Travel and Off-Site Meeting Policy
Protect your data from lost and theft
Travel and Off-Site Meeting Policy - Protection of data and software is often is complicated by the fact that it can be accessed from remote locations. As individuals travel and attend off-site meetings with other employees, contractors, suppliers and customers data and software can be compromised. This policy is seven (7) page in length and covers:
- Laptop and PDA Security
- Wireless and Virtual Private Networks (VPN)
- Data and Application Security
- Public Shared Resources
- Minimizing attention
- Off-Site Meetings
- Remote Computing Best Practices
This policy has been updated to reflect the requirements of PCI-DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and ISO. The policy comes as both a WORD file and a PDF file utilizing a standard CSS style sheet.
Laptops can and do get lost or stolen. In studies conducted by several security firms, it has been found that over 50% of all lost or stolen laptops disappear at airport security checkpoints an departure gates. Unfortunately almost 70% of these laptops are never recovered.
CIO - CTO - CSO News
Hurrican Earl will test many Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans
When Hurricane Earl, now a major hurricane, hits the East Coast of the U.S. later this week many enterprises will find that their Business continuity plans were not adequately tested.
Critical data centers, with backup generators, facilities and fuel supplies, are now built to continue operating during storms. The same can't be said for the computing setups that telecommuters maintain in their homes, and they may be put to the test this year.
Disaster Planning Base for Business Continuity
Last year there were only three hurricanes in U.S. waters last year, and none of them brought hurricane force winds over land in this country. In 2009, there were an average of 236 power outages a month in the U.S. Through July of 2010, the average had increased to 273 a month.
The need for teleworkers to be self-sufficient (and less dependent on coffee shops and local libraries for wireless access) is growing. In a report released last month, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments estimated that there as may be as many as 600,000 workers, or about 25% of the region's workforce, who telework at least one day a week. The council also discovered, via a telephone survey of more than 6,000 area workers, that the number of teleworkers could rise by 500,000 over the next few years.
When blizzards early this year prompted a multiday shutdown of federal
offices, many federal employees rose to the challenge and continued to work,
making good use of telework and other work flexibilities. The question is
will Hurricane Earl be as easy on existing Disaster Recovery and Business
Continuity Plans.
Cloud computing capacity planning is complex
The cloud computing model reduces the need for capacity planning at an application level. An application can simply request resources from the cloud and obtain them in less than an hour in accordance with dynamic demand. Thus, it is far less important to correctly predict the capacity requirements for an application than it is in traditional data centers, for which as many as six months might be needed to order and install hardware dedicated to the application.
On the other
hand, virtualization makes it harder and more important to plan capacity from
the data centers perspective. In the past, data center managers could use the
projections from applications, take into account the hardware on order, and thus
avoid having to dynamically adjust the capacity of deployed hardware.
Traditionally, a data center would just need to make sure that it had the
capability to support the hardware planned by individual applications. In a
cloud environment, however, many different applications will be installed. It
becomes the data center managers responsibility to predict the average or total
resource requirement of all the applications and to order enough hardware in
advance independently of the input from application owners.
The basis for capacity planning, then, lies in monitoring existing usage and keeping track over historical time periods. Long-term trends can be projected based on previous activity and adjusted without any knowledge of business plans. In a data center-driven cloud, typical capacity planning techniques can be applied for the most part. Since clouds use virtualized resources that share the same physical resources, this makes capacity planning somewhat more complex. In contrast, the capacity planning does not need to consider each individual application, and can simply track and project the overall summation of all applications on the cloud.
- more infoCloud computing gone wrong
A leading software company in the application development and governance
market, made headlines in 2008 when it decided to migrate all of their 600
employees from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. After months
of user dissatisfaction, content loss and poor support, the company decided to
make a full migration off of Google Apps to Microsoft's Business Productivity
Online Suite. Since then, user confidence has returned, IT has once again become
a trusted partner, and the company can increase their focus on their core
business.
The Practical Guided for Cloud Outsourcing Template includes -- Sample Cloud Outsourcing Contract along with a Service Level Agreement and other tools to facilitate the cloud outsourcing process. The template includes Janco's exclusive Business and IT Impact Questionnaire.
The template is delivered electronically in WORD and/or PDF format. Included are two 3 page t job descriptions - Cloud Application Manager and Cloud Computing Architect. Sarbanes-Oxley issues are addressed directly, alond with an ISO 27001 and ISO 27002 audit program.
- more infoGoogle Desktop is in a World of Hurt
Janco has just released its Browser and Operating System Market Share White Paper. The study shows that in the last 12 months Microsoft's browser market share has continued to erode Microsoft lost over 4% in the last 12 months; Firefox's market share is unchanged for the last 12 months; and Google Desktop and Chrome now have just under 6%. On the operating systems side, Windows 7 is being accepted at a pace is parallel to the way Window XP was in the 90's. The CEO of Janco Associates, Victor Janulaitis said, "The last six months have been a mixed bag for Microsoft. Their browser market share has fallen to level that they back in 1998 with no end in sight. At the same time Windows 7 now has 17% of the OS market in less than 13 months since its availability."
Google Desktop is going the way of Netscape
Google Desktop has not taken off as the emphasis seems to be on Chrome. Based on these trends we belive that unless Google places more emphasis on Desktop, in short order Desktop will no longer be a force in browser market.
- more infoSecurity Breach Impacts 3,000 Bank Accounts
Consumers and businesses in Great Britain have lost more than $1 million so far this summer from a Trojan that is infecting their computers, prompting them to log into their bank accounts, and then is surreptitiously transferring money to scammers in other countries.
About 3,000 bank accounts were found to be compromised at one financial institution, which was not identified, according to a white paper released by M86 Security.
The multilevel scheme uses a combination of a new version of the Zeus keylogger and password stealer Trojan, which targets Windows-based computers and runs on major browsers, and exploit toolkits to get around anti-fraud systems used at bank Web sites, the report found.
Bank sites that offer two-factor authentication, such as one-time passcodes and ID tokens, are ineffective because the malware has taken over the browser after the victim has logged into the banking site.
- more infoLayers of Disaster Recovery Defined
Business continuity can mean success or failure if data and applications on a production server are lost. Disaster recovery planning ensures organizations have the capability to continue essential functions across a wide range of situations that could disrupt normal operations. However, traditional data protection strategies focus on just the data and not the application. Read this white paper for a discussion on how layers of protection not only mitigate the risk of data loss, but also maintain the health and uptime of systems and applications.
- more info