The legality issue is the big one. You'll care when you get sued by a
media company. You'll especially care if you end up with any personal
liability too. Just wait till there's some trumped up child porn charge
about a kids photo (google it, it's not uncommon) and now the company's
backups are on the hook for that as they have that picture.
Or, what if you get hacked and your employees photos etc are leaked? Do
you want potential negligence or bad publicity of people's personal
photos on the company?
What if they have tax info on their laptops? Did you trigger reporting
requirements from a breach? Do you now have to pay for credit
monitoring? Can you be fined?
I don't even know if you *could* get cyber insurance for these things,
but you're looking at A LOT of potential liability in making copies and
storing who knows what centrally.
James Pulver
CLASSE Computer Group
Cornell University
On 12/07/2016 11:24 PM, Kish N Kepi wrote:
We keep a lax environment – our users are local admins on their Windows
laptops and we not stop them from installing any software they want –
the only caveat I ever say is ‘don’t be stupid’. And yes, we are a
hi-tech house, well beyond the startup stage.
During a conversation about potential changes to the way we do backups
today, I stated that the current back up routine specifically excludes
most media files, and also that I’d used psexec to kill utorrent
processes. My boss, who is actually quite knowledgeable in IT matters,
had a response surprised me: why? Why not backup the media files? Why
not allow torrent traffic? His points were as follows:
1. We give them laptops and smartphones and expect them to be
available at all hours of the day – that’s convergence of home and
office life – why shouldn’t we backup the photos of their kids, pets and
vacations too?
2. Do we have bandwidth issues? We have a broad link to the
internet and only at periodic peaks do we hit anywhere near our limit
3. Legality of torrents? Really? How many people care about the
legality?
4. Malware? We have other protections in place.
I couldn’t come up with any answers that sounded reasonable to me, so at
this stage, we’re planning increase our backup storage capacity.
Does anyone here have answers that I lack? Sorry for cross-posting, but
I this question is bothering me, and I know that many people in this for
a have strong, well-formed (and well-expressed) opinions
Kish n Kepi
