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Dealing With Laptops in a Business Network?
lanimreT asks: "Notebooks are a large problem for IT managers. They carry viruses and other malware back into the network and are less reliable than desktop PCs for more than one reason. Yet, every employee MUST have one for his job. How have other IT managers dealt with the various problems that notebooks create?"
Treat them like machines on the internet, since you have no control over the machine itself. (I've seen people reinstall the OS because they can't get their kid's game to play.)
Assume the machines have viruses and trojans, and spyware throught the wazoo.
Oh, have a policy that every 4 months, people have to turn in their machines in for maintenance and reassignment. They won't think of these machines as "theirs" and they won't install crap (like their palm-pilot synch software).
I'm still out on filesystem encryption. I think it does not really block determined hackers, especially if they have government funding.
Finally, the reason why people get paid good money to find solutions is that these problems are not trivial. Good luck.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Find out what the risks are and create an AUP (acceptable use policy) around the risks.
Get the users to sign the AUP.
put controls around the AUP - eg make sure the users can't install their own software and do this for then with LanDesk or similar. No use of IE, Firewall only etc etc..