1 and 2 are up to management as long as they give you the resources to do it.

3 really surprises me, knowingly allowing company resources for certain 
copyright infringement seems really negligent.

On 4 you can never have enough layers against malware.  In the environment you 
describe I would be scared to death of ransomware.  And I would argue that you 
currently have zero protections in place if your users are admin. Especially 
when they are at home, you have nothing to protect them.


From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Kish N Kepi
Sent: Wednesday, December 7, 2016 11:29 PM
To: Kish N Kepi
Subject: [NTSysADM] OT: IT Philosophy

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

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