Financial Services IT

I used to work for a major UK pensions/financial services provider. At said company I used to be in charge of the Wintel hardware and wintel backup. My pet hate was people ordering CD/DVD writers, because they just presumed that it was ok for them to have their own personal copies of data, or to send data to other companies. So few people understand the implications of their actions in this area, it is frightening. I used to take CD/DVDs of personal/external data from people's desks after hours and post them to our IT security department, just to see if the loss of data was reported - it never was, although the IT security people relished 'having a quiet word'.

It took a significant amount of my time to get in touch with people ordering CD/DVD writers and persuade them that it was safer/faster/better for us to setup VPNs to send the data or that the 3million quid we just spent on a new backup infrastructure would probably be better than a 25p writeable disk. We had to get our IT security department to walk floors after hours to see if they could find unauthorised CD/DVD writers.

Then came XP and memory sticks, it took a while, but I managed to get all USB ports disabled before most people realised it was possilbe...