It’s funny how things evolve so quickly. Just a few years ago, the thought of employees using their own phones or laptops for work at work was unthinkable.
But as the consumerization of IT trend grows from a trickle to a flood, many organizations have no choice but consider how to implement a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program. And the experience at Softchoice was no different.
Recently Stephen Speirs from Cisco wrote a blog post about The Winchester House, as an analogy to explain how IT often evolves in unplanned ways.
I’d like to extend Stephen’s analogy a little further by using the Winchester House as an example of what can happen when organizations over time continually enhance and upgrade their infrastructure without proper planning and foresight.
But first, what is the Winchester House? The Winchester Mystery House, located in San Jose, California, was the residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun maker William Winchester. Sarah was obsessed with building out the house and so arranged for construction around the clock, from 1884 until her death in 1922. Construction costs were estimated at about US $5.5 million in 1922; equivalent to over $75 million today.
The house’s real claim to fame however, isn’t the construction; it’s the complete lack of any master building plan. The house has 160 rooms, 24,000 square feet, 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 6 kitchens, 40 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, and 47 fireplaces. Sixty-five of the house’s doors lead to blank walls, 13 staircases lead nowhere, 24 skylights are covered by floors.
So how does this relate to IT?
This is the fourth in a our series about how Softchoice is implementing BYOC. We hope you find the series interesting and look forward to your comments and thoughts on your own experiences.
Recently our team met to create our Softchoice BYOC Acceptable Use Policy that will be tied to this program. Not what you’d classify as a “fun” meeting. I’m pretty sure that there isn’t a person out there that likes writing out policies and it’s something that’s really hard to start. So hopefully this blog post can reduce the pain of your organization’s policy building meeting. Thanks to finding the right guidance from Gartner and InfoTech Research, our team was able to bang out a first draft in under an hour!
According to Gartner’s BYOC Checklist the major areas a policy needs to cover are:
Wakefield Canada is the exclusive Canadian distributor of Castrol premium lubricants and Canada’s premier integrated manufacturer and distributor of Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) under the brand name H2Blu. With a broad customer base across Canada, including retailers, warehouse distributors, quick lubes, fleet companies, new car dealers and Original Equipment Manufacturers, Wakefield prides itself on delivering intuitive customer service.
Wakefield has been on Canada’s Top 50 Best Managed Companies and Top 50 Best Employer lists for the past three years, and has received a Microsoft Pinnacle Award for its technology successes.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are a combination of SIM (security information management) and SEM (security event manager).
Whatever the acronym used, these products provide real-time analysis of security alerts generated by network hardware and applications and log security data and generate reports for compliance purposes.
SIEM plays a key role in helping secure infrastructures and Softchoice’s Director of Security Solutions Stephen Perciballi is an expert in its use. He is very focused on helping customers build strong resilient solutions to protect their critical information assets and has a special interest in mentoring others to help them learn and manage their security technologies. [Read more...]
The way people work is changing dramatically. Everyone is bringing their personal devices into the office, which has led to the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend.
A recent Infotech Indaba survey found that the use of personal and unmanaged devices and applications within businesses is at an all time high. “The consumerization of IT is happening within businesses despite those businesses not necessarily being ready for it,” says the report. “Beyond simply accepting the presence of consumer devices, businesses should establish a base level, proactive and open approach to their use.”
In the survey, 82% of IT decision makers ranked security as a barrier to accepting personal and unmanaged devices into the business, followed by managing those devices at 66%.
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