Google Apps in the Real Office

Google Apps is a set of office productivity tools from the ever expanding Mountain View investment bank named Google. Google Apps comes with Gmail for email, Google Calendar for scheduling and Google Docs for writing documents, creating spreadsheets and making presentations. These can all be accessed online through any modern browser, although they work best through Google's Chrome browser. From an IT service delivery perspective the most interesting feature is Postini, a fully featured hosted spam filter which combines with Gmail to offer a full replacement to Microsoft Exchange. Postini allows all of the standard email controls to be put in place such as automatically adding footers to outgoing emails. The mail and calendar applications integrate with Blackberry Enterprise Servers meaning that existing Blackberry smart phones can be used without any degradation in security.

Structuring a Security Policy - Part 3

A final brief note to the discussion of IT security policies is to encourage the writers of policies to do something which could be seen as making a rod for their own backs - introducing specific, contractual penalties for infosec staff who fail to abide by the terms of the security policy by doing quick favours. Quick favours are generally requested by senior managers, are frequently for things which would not be allowed under the security policy anyway and are easily overlooked when they should be tidied up.

Saying to a (non-IT) manager that they cannot be given the password to a user account because that is poor practice won't be terribly effective - saying that giving them a password would result in automatic written warning is much more persuasive. Having a concrete example of a downside for IT staff can be a real advantage when it comes to negotiating with power.