Security devices and configurations which inhibit or minimize employee productivity. Employee productivity may be impacted by limiting access to information, communication and computing functionality, as well as by limiting computing performance. Controls may block websites, may block communication channels such as IRC, may slow computing devices by using full-disk encryption, antivirus, and spyware, may break applications by performing man-in-the-middle attacks and by misconfiguring applications. For some employees, substantial effort may be expended to find workarounds to bypass controls.
Brenda: Why won’t IE open this site?
Tim: The productivity throttling controls are misconfigured to arbitrarily disable TLS connections in IE. Go into Tools and enable TLS connections.
The productivity throttling controls won’t allow Firefox to get a critical update that addresses a vulnerability. Now I need to download the update and manually install. What a waste of time.
My workstation is churning away because of having to scan the large email attachment that I received. Because of the productivity throttling controls, I am unable to even switch tabs in my web browser.
Bill: Websense is prohibiting me from downloading a library I need to complete this work.
Me: We’ll let customer wait another day for the deliverable while I bypass the productivity throttling controls by downloading the library at home tonight and supplying to you on a USB tomorrow.
Tim: The productivity throttling controls are misconfigured to arbitrarily disable TLS connections in IE. Go into Tools and enable TLS connections.
The productivity throttling controls won’t allow Firefox to get a critical update that addresses a vulnerability. Now I need to download the update and manually install. What a waste of time.
My workstation is churning away because of having to scan the large email attachment that I received. Because of the productivity throttling controls, I am unable to even switch tabs in my web browser.
Bill: Websense is prohibiting me from downloading a library I need to complete this work.
Me: We’ll let customer wait another day for the deliverable while I bypass the productivity throttling controls by downloading the library at home tonight and supplying to you on a USB tomorrow.
by sutch December 8, 2010