Significant changes in working arrangements have occurred for many people during 2020, and as 2021 commences, further changes are very likely. In the last 10 months the COVID-19 pandemic drove an increased reliance on technology by organisations in order to ensure employees and customers could function through a very disruptive period. When announcing their most recent quarterly financial results Microsoft […]
Category Archives: UK
The accelerated adoption of Working from Home practices in 2020 has seen numerous IT teams and service providers rise fantastically to the challenge of making systems and data more available to higher numbers of remote users. For many organisations the Remote Access Policy is now an increasingly important element of their overall security posture. To cater for today’s rapidly changing […]
Read morePosted by Steve Macmillan on September 9, 2020
Tagged:IT PoliciesIT Policy Management as a ServiceRemote Access Policies
Post-lockdown, many organisations will reopen offices with significantly reduced occupancy. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is moving to permanently reduced occupancy and a formal remote working policy for new hires. Eventually about half of its 50,000 workforce will work remotely within 5 to 10 years. When we list some of the benefits of remote working, the drivers and rationale for […]
Read morePosted by Steve Macmillan on June 11, 2020
Tagged:IT Policy Management as a ServiceRemote Access Policies
The Covid-19 pandemic means remote working has become prevalent and will probably continue long after the crisis has eased. The increased cybersecurity threat inherent in remote working represents an opportunity to transform your workforce into a very powerful resource. In the fight to maintain robust cybersecurity, personnel can be galvanised into a team with a heightened awareness of potential threats […]
Read morePosted by Steve Macmillan on May 7, 2020
Tagged:CybersecurityCybersecurity TrainingSecurity Awareness
As a CIO, IT Manager or Senior Executive you may experience a sense of mild panic at the prospect of high numbers of staff suddenly vacating the office to work remotely. That’s unsurprising but the world as we know it is changing due to COVID-19. The First Step is… The solution is preparedness. It’s never too late to formalise arrangements […]
Read morePosted by Steve Macmillan on March 30, 2020
Tagged:IT Policy Management as a ServiceRemote Access Policies
A recent assignment we undertook for an unnamed organisation (we’ll call them Demonstration City Council (DCC) for the purposes of this article) required us to review and conduct a gap analysis of their existing IT policy material. In doing the analysis the most obvious gaps we identified were that DCC did not have any IT policies written for heads of department, team […]
Read morePosted by Steve Macmillan on October 30, 2019
We are pleased to announce the release of IT Policy System Version 19 which will ship as of November 1st to UK customers on support and maintenance contracts. New additions and enhancements being delivered in Version 19 are: Mapping of policy content to align with the Cyber Essential Plus requirements. A new introductory video is incorporated in the IT Policy System which […]
Read morePosted by Steve Macmillan on September 10, 2019
An ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) Shared Services project offers many benefits to the participating entities if it is planned and executed successfully. There are plenty of successful examples where an ICT shared service model is working and delivering the desired outcomes. However, bringing together different organisations, cultures, people and information systems is not for the faint hearted. There have […]
Read morePosted by Steve Macmillan on April 26, 2019
Tagged:ICT Security PoliciesICT Shared Service ModelICT Shared ServicesIT Policy Management as a Service
Eliminating Confusion A recent IT security policies gap analysis exercise we were asked to undertake for a client highlighted how frequently policies and procedures can get confused. After finishing the analysis our report identified that the client had a selection of well written procedural documents, a small number of policy documents and then some documents that contained a combination of […]
Read morePosted by Steve Macmillan on February 7, 2019
Cloud computing continues to attain increasing levels of investment from Local Government organisation’s in the UK. Whilst this model has removed the burden and complexity of having to build and host systems, to assume the cloud environment is secure is flawed. The objective of the Shared Responsibility Model is to create a secure and compliant computing environment by sharing the […]
Read morePosted by Steve Macmillan on October 1, 2018