The fact that public sector employees will be banned from taking their laptops outside of the building is a typical government knee-jerk reaction.
Surely the whole point of a work laptop is to work on it whilst on the move or in a different locations - when you're on the train or working from home for example. The fact that now employees have been banned from removing their laptops from the office to do such a thing is highly amusing and counter-productive.
What about all those homeworkers, part-time workers and so on that went through all the palava of getting set up on a portable machine (believe me I used to work in government agencies and it can take weeks) only to find out they cannot use it? It denies the most basic principle of home-working.
Now I know this ban only affects those employees with sensitive data on their laptop - but think of the countless administrative officers that might well have access to protected files to carry out the most simple of tasks.
The Royal Navy's recruitment officer story is a case in point. The database on his laptop, which was stolen on 9 January, contained sensitive details about 600,000 prospective military recruits, including details of religions and some banking records, and was not encrypted. But I am assuming, unlike Des Browne, British defence secretary, that he needed this to do his job?
While he shouldnt have left this lying around he had obviously carried this with him for a workwise reason. To deny future recruitment officers to do the same on a day to day basis is too drastic.
Surely it's better just to discipline the person involved (and I'm not going to go into detail here), make him swear he or she will never leave his laptop on its own in the car or anywhere else again, and send a memo round to staff asking them to be extra vigilant about leaving laptops in cars. It's about managing your mobile workforce better.
Of course if employees do not need the sensitive data on their laptop - fine, carry out an internal audit and remove it from those laptops that don't need it. Dont just tell them they cannot use it outdoors.
Simply telling staff they cannot remove laptops in the first place means they will never learn from their mistakes.
Comments (1)
I agree with you, theer's no reason not to provide users with laptops that use strong authentication and encryption. It's the employers fault not the employees if a laptop gets stolen with unencrypted data on it. That said for employees who just work from their desk and their home office they might consider a virtual desktop solution, ie accessing their PC running in the data centre over the internet from home and work.
Posted by Steve Richards | January 27, 2008 2:02 PM
Posted on January 27, 2008 14:02