Re: MDM @Lusty

I really don't get it?

Your post reads like you take the view that everything that your employers use to ensure their compliance with statute and industry practice is part of a personal vendetta against you. Your post seems to suggest you thumb your nose to them?

By all means stop using corporate devices or corporate solutions on your own device - as you rightly say "they" can't stop you. I wonder though, how using your own unhardened device to store and manipulate sensitive data and perhaps use an unmanaged personal mailbox to share that data would be viewed in terms of your contractual duties around sensitive customer or corporate data.

You may well be right, I.T. Can't stop you, but any number of other people can, be they your employers, regulators or ultimately the cops.

MDM, as much as anything is there to place constraints *and protection* around users. Lose customer details from say a Good Technology mailbox and you're personally protected, but lose it from your mail account or contacts app and you really have no defence. It isn't big and it isn't clever...

Re: MDM

In some places and some industries, some kind of lockdown of IT is a necessity and a legal obligation, and using a non-managed e-mail account for business can get you busted. On the other hand, the Dilbert cartoon has (or had) the recurring caricature charactersof Mordac the Preventer of Information Services, or something like that, the guy who won't let you use your USB ports or a password that you actually can remember and can type. And then he laughs at you. Actually laughs.

Most businesses and other ventures have data that they really don't want to have stolen or damaged. And most device misuse, from the point of view of the company, is games, social, and pornography. And maybe online shopping. So the only way to avoid being resisted by your own staff even when they aren't themselves stealing or damaging your data is to let them enjoy their business devices responsibly in all of those ways. Maybe on a time meter and with an appropriate warning that "You are about to access adult services that may contain unadvertised horsemeat", but flexible.

Let's face it, most people who are reading -this- page shouldn't be.

Re: MDM

If you're working in a regulated industry such as Financial Services or Healthcare, your carefree approach to where data goes would probably result in your employer deeming you worthy of dismissal.

Re: MDM @Lusty

The issue is not about working round IT, per se, it's more about breaking company policy.

For what it's worth, I've seen people get fired for breaking company policy at Law firms, big banks and at a large Financial Services company. One was for sending confidential information to a personal email address, one was for losing data on a USB stick and another was for logging on to a transactional system as someone else because they didn't have the rights to do a task themselves.

In all these cases, the policies were set by the companies, not by a draconian IT department stuck in the 60s.

Typical EU

"Users who create content always have and always will control where that content goes, and there is literally nothing that IT can do to stop them"

No, the "crap" is not to stop you working but to protect the enterprise from fines from regulators because they can not demonstrate that they have made reasonable attempts at protecting data/adhering to the rules.

As a EU, do as you wish, but remember, EU's are not exempt from all those rules and regulations imposed on the organisation. Play dice with your future if you wish.