimes my job will require me to limit the amount of fun you can have today to make sure you can have fun tomorrow."
I like the people I work with, and they usually are not stupid, so I don't put any more rules on their computer use than I have to. But as the IT support guy at a small department, about 40 computers, I think pla has it right. There is a big difference between us
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posted only about 15 minutes before your own
heh, captcha says repeater, we sure these things are like adsence and detect message content?
Ghost (Score:1)
Might be workable (Score:2)
I had some questions about implementing Gmail on an enterprise basis. What about local backups of the email store? Delegating? SoX compliance? Working offline?
What a bonus to be rid of Exchange! All the expense and overhead for supporting that pig and the added pleasure of giving Outlook the boot. Replace the office suite with OpenOffice or a hosted service and you could kiss Windows b-bye, except maybe a few kiosks scattered around for Windows only applications.
But just try getting in touch with a
It's not the IT staff... (Score:2, Interesting)
Some of the managers of certain departments would like to install an instant messenger client for more responsive communications within the company between buildings. It was explained that a user could have more then one conversation (like a telephone) at a time and also save cost.
The upper management insisted that we do not install this program because it would "subtract" from productivity.
Even after explaining to them that I could enforce th
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Toys belong at home (Score:1)
It's that old dynamic again... (Score:2)
(1) Older IT types are more likely to have little if any concern about data and communications security
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If your users can install random software (Score:2)
Some organizations make there works buy laptops (Score:2)
Why lock staff out of their own machines? (Score:1)
However, for most people, what's the point in having a powerful machine with incredible software that can do everything, if all the functionality is locked out? It's like buying satellite TV and then locking out all the channels.
Having IT be a gatekeeper for determining what users "need" can do enormous damage to productivity. With few exceptions, we give staff admin permissions because we don't und
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However, we make it crystal clear there is zero tolerance for proprietary software that we can't provide license information for or running rogue servers. They know they will be in big trouble if they install recreational software that interferes with the operation of their machines or which launches an attack.
This is basically an honor system. There's plenty of software with legitimate and illegimate uses on a corporate network (e.g. Cygwin). If you let me install Cygwin, then I can do all kinds of fun s
Routes and Proxies (Score:2)
Fine, install away. What I don't understand is why these apps would work in any sane company without the complete cooperation of the IT department. Surely in this day and age no company larger than a mom and pop setup would have any routes from any PCs dir
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Or both.
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