Thursday, December 13, 2012

Users win...

BBC Chief Technology Officer John Linwood has been explaining his "journey" over the past for years at a conference of IT leaders, reported by Computing.  He's been responding to the pressure to “allow more and more” office services on employee-owned devices - giving rise to the ugly acronym BYOD: Bring Your Own Device.

“When I joined the BBC four years ago, the desktop was locked down as it is in most corporates, and you couldn’t do anything with it except run applications already on it,” said Linwood. “So journalists went out, they bought their own laptop and put Gmail and Skype on it, they forwarded their BBC email to Gmail, and suddenly you had completely unsecured, unencrypted laptops with confidential information being left on planes and trains and buses.

“It was all because we tried to be too secure,” said Linwood. “So you have to take the pragmatic line that recognises that your users will fight their way around it, so you have to find an answer.” Linwood says the BBC goes to great lengths to educate employees about the value of data - and they need to be constantly reminded that using a service like Dropbox does not involve simply “moving data from a PC to tablet or phone, but that that data is now sitting in a datacentre on the other side of the world, under the jurisdiction of another government”.

I wonder if the additional costs of training can be set against savings in hardwired computer security.

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