I worked for ABN Amro as a Server Admin until recently. The security guys in the UK and global Tech Risk Management departments were and still are extremely anal about security.
However I usually agreed with them one hundred percent. Any outage caused by any form of malware causes major league losses for financial companies. VoIP, messaging, freemail and IM are all good fun until every user in the building starts to use them and your whole network collapses in a heap. Or worse a major security flaw gets discovered in a product like Skype. A big corporate network might have hundreds or thousands of unmanaged installs of Skype floating about. This constitutes a major headache for administrators, like me, who spend enough weekends patching stuff as it is.
In addition there is the law of unintended consequences to consider. Take iTunes, a harmless fun application that all users should be able to enjoy. Nope. iTunes has a wonderful tendancy to store all downloaded music in the My Documents\My Music folder on every user's profile. As soon as that user logs off the entire contents of the users roaming profile including the My Documents\My Music folder gets copied to the network file store. I recently saw all the free space on a multi-terabyte file store vanish in the space of a morning becuase of itunes. Harmless. Yeah right. We now have a complete ban on iTunes for all staff, enforced by Group Policy restrictions.
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I worked for ABN Amro as a Server Admin until recently. The security guys in the UK and global Tech Risk Management departments were and still are extremely anal about security. However I usually agreed with them one hundred percent. Any outage caused by any form of malware causes major league losses for financial companies. VoIP, messaging, freemail and IM are all good fun until every user in the building starts to use them and your whole network collapses in a heap. Or worse a major security flaw gets discovered in a product like Skype. A big corporate network might have hundreds or thousands of unmanaged installs of Skype floating about. This constitutes a major headache for administrators, like me, who spend enough weekends patching stuff as it is. In addition there is the law of unintended consequences to consider. Take iTunes, a harmless fun application that all users should be able to enjoy. Nope. iTunes has a wonderful tendancy to store all downloaded music in the My Documents\My Music folder on every user's profile. As soon as that user logs off the entire contents of the users roaming profile including the My Documents\My Music folder gets copied to the network file store. I recently saw all the free space on a multi-terabyte file store vanish in the space of a morning becuase of itunes. Harmless. Yeah right. We now have a complete ban on iTunes for all staff, enforced by Group Policy restrictions.