Enterprise security policy

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I received an email reminder from the client recently.

"Please don't plug external/personal laptops into the corporate network, this is against the enterprise security policy".

This blog is not a criticism of this security policy.  In fact, I tend to agree with the gist of this security policy.  It is always better to tell your less-computer-savvy users to avoid plugging in potential trouble into the network.

However, this does reminds me of a few things I wanted to rant about:

1. What about things like: External Hard Drives, USB sticks (and by extension, iPods or digital cameras)? 

They can transfer viruses too.  There was a news just this January where the USB digital picture frames many people got for $50 from Best Buy for their grand dad for Chrismas, and it was infecting their PCs.

http://www.news.com/8301-10789_3-9843574-57.html

Personally I think the network must be smart enough to detect virus troubles and drops the device from the network automatically, in a corporate environment, this goes for both "internal" as well as "external" machines.

Enterprise Security Policy by limiting who can or can't plug into the network is extremely naive, and possibly only give a false sense of security.  I sincerely hope there's a second line of defense on the network beyond just this policy.

2. Licences on development machines

For many years, I do work on a laptop with all the tools already installed, licensed and configured correctly.  So when I showed up at a new client/project I'm ready to go on day one.  Trouble is, many clients have a similar requirement in not allowing external machines to be used on the network - usually that's a set back for development time with lots of "develop on laptop", "copy over on USB stick", "test on client network"...  rinse and repeat.  This is a workable solution, but it is time consuming and still requires a basic setup on the client's development computer (at least VS.NET)

I thought there are a lot of parallels between a consultant vs say a plumber.

Plumbers shows up at the project with their own hammer.  The client doesn't have to buy a hammer for the plumber.

If a consultant shows up at the project with their own laptops.  The client shouldn't have to buy a new laptop (or the tools on it) for the consultant. 

What happens though, when the client won't let the plumber use the plumber's own hammers on his sink?  How can the plumber do his work?

Oh by the way we're still waiting for a few more licences for Resharper.

Cool bits about Office Communicator

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image

Our regular morning project scrum was cancelled for today, as I went back to my desk, I noticed that my Office Communicator has updated my status to "In a meeting". 

I checked my team members, theirs were updated too.

It knows this because Outlook told it about my calendar!

Another thing I liked was how you can add Active Directory groups (or possibly any outlook groups) directly as contact lists.  Which saves you the problem of adding new people (and possibly removing/maintaining your list).

That's very cool integration.  Well done MS.

An interesting quit smoking help

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A colleague mentioned a site quitext.com which is a quit smoking support website.  They send you daily SMS' to help encourage you to quit smoking.  You can also buy it as a gift for someone you know.

I don't think I'll ever smoke myself, but I can understand wanting to quit smoking can be very difficult at times.  It's good to have different ways to help out.

MIX08

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Everybody is blogging about it.  I'm not there, but still the amount of betas rolling out from Microsoft is making me very happy.

  • ASP.NET MVP beta 2
  • IE8 beta
  • Silverlight 2 beta 1
  • Expression 2.5

Colleague forwarded a news article to me where Microsoft is partnering up with Nokia to deliver Silverlight on the Symbian platform.  So that's going to make this platform very tidy.

Good times.