CFO: Risks of rogue technology -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 5/11/2003
Last Visited: 1/30/2004
"We've pretty much experienced all the rogue technologies out there," says Richard Belanger, Forrester's chief technology officer.
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"We saw a burst of rogue Wi-Fi activity nine months ago," says his CTO, Mr Belanger.For about US$90 each, a number of Forrester employees bought their own wireless hubs and used them to help their workgroups access the network.Unfortunately those hubs "basically allowed any outsider with a Wi-Fi card in their PC to get into the corporate system", observes Mr Belanger.Fortunately, he adds, "We were using our network sniffing and intrusion detection system and saw this weird traffic on the backbone network.
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PDAs pose an additional problem: "People go out and get these specialised PDAs that interfere with existing corporate systems because they're not standardised to them," Mr Belanger says.
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"We had to rebuild ten laptops here that had been corrupted by KaZaA installations," says Mr Belanger.
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Mr Belanger says that since Forrester doesn't have a "secret proprietary manufacturing process like Apple does", the company doesn't prohibit camera phones.
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So pervasive, notes Mr Belanger, that he picked up a USB token as a convention giveaway.
"I think of them as souped-up floppy disks," he says.
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"We require rigid standardisation so everyone is running the same laptop with the same system image and same software on it," says Mr Belanger.