Bring your own device has snuck in through the back door, and Jon Honeyball thinks it’s time to get tough
It was the sort of plaintive phone call that makes your heart sink, although perhaps my own fault; after all, I did inadvertently advertise my tech-fixing services in last month’s column ( see issue 312, p130). I’ll rename this distraught caller, a good friend from my village, Mary. Her laptop, an aged ThinkPad, was “going very slowly and I can’t get any work done”.
Mary’s employer, a utilities company, had decided that working from home was the best thing to do during The Great Unpleasantness. So Mary had rearranged the lounge in her house to ensure that she had a good table, a view out onto the road, good lighting and a proper chair. After all, she would be sitting there for most of the working day, so there was little point in crippling herself with bad ergonomics and an unhelpful working space. But it was all for nothing if her computer didn’t work.
A few minutes later, she arrived at our front door clutching said ThinkPad. The first thing you need to do, when attempting to diagnose any significant computer problem, is to make a pot of strong tea. And dig out some chocolate biscuits, along with some slightly more diabetic-friendly plain ones for me.
Starting up the laptop turned into a long, dark searching of the soul as the hard disk audibly ground away. It took five minutes to get to the Windows login screen and then another three to fight its way to the desktop. That’s if it even got that far: almost every time, there was a kernel panic, the process ground to a halt and the machine rebooted.
Clearly, something was amiss. I did manage to get to a workable desktop, using Windows 10 Safe Mode, to see that nothing seemed completely horrible, and Mary reassured me that Windows Defender was up to date, that Windows 10 was fully patched and that all the data on the hard disk was properly backed up. I could have hugged her, because it’s usually around that point when the lower lip starts to tremble and a pleading look appears in the eye that says “oh, and there are irreplaceable photos of my granny/PhD thesis/last year’s accounts on there and I haven’t got a backup”.
We’ll gloss over the multiple antivirus installations, which were probably installed in a fit of overprotective worrying. Clearing out the spare packages helped a little with the boot time but was no panacea. I was intrigued to find a whole Citrix client installation – it seemed that her employers had an installable package that allowed staff to connect to the office servers and run the line of business apps.
We got to the end of the teapot, and it was clear, after about 90 minutes of fiddling, that no quick fixes were going to work. It was time for the machine to be blown away and reinstalled from scratch. Once this was done, it sprung back into life and all was well.
It got me thinking, though. While I can accept that we live in exceptional times, there needs to be a long hard conversation about the whole BYOD philosophy – too often, bring your own device turns into bring your own disaster. At least Mary’s employers had managed to get VPN tunnelling set up, complete with two-factor authentication, and a method of remoting apps onto the laptop.
Full marks for this. I wonder just how many other firms have had such foresight, and how many were left scrabbling around, wailing that “all our apps are in a web browser” whilst attempting to get VPN tunnels available for staff.
I don’t mind BYOD, providing it’s properly managed and implemented, but we shouldn’t allow the pandemic to reset expectations. Although I understand the desire for a business to not supply laptops when they’ve already invested in desktops, there needs to be a discussion at board level about the sort of IT infrastructure needed moving forward. Laptops should be de rigueur now ( see Barry Collins’ column on p22 for a different view – Ed), along with appropriate larger desktop monitors, keyboards and mice. And companies need to think about the requirements for asking staff to use their home broadband for business on a daily basis.
This shouldn’t be hard or radical, but a company with entrenched and backward-thinking IT processes needs to wake up to the new world order. This is an ideal time for directors to carefully assess what they need from staff who are working from home, and what impositions it’s appropriate to apply. The new world order is not an excuse to save money by pushing burdens onto staff, even if they aren’t paying thousands a year for train tickets. This is a hard discussion to have within the management of a company and with its IT teams, but it’s long overdue.
A company with backward-thinking IT processes needs to wake up to the new world order