* Educational materials for helping end-users protect their systems and your net
My wife and I are just back from an extensive vacation, which saw me connecting to the Internet for e-mail and work from a number of different locations and platforms. We were on a cruise ship where I used both the ship’s Internet café and my laptop connected to the ship’s wireless system. I also used both wired and wireless systems in hotels as well as at Internet cafés in cities large and small throughout Northern Europe.
In today’s global business climate, this sort of connectivity is something your users will be doing frequently. While I’m sure you’d like them to practice safe computing for their own well-being, it’s imperative that they do so for the well-being of your organization and its data. You can do a lot these days to lock down the laptop your users might be using. If it’s the corporate laptop, that is. No telling what safeguards are on their personal machines. But sooner or later, some of your users will need to access the corporate network from an unknown – and possibly unsafe – platform: an Internet café, a hotel business center, even a TV in their hotel room.
There are some good practices to follow, and Microsoft has collected them into a handy document that you should download, personalize, print and distribute to any of your people who might use a non-corporate computer to access the enterprise network (or any other network, for that matter).
The 5 safety tips for using a public computer” are:
* Don’t save your logon information.
* Don’t leave the computer unattended with sensitive information on the screen.
* Erase your tracks.
* Watch for over-the-shoulder snoops.
* Don’t enter sensitive information into a public computer.
The article explains each of these and gives tips on how to easily follow the advice. It also contains links to other resources that can help secure the computing environment for your traveling users. These include:
* “Video: Protecting your privacy and personal information online”
* “7 ways to protect your laptop on the road”
* “Use public wireless networks more safely”
* “Danger, danger: 5 tips for using a public PC”
And, remember, it’s summertime in the northern hemisphere and many of your users will be traveling on vacation as well as on business. It’s probably even more important to remind them about safe computing when they’re about to leave on vacation, use their own (or a public) platform and want to handle secure computing as quickly as possible so they can get back to the pool/bar/whatever. Do your users a favor, save yourself some headaches. Get the document.
