IT Security from the Top Down

In many companies, particularly in small businesses, managers have to wear many hats.  IT is very often left to the “IT people” and that is fine from a day to day point of view where the focus is usually on firefighting and keeping systems running – that is the area of IT Support.

With IT Security on the other hand, management need to get involved.  It is important that those running the business understand the implications of the “dark side” of IT.  Management need to look at the data and the systems in use and then consider the following:

Passwords

One of the main problems with IT Security is passwords. It’s human nature to make life easy for ourselves and no where is this more obvious than with user passwords.

Some of the most common mistakes with passwords include:

Take care with USB Keys!

It’s high time I did a post about usb keys (aka memory sticks, pen drives etc).  My thoughts can be summed up in the following sentence:

Don’t EVER rely on a usb key!

For some reason usb keys are seen as the answer to everyone’s IT problems!  Some use them to save backups of their files, some use them because they are handy for transporting files from one place to another  and some people just use them because “that’s what they were told to do”! 

Spring Clean your Hard Drive

We all have times when we make “temporary” copies of files and folders just in case we mess something up, but how temporary are they?  If you’re like most people (me included!) the copies become more permanent than temporary.  

SME Support Blog

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