The Desktop Support Technician - Assignment Example

Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Ernest Stevens December 16, 2007 6:53 PM Itis the responsibility of the employee to save her work regularly, so that if the PC goes down for any reason, her work is saved. It is simply part of the perceived responsibility of the worker. It is also the employee's responsibility to save her work in a location that is easy to remember. There are many tasks associated with the maintenance of files that don't have much to do with the actual creation of the file. Backing-up files is one of these tasks. However, the employee is not responsible for paying for the software tools she uses. That is clearly the responsibility of the employee. Backing-up data requires software tools, which are clearly the responsibility of the company to make available to the employee. In this line of reasoning, it is the responsibility of the company to purchase and make available the back-up software. However, it is the responsibility of the employee to use the software to back-up her files. --Doug Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Todd Knapp Date: December 17, 2007 12:55 PM The answer to who should backup company data is, it depends. I can think of two situations where the answer differs. The first situation consists of a typical user who sits in the cube and uses systems provided by the organization. In this situation, the organization must address two issues. First, they must provide a central location for users to securely save their information. They must provide policies, procedures, and technical solutions to backup those backend systems that house all critical information. The employee is not without responsibility in this situation. They must ensure that they are saving their work on those resources that provide the backup solution. Where my answer differs is from the following scenario. I have worked for and know consultants who are responsible for purchasing their own laptops. They are typically road warriors and do not frequent the office on a regular basis. Their laptops house corporate data critical to the organization. In this case, it is the responsibility of the employee to backup the information on their laptop. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Randal Freston Date: December 17, 2007 4:45 PM Hi Todd, Your contractor example is a very hot topic in our company right now. Our ISO (and some others) want to make contractors use company owned hardware assets if they are working for us. The idea seems to be that we can better manage the risks (we once had a contractor using their own laptop infect our network) associated with them, including backing up data, if that is company policy. Others like CTO (and others) see that as expensive, inconvienient, and in the big picture unecessary. It will be interesting to see which side wins out...... -Randy Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Todd Knapp Date: December 19, 2007 8:07 PM I think this is a double-edged sword. The expense incurred by organization to provide employees, including contracts, with the computing equipment they need can become expensive. It also does not mean that the organization faces any less risk. Depending on the contractor's requirements, they may need administrative rights to the laptop to conduct their job. They may store sensitive information on the laptop and not treat it with the respect it should receive, because it is not their own. Contractors are here today and gone tomorrow. All these situations raise a red flag in my head. The alternative is not much better. Allowing contractors to connect their laptops to our internal network presents a significant risk too. I am not sure what side of this argument I fall on. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: John Knight Date: December 19, 2007 9:30 PM When I was with City/County - all personal laptops had to have our network client to attach to the network and the VPN client of our choice. Before they could connect they were scanned for upto date AV dat (had to use McAfee), and all MS security updates on the OS and on the software. Worked well and cut down on the number of people that actually decided to get work done during business hours on approved network machines. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Karl Peterson Date: December 21, 2007 1:16 AM We face many of the same issue that you are presented with. I do not feel that non-company devices should connect to the company network directly. If they do connect to the network, they should be going through a firewall or being monitored by a IDS. We do have a guest wireless network, which does not connect to the corporate network. It requires a password to connect to the guest network. However, we still do not have any policy that states that vendor owned devices that cannot connect to the network. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: John Knight Date: December 19, 2007 9:25 PM I have thought it to be much better to provide the hardware and the software as you have stated here. This has been used in other business also and has proven to be a bonus. You now have the ability to dictate the terms of use which can include mandatory backups as well as a uniform and structured VPN client, AV software updates and scripting to check for additional software upgrade and updates or unauthorized software on the client machine. Depending on numbers and equipment upkeep this has been proven to be a great solution. I ahve a laptop just for that reason - to prevent me from using my personsal laptop on the Faculity network. Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Eric Pressley Date: December 17, 2007 4:13 PM Ahhh, the good ole days of having a company care....where oh where have they gone. With regard to data back-up and responsibility. I think it boils down to ownership. It was a blessing to have a company car, the beautiful thing was I got to use it but didn't have the responsibility of ownership for it. I did not pay for maintenance, gas, damage, insurance... nothing. It was heavenly. I was involved with a fender bender in one of my company cars and I didn't even sweat it. On the other hand, while with the same company, I had some damage to a hard drive and lost data. I was in a bind. The data on the drive allowed me to do my job and it could not be replaced easily, if at all. I had not been diligent in my backups and I had no one to blame except myself. I was negatively impacted by the loss. The company backed up data, but guess what, the IT folks searched but couldn't find it. Had I even copied it out to my network drive It was not on a departmental share drive. It was gone and I was in hot water. The moral of the story is.... each user on the company's network would do himself a huge favor by backing up his data on a regular basis. Since my last experience losing data, I purchased an external large capacity hard drive. I routinely back up data on my work pc and my home computers too. Lose data once...shame on you. Lose data twice... shame on you again and go get a large thumb drive, cd's or some other media to back up to. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Randal Freston Date: December 17, 2007 5:00 PM Eric, I really liked reading your post. The way you use humor and real life examples to make your point makes it a fun and interesting read! Put me in the shame on me twice catagory -Randy (Who carries a large mem stick) Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Karl Peterson Date: December 20, 2007 1:03 AM Do ou have any concerns about having company property on your computer This makes me a little nervous, in my company all electronic information belongs to the company. If a person stores company information on a USB the information still belongs to the company. This is stated in company policy. What I have wondered is if I have company information on my personal computer the company could force me to turn over my electronic device, to them or to law enforcement; if they felt I had some of their intellectual property on my computer. The company also has a policy that stated that no person is allowed to connect any eletronic device to the company network with out written permission from the network team. This would include wireless access points and external harddrives. I think this is a great policy to stop rogue networks and the loss of intellectual property. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Eric Pressley Date: December 20, 2007 9:10 AM I agree with this policy 100 percent. The agency I work for has similar policies. In the case of the recommendations... many of the people asking are remote employees who save data locally to their laptops. Most in-house employees take the attitude that the agency owns the data, therefore the agency better back it up. Leadership has this basic attitude also. So, that being the case, most in-house employees can get documents from network backups (last resort), have them emailed back to them from another user on their team, and many employees save research documents and event photos to cd. This data belongs to the agency, but none of the in-house folks seem to be bothered by that. Remote employees are more leery of the intellectual property issue based on their work as account execs, media relations, and marketing. In-house employees are the program, out-reach, social service types. These folks usually try to leave their work in the building literally and figuratively. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Todd Knapp Date: December 22, 2007 9:42 AM Eric, I too have experienced the loss of data. I also agree that that the protection of the data should be a joint effort. I have three external drives that I keep multiple copies of my data on. I am afraid of it walking to I also encrypt it. In the health care industry, having users backup their own data scares me. First, if they are backing up data that contains patient information, then I have more of a problem. If they are backing up data to external drives, thumb drives, or CDs, those things can walk. Are they using encryption If so, who has the software and did we backup the encryption keys. Pandora's Box just got a little more interesting and my job just got a lot harder. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Randal Freston Date: December 17, 2007 4:37 PM The owner of a car is responsible for its maintenance and the owner of data is responsible for backing it up. Following company policies related to using/accessing data is the responsbility of the employee. Our company has a policy that all data created on company owned hardware is the property of the company. Another policy states that all data that is created will be saved on a home drive (H:) or department data share (DDS) and not saved to local desktops or hard drives. When it is saved to these network resources, it is backed-up. The company pays for admins and hardware/software solutions to fullfill it's responsbility for backing up its owned data. Our company then chooses (whether purposely or not) to trust company employees to follow the policy of saving the data to those locations. Our company could implement technical controls, like AD group policies, that require a computer use save to these locations, but they don't. Instead, they show a level of trust in users to follow the policy. If a user does not follow that policy, it does not relieve the company of the responsbility for backing up their company owned data. The company simply must make a decision whether they are going to use madatory technical controls to force users to save to backed up resources or not. The responsbility is still theirs as they own the data. -Randy Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Karl Peterson Date: December 18, 2007 1:30 AM It is the responsibility of both parties to ensure data is backed-up. It is the responsibility of the company to ensure there is the infrastructure in place to back-up the data. The data does belong to the company and they need to protect their intellectual property. An individual has been hired to do a job. It is their responsible and stewardship to ensure the data that they are responsible for is secure and protected. Part of the protecting the data is ensuring the data is stored in the appropriate place. If an employee works in the bank and leaves money on the counter and it becomes lost or stolen, it is likely the employee will become unemployed in the near term. It is no different for not protecting data pertinent to a persons work. SupportingAdvancement.com states, "While every user's environment differs to some degree, there is a common requirement shared by all which is to conduct systematic backups. Backing up data is one of the most important, if not the singular most important tasks that system administrators must perform. Administering backups requires a degree of discipline and behaviors that need to be instilled in operators from the onset of their employment. Both the duties and responsibilities, along with a clear description of the repercussions of failure to backup and restore data need to be clearly articulated to employees and included in their job descriptions. Users also need to be trained. It should be regularly reinforced that users are required to store any critical files on a server if they are to be backed up. There should be a provision in users' job descriptions that note this responsibility." (SupportingAdvancement.com) This must be outlined in policy the responsibilities of the employees for backing up data. One of the local companies in town the employees are all given a Documentum share to store all of their data on. This not only gives them a place to store data in a reliable environment it also allows the employee to have version control over their documents. This is not too surprising since the company owns thousands of patents and intellectual property is a very important part of their business. Works cited supportingAdvancement.com, "Data Back-up strategies." Supportingadvancement,com. 18 Dec 2007 . Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: John Knight Date: December 18, 2007 2:39 PM IMPORTANT: The Desktop Support Technician will not be able to verify that all data has been backed up since clients are the only ones familiar with their own data and where they normally save it too. Desktop Support Technician is not responsible for any lost data. http://www.uta.edu/oit/policy/cs/desktop/backingup.html It has always be the policy of IT where I have been and it is my own personal policy that the client (includes me) is responsible for the backup of their personal information. PERIOD! There are many ways to set up the network - network fileservers, home directories, redirect "My Documents" to a file server etc. for user created data. The only place that any information will get backed up is on a network resource so designated. There are network resources that do not get backed up such as some Public directories that all can write/read. The contemplation of having to backup individual PCs across the network runs chills down my spine. The screaming cry of the Banshee (the Banshee of Irish legend is a wailing woman who brings news of an impending death) will echo throughout the halls when an end user claims the loss of an email from her third lost cousin Sam. I have some personal experience with this Banshee as I have been accused of purposely loosing files to make my point of not using the file server for all COMPANY files. The link above is from the University of Texas at Arlington. Even tells them how to help themselves. Good practice in policy statements too. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Eric Pressley Date: December 19, 2007 3:39 PM The agency I work for made changes to how much data users are allowed to store on the network. Users are now asking several key questions about backing up their data to personal media. 1. What should I use to back up my files IT Support has been recommending cd's since the drives are in each users' pc and are fairly low cost and high capacity. The second choice is thumb drives. Some forlks want to use floppies, and asked if IT could install a floppy drive for them. That request was denied. 2. What should I back up The recommendation is... important files that help you do your job. Files you need as reference, email addresses, website bookmarks, archived email, photos, presentation, research data... whatever you deem important. Scanned documents, personal records, health records, family records and data, financial documents. 3. Where do I keep the backup Recommendation: label the cd's well, organize the cd's by document type, store the cd's or "backup" in an accessible location...make two copies of really important data. Some of the users are protesting that it is not their job, i.e. "not their responsibility" to back up their data. I have told a few of the more obnoxious users "ok, fine, you don't have to save your data, but if the data is loss IT will not be able to recover it." Eyes roll, but users get the message that they better back up their data to be safe. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Debby Landry Date: December 20, 2007 11:52 AM When driving a company car, you still have some responsibility to the upkeep. For one thing, even if the company reimburses you, you are responsible for filling the tank with gas. There is some personal responsibility. The same is true with data backup. Even if the company provides a backup solution, there is still some personal responsibility on the part of the user, even if only to make sure that the data is in the correct location for the company-provided solution to pick up. Reply Forward Subject: Re:Backing-up data; responsibility of company or employee Topic: Wk03 Discussions Author: Ernest Stevens Date: December 20, 2007 11:55 PM An article called "Whose Data is it Anyway" got me to thinking about this issue a little more and I have come to the conclusion that it is the responsibility of the data owner to backup the data. In the case of my company, all work stations have backup software installed. The software runs regularly. Of course, the employee could always click the "Don't backup now" button. But, I believe that, legally, the owner of the data would be responsible. -Doug http://webapp.dpor.state.va.us/articles/whos_data_is_it.htm Reply Forward Read More