Control + Alt + Delete

Just the other day, I was ranting about my company policies of not having CDroms and floppy drives disabled. Welcome to the Dark Age.


I am in Norwich and at client side. (If you are smart, it won't be difficult for you to guess the client's name) Anyway, the utter shock to see first hand how things are done!


1. PC crash - The time given to resolve the call was a day. A day? Then the guy comes and tells me that it will take 2 days to rebuild the PC. What I am supposed to do meanwhile? Play Goti? In any decent IT company, the helpdesk guy would take minutes to attend to the call and few hours to give me a replacement PC.

I cannot even locate the IT help system online and have to call up helpdesk for every call and update.



2. Internet access - Fortunately, we got it the next day. but for the earlier guys it took about a month to get net access. You won't find anything majorly wrong in this, but to note that the client mail doesn't allow you to send external mails. It's as good an isolation you'll ever find. So how can you mail offshore to get your work done? You can't.



3. Clean desktop -Did I tell you about the desktop security here? Its autocratic. You don't see control panel, No Start-->run, no explorer (Flag+E doesn't work), you don't see desktop icons! Of course, forget admin access- thats only for God. Such smothering of personal freedom at workplace is not due to well thought out security policies, its more laziness to find solutions and work-arounds to possible threats by hackers or through viruses. Ignorance in finding out whether there is threat at all. e.g. we use the divine Lotus notes (upgrading from Outlook to Lotus Notes 4.5) and the address book is not active. Possibly, I could locate who the head of the client company is and behead him?
Can having desktop icons be a threat? How can disabling explorer, search and run functionality benefit security? In hampering resource productivity like this (forget the fact that PCs have highly antiquated configuration), we inch dangerously close to zero output - which would warm the cockles of the Infrastructure and Security guys - Zero calls logged, zero breaches of security.