Easily handled by a policy waiver.
Use of company equipment is provided for execution of company business and
processes. Personal use is allowed as you see fit but if you don’t want your
personal files in our possession then don’t put them on our equipment. Doing so
grants us an unlimited license to do with them as we see fit.
--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world...
those who understand binary and those who don't.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Kevin Lundy
Sent: Thursday, December 8, 2016 11:11 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] OT: IT Philosophy
I definitely agree with Brian on this for #3.
I would also be concerned about the liability of having possession of employee
personal files. Do you protect laptop backups to PII standards? What are you
going to do if a departed employee asks (demands) that all their personal data
be deleted. Depending on your backup architecture that could be painful. Just
like torrent downloads, what if they are storing explicit pictures?
And if your environment is this lax, I would doubt the viability of your
comment about malware protection.
On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 11:41 PM, Brian Desmond
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
For #3, that seems like a discussion around acceptable use and risk for your
attorneys rather than IT. The others I would generally agree with your manager.
Thanks,
Brian Desmond
w – 312.625.1438<tel:(312)%20625-1438> | c – 312.731.3132<tel:(312)%20731-3132>
From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
[mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>]
On Behalf Of Kish N Kepi
Sent: Wednesday, December 7, 2016 10:24 PM
To: Kish N Kepi <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
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
