One of the biggest challenges many companies face is having users that work off-site and need to connect to the Internet. The users may be at a construction site, performing an accounting audit at a customer site, working from a hotel or conference center, or be in some other location. The temptation is to allow the users to connect through a WiFi hotspot or even plug into someone else’s network. The dangers are huge if the remote network infects your user’s computer or if your user gets accused of infecting the remote network.

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When I ask IT professionals why their users have blank passwords or use words like “password” for their password, the IT professional explains “my boss told me I had to leave it that way!”

The same goes for restricting Instant Messenger, or blocking web streaming sites that allow users to watch video and eat up the organization’s precious bandwidth. Then there are the issues of employees bringing in personal notebooks and connecting them to the network without any prior anti-virus checking.

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An IT professional discovered an unauthorized computer on the network!  “I know all our computer names and I knew this one did not belong.  I immediately called our consultants thinking we were being compromised. They said the computer was in our office.  I searched through the office and found that one of the (employees) brought in a (outside representative) into the office and set her up in one of our offices. She was allowed to plug her laptop in to our network and proceeded to access the internet.”   I frequently come across offices that freely offer for visitors to “plug in to the network” to check e-mail or access the Internet. Same with offering visitors wireless access.  The people offering access to complete strangers obviously have no idea of the danger.

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A common theme you will notice in my new book “The Secure CEO” for protecting your network is the concept of Central Management. What’s that? Well, ask any IT professional, and they’ll tell you that one of the worst things in our career is when we have to change something on all the company’s computers. It doesn’t matter if you have five computers, 50 computers, 500 computers, or more, that’s way too much work to visit each computer, phone, or PDA, individually. We want to be able to manage things centrally.

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Realize that of all the professional relationships that can make or break your business, your relationship with your IT support staff is one of the most critical. In fact, it’s just as critical as is your relationship with your CPA, your banker, and even your attorney. When your IT staff feels supported and acknowledged, and when they’re armed with the proper technology, they can single-handedly keep your company from losing data, losing work time, and losing customer confidence.

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Are you protected if your hard drive crashes today?

Your newsletter this month is devoted to “backups” since audiences this month have been so interested in this topic. Let’s face it, although there are a lot of proactive people in the world, most people don’t get serious about backing up their computers until they have experienced the loss of their work. The pain of losing months (or years) of hard work can be devastating.

Of course, for your networks and your servers, you have RAID 5 striped sets with parity keeping your data safe. This e-zine is devoted to your desktop computers; there is a new personal backup tool on the block that is very impressive.

This newsletter last spoke of GHOST in February 2003 in the article “Help - The Computer Ate my Data.” You can review that article for a more in-depth look at backups.

Recently, Symantec released the new GHOST version 9 that is nothing short of amazing. Apparently drawing heavily on the recently purchased Drive Image from PowerQuest, this new version of GHOST is impressive.

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Welcome to the Foster Institute Blog. Check back frequently for posting on IT security, technology tips & tricks, and more.