Security

I am the IT Manager at a major craft brewery with over 200 employees scattered over 10 locations. Data retention and collaboration seem to be a major hurdle throughout our day-to-day operations. With a fairly limited security protocol, users have free will to create whatever they please, save the information wherever they please, and share it with whomever they see fit. Shared resources are difficult to manage and policing users doesn’t seem to be working either. Information databases as well as files pertinent to marketing such as photographs, videos, and design files are saved on an individual’s PC, rather than on the ...

I work with a very large enterprise company that has a very distributed environment (international with many small remote locations). In today’s world, the use of the Internet is crucial to day to day business operations. Even with firewalls and anti-virus software, users still get infected with virus’s and malware. Most notable is the drive by downloads and related vectors of infection. The most common example would be the rouge, fake anti-virus programs. As we look forward to windows 7 in the enterprise along with the enhancements that cloud computing bring to the anti-virus software, is there a better way to ...

We’re a small, 30-person commercial contracting company. Because of the nature of our business, everybody has a laptop that they take home with them. The problem is that these laptops are running either XP or Vista, with different software on each, and because the users use them at home they end up with viruses and spyware, and Windows patches are often out of date. How can we force users to always keep their systems patched, virus software installed & updated, and free of spyware without being too restrictive or causing a headache for our single IT guy? In addition, how ...

I work in a school district in Michigan where the government is constantly cutting school budgets at every available opportunity. My district has four sites. We have all Windows 2008 R2 servers and have just purchased Windows 7 for all our workstations. I still want to provide good equipment and software for the students to learn on the best available technology, but doing so is difficult with a limited budget. We have recently started utilizing desktop virtualization technologies like N-Computing and find the pricing structures difficult to follow. I have one computer that runs seven workstations, and I have to have ...

Group Policy is my favorite part of managing a Microsoft Windows network. I want to use the power of Group Policy to stop all the software that makes its way onto my network. Everyone who logs onto a computer on my network wants to install things that I don’t want there. I have successfully stopped them from downloading off the internet through my firewall. My big problem now is CDs and USB drives. The software that we run prevents me from making everyone use a guest account. I’ve tried methods of blocking certain extensions on removable devices, but some crafty folks ...