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Simon Waters wrote:
THE major problem in most IT cases is Microsoft. It tells you things are easy, it teaches you the easy 20% of computing and not the real hard have to think about it 80% that you need to know to run useful safe systems. Some of the IT dept may have a large percentage of a clue - but being MS trained and cultured probably any problems will be refered to MSDN or similar. Management (with the emphasis on miss) KNOW these things are easy - they've bought the advertising but have no practical implementation experience so they still KNOW these things arn't hard. Yes you can make IT networks secure - often very simply - but you will never recover the time spent explaining to higher management the benefits of not allowing them to do the stupid and pointless - its their raison d'etre after all.Martijn Grooten wrote:Well, the council seems big enough to me to have its own IT department. Their policy could have been that you can't insert USB sticks (or CDs) unless you give them to IT; that sounds neither unreasonable nor unworkable to me.7,500 employees of Ealing Borough council. I don't know how many sites they are spread over.... At a guess staff members cost 100,000 a year, and I'm guessing it would be a full time job (along with answering the question - why does my USB X not work - x being "Phone, Camera, Printer, USB storage, ....."). Along with sending the data to a central site, and the delay in exchange, it might cost as much as this episode. Nah micromanaging such is madness unless strictly necessary. And they could have prevented this one by patching (and sensible policies), which they ought to have anyway. Ironically the council had been deploying ZENWorks across their desktops, which is just the kind of thing needed to manage such a network. Be interesting to get the low down on what really happened, see if the ZENworks boxes had been upgraded (and thus presumably protected, or not - I'm guessing not). Simon
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