Building a foolproof IT security system is impossible because even the most innocuous and altruistic of actions can expose massive vulnerabilities. True strength is derived from your response and reaction to those incidents.
An overnight alert notified us that one of our clients — a school — was running low on disk space. Using a great utility called WinDirStat, which identifies the applications using up the most disk space, we were able to see that someone had illegally downloaded some software. When we brought it to the attention of the business manager, we found out that the software was downloaded with the most innocent of intentions; the offending employee was trying to solve a problem with a student and the school could not afford to purchase the software.
Going through this problem with one client got us thinking … maybe there were others who were in the same boat. So, for all of our clients, we took the following steps:
- Searches all of their servers for illegal software
- Searched all of their computers for software that facilitates illegally downloading software
- Prevented all of our client’s firewalls from accessing Bittorrent technology
- Created a new link in our Blue Steel App that allows employees to ask their managers for anything. If the manager approves the request, we get involved to install the software or hardware.
A silver lining for the school was that it went out and formed a partnership with Tech Soup, which sells software to schools and non-profit organizations for pennies on the dollar. The partnership and the steps we took should keep future issues from arising, because employees now have a direct path to the business manager for IT requests and because the technology prevents them from getting software through non-approved channels.
If you have concerns about the security of IT system, please reach out to me today.