Securing Windows 7
Windows 7 has been released to the consumer market and small business integrators, administrators and owners should start thinking about their strategy for deployment and how they will go about securing their environment. From our experiences with the beta, release candidate and official release (RTM) versions of Windows 7, I must say we’ve come a long way from the days of using National Security Agency (NSA) templates to harden and secure enterprise computers. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft started delivering products that were significantly more secure than previous versions out of the box.
In this fast moving internet age, the biggest threats these days come from malicious trojan executables and user laziness. The trojans you can get tricked into allowing into your computer system; the laziness is what happens when users naively lower their default Operating System defenses like disabling the User Account Control (UAC) in Vista and/or Windows 7, turning off automatic patching and deactivating the built-in firewall. The UAC and firewall, by the way, performs the same functions as applications we spend money on with products like Zone Alarm, Norton, McAfee etc. where you get notified if an application is trying to do something fishy.
Employee Surveillance on Steroids
So the other day I went to a conference on security and listened to a couple of rehashed arguments on why business owners should secure their networks, data and mobile devices. Pretty standard stuff. Then we got into the latest development in employee monitoring and surveillance technology and I found myself going “whoa”, can they really do that? Sad fact is, yes, employers can really strip you down to your bones in terms of keeping tabs on what you do at work.
Windows Backup 2008: Another Royal Mess
I am always baffled by the constant ability of Microsoft to take something that was working very well and turn it upside down all in the name of trying to improve the product. The list is long so we won’t even bother. The latest in this list is the supposedly new and improved Windows Server Backup 2008. In my opinion, this is one of the most frustrating thing the company has done to small business owners in terms of backing up files. Don’t get me wrong, the concept behind the product makes sense – for those who can afford it. It has:
- Faster backup technology.
- Simplified restoration.
- Simplified recovery of your operating system.
- Ability to recover applications.
- Improved scheduling.
- Offsite removal of backups for disaster protection.
- Remote administration.
- Automatic disk usage management.
- Extensive command-line support.
- Support for optical media drives and removable media.