When it comes to building and implementing an IT policy, no quick-fix or one-size-fits-all solution will adequately serve your needs. Every business is different, and the approach taken to meet objectives and/or ensure compliance will vary from one environment to another, even in the same industries. But you can take advantage of certain best practices to increase your odds of crafting and implementing a policy that employees will support and that will help protect your organisation.
Executive support

For starters, no policy will succeed without the basic buy-in from senior leadership. Senior executives, directors, and managers should be asked to provide input and some form of approval to the policy. Obtain a clear statement of support before you start creating the policy and continue to keep senior management educated and involved as it is written. When the policy is ready for implementation, request that management formally present it to your [...] Continue Reading…

Identity theft may be on the rise, but you don’t have to make it easy for thieves — take steps to protect the personally identifiable information (PII) of your employees and clients.
Is your organization part of the solution or part of the problem? PII is pouring through the security floodgates and ending up in the wrong hands at an alarming rate.

To protect your organization’s employees and clients, you need to evaluate how well your company protects its PII. Here are seven common mistakes to avoid.

Keep users in the dark

Users will always be the weakest link in any enterprise network — and all of the gadgets and controls in the world won’t change that. If your users don’t know how to identify and handle PII, it’s only a matter of time before one of them discloses this data to the wrong source.

The solution is simple: Educate your users on your [...] Continue Reading…

There’s been a lot of publicity about pop-up windows, and most of it hasn’t exactly been rave reviews. But it hasn’t always been this way.

In fact, pop-up windows were a positive component in the beginning. Created long before tabbed browsers, their purpose was to present information without interfering with the current browser window.

These days, due to security risks as well as the annoyance factor, a standard feature among browsers is to block or control pop-up behavior. But before you start telling your browser or other privacy programs to block all those pop-ups, you need to understand why they happen and what you should really be doing about them.

Most pop-ups are part of the content from the Web site the user is visiting, containing either requested information or info the site thinks one might like. But other pop-ups are just spam that’s both invasive and malicious in nature.

These types of [...] Continue Reading…

When you’re designing or writing software, one issue that can often be glossed over is the matter of efficiency. It’s so easy at the beginning of a project to just concentrate on getting something working, so you can demonstrate progress, and then worry about making it fast later on. The unfortunate fact is though optimisation can only take you so far, the true efficiency issues are going to lie in your algorithm design. Most IT professionals have learned the basics at some point in their career, but in case you’re a little rusty read on and we’ll refresh your memory.

The first thing to consider is what kind of complexity you’re looking to reduce. The two major complexity areas are time — that is, how long an operation will take to complete — and space, or how much memory is needed. When talking complexity, we tend to rate speed in [...] Continue Reading…

Waterfall development is a software development model involving a phased progression of activities, marked by feedback loops, leading to the release of a software product. This article provides a quick and dirty introduction to the model, explaining what it is, how it’s supposed to work, describing the six phases, and why the model can fail.

Say the words “waterfall development” to most people and chances are they’re going to be thinking of a bunch of condos under Niagara Falls. Imagine their surprise, then, when you tell them that waterfall development is actually a software development model which involves a phased progression of activities leading to the release of a software product. This article provides a quick and dirty introduction to the model, explaining what it is, how it’s supposed to work, and why it can fail.

Overview

Waterfall development isn’t new — it’s been around since 1970 — but most developers still [...] Continue Reading…