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July 07, 2004
Bannination of iPods
Over at suspended conversation, Chris Riley muses on an article from P2P net about why companies should not allow portable storage devices connected to their computers, which invariably leads to them being connected to their networks.
Chris is correct that you have to trust your employees at some basic level, and there really isn't anything stopping them from emailing, printing, faxing, or dispersing the data by some means to a competitor (possibly even using corporate resources). Depending upon the data though, you may wish to keep it completely secured to itself, in which case even the computers won't be connected to a publicly accessible network. Banning at that point does make sense, but overall data isn't that sensitive to encourage such action.
What Chris (and others) has failed to consider is not the theft or infection of data from the portable storage device, but the possible infliction of violating intellectual property rights. Imagine the scenario where an employee has illegally downloaded a series of MP3s (any copyrighted data will do, MP3s happen to be the most common) from the internet, placed them on an iPod (or any portable storage device), brought the device in, and connected it to their office computer. Fine no real harm done yet as the files haven't gone anywhere, but now this is a locally connected drive that can be shared among other machines on the network. Most importantly it can be shared/detected among the IT departments backup server.
There now stands a reasonable chance that the data will be replicated onto a corporate server or archive for the length of time of the archival policy set forth by the IT department. If either the SPA or BSA decide to conduct a search/raid, or are tipped off by an disgruntled employee, the company is now placed into a position of difficulty having to explain how/why these files are there. More than likely, they will also be forced to pay restitution for the violations discovered.
To me, this is the most obvious reason why such devices should be banned.
Posted by Dan at July 7, 2004 06:20 PM