Napera

Having grown up around the automotive industry, I can’t help but shake my head in disbelief to see the Big Three CEOs begging Congress for cash to save GM, Ford, and Chrysler.  From the headlines, it appears the American car companies are suffering from the recession and recent high gas prices.  But America’s automotive industry has been in decline for decades, and we’ve bailed them out before, only to see them build bigger, gas guzzling trucks and cars and ignore the global economic and consumer trends that the Japanese, Koreans and Germans embraced.

I clearly remember when Lee Iacocca was in Washington in the late 1970’s with bowl in hand, arguing why the US could not let Chrysler fail. So, more than a billion dollars was poured into the company then and more over the years. And here we are again.

While Silicon Valley is much younger than Motorcity, a similar fate could befall any industry, and we should take note and learn from Detroit. Here are five lessons the IT industry can learn from the Detroit debacle:

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Today Napera released the results of our online survey of 200 small and medium-sized enterprises that revealed a high level of security risk and an overall lack of confidence among IT managers. Seventy percent of those surveyed received scores on the Napera Network Test indicating medium to high risk of a network security breach, and more than half of the respondents stated they do not have confidence in the security of devices and users on their networks.

The comment we heard most from folks who took the test was that the questions made them think about network security in a new way and they had never thought about the security risks the test revealed.

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I thought I’d give my own two cents following Todd’s post on why he loves Vista. I, too, have been using Vista for two years now, and since I switched to a new Sony Vaio, Vista is great.

However, some of Vista’s most powerful features for businesses are not receiving the attention they deserve, as Microsoft focuses most of its energy on consumer and “I’m a PC” campaigns. One feature that I believe is truly the unsung hero of Vista is Microsoft Network Access Protection (NAP).
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It didn’t surprise us when Forrester Research put Microsoft NAP as the frontrunner in the Network Access Control market (The Forrester Wave: Network Access Control, Q3 2008). “Microsoft’s NAP technology is a relative newcomer but has become the de facto standard…,” said Rob Whiteley in his report. While Cisco and others might be able to claim more direct revenue from NAC products as of now, I believe Microsoft has the technology and framework that positions it for success.
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As a working mom with a tween and teenagers, I often have to keep a loose boundary between work and home, and my laptop and smartphone are often in use as much in the kitchen as in the office. I think that’s typical of many working parents, who find some level of work-life balance by blurring the two.

It’s not hard, therefore, to imagine how easy it is for some people to also stretch the boundaries of corporate IT policy by using the company laptop for both work and personal things, like allowing their children to use the company laptop for school research or to IM with friends or to download the latest tune onto their Zune (yeah, yeah, I used to work at Microsoft and have a Zune as does one of my sons – they’re actually really good – and I don’t have to say that anymore).

Today’s mobile workforce views the company laptop as a personal productivity tool, and IT departments must take this into consideration and address the behavior and the potential security risks that come with this trend. Even with security solutions and controls in place, you still can’t guarantee that an employee or one of their kids won’t accidently download a virus or trojan or open a spam email.
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