All devices must require authentication with a username and password or other authentication element (e.B. token). The IT department must keep a list of the equipment and personnel authorized to use the equipment. All devices must be labeled with the owner, contact information and purpose. An organization that wants to protect all assets from a technological point of view should have an acceptable use policy. If you don`t set the rules for using your technology (even if you`re worried that your employees won`t follow it to the letter), there`s no reason for you to expect your employees to act responsibly. Honestly, I would expect employees to abuse the technology provided if the rules are not clearly defined. FYI: The most effective guidelines for acceptable use are those that are easy to understand. Make sure your PUA is written in plain language that makes sense to your employees. Companies and other institutions use a PUA to protect their networks from bad players.
The purpose of an AUD is to ensure that everyone uses internet access only for the appropriate tasks. Restricting what users can do can help these ISPs comply with the law and protect other users from cybersecurity threats. Here are some provisions you can find in a PUA: It`s no surprise that with technology, the associated policies also change with that technology. Even if things are going well and you have established a strong culture, your policies need to adjust over time. New employees will join us, and they also need to learn the right rules. In addition, everyone needs a reminder from time to time. This feedback loop is very important and will help make the policy stronger and easier to manage. Some rules must be based on best practices or business impact, and these do not necessarily have to do with government or a compliance standard. However, for a number of organizations, there are specific regulatory concerns such as HIPAA, PCI, SOX, etc. Good policy should take into account both best practices and compliance standards.
An Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) is a document that sets out the restrictions and practices that a user must accept in order to access a corporate network or the Internet. If employees know that there are real consequences for violating your PUA, they are more likely to follow your settings. Have a clear policy on what management will do if an employee is caught abusing the network. If you learn that a user is violating the terms of your PUA, you must consistently implement these consequences. If you give people a free pass all the time, employees are unlikely to take your PUA seriously. If you implement an employee monitoring software solution and include it in your PUA, you need to be clear with your employees when they are being monitored. Kot encourages business owners to keep an eye on their employees` privacy issues and “opt for a reasonable PUA while staying away from hypercontrol and setting unnecessary limits in employees` daily work.” [Read related article: Why you should tell your employees you`re watching them] As I mentioned earlier, your policy should make sense so that employees understand why it exists and opt for the culture of compliance. Therefore, the rules you create for a good policy should be practical. If something bad were to happen (whether or not it had to do with the end user), what would be the consequences for the organization? Would this lead to system failures that would affect the organization and its partners? What distinguishes a PUA from other user agreements, such as the Common End User License Agreement (EULA), which most people quickly go through before clicking “I agree,” is that it applies to a much larger system. While an EULA applies to a single piece of software, a PUA applies to entire networks, websites, and how a person is supposed to behave on their own while using your company`s resources. While an EULA focuses on the customer (end user), a PUA is for employees.
At the heart of most AUP documents is the section that describes unacceptable uses of the network as posted in the University of Chicago`s AUP. Unacceptable conduct may include creating and transmitting offensive, obscene or indecent material or images, creating and transmitting material intended to cause anger, inconvenience or anxiety, creating defamatory material, creating and transmitting material that infringes another person`s copyright, transmitting unwanted commercial or promotional material, and intentionally unauthorized access to other services. accessible via network/Internet connection. Then there is the type of activity that the network uses to waste time of technical staff to solve a problem for which the user is responsible, damage or destroy the data of other users, violate the privacy of others online, use the network to deny service to others, continues to use software or any other system for which the user has already been warned, and any other misuse of the network, such as the introduction of viruses. The purpose of this Directive should be to define acceptable end-user use criteria for organisational systems. Information systems provide access to the data and processes needed to support most business functions. They have contributed to significant improvements in productivity and customer service; However, the use of information systems to access customer or financial data, e-mail (e-mail), the Internet and remote access to corporate systems carries risks. An acceptable use policy is a set of rules that define what end users can and cannot do with their technology. Usually, this policy requires some sort of confirmation that the rules are well understood, including the possible consequences of a breach, before any type of connection to the system is issued.
A good policy not only describes these rules, but also explains the general rationale for their existence, so that employees eventually get into the concept and don`t view the rules as arbitrary or unreasonable. If this is the case, the Directive should focus on these types of problems and on the behaviours associated with the prevention of these consequences. For example, if an organization processes social security numbers that could have very significant consequences in the event of leaks, the policy should indicate the sensitivity of that data and the specific ways to process it. Employees need to know what is important to the organization when it comes to data. What needs to be backed up? What should be encrypted in transit? Why is this data valuable? Is it a legal issue, a trade secret, or perhaps just a sensitive and embarrassing issue when it is disclosed or lost? When this is well defined in advance, it is expected that employees will generally be able to apply, even if they forget a specific rule defined in the policy. While it may seem like the best policy for management is to lock everything down and restrict staff, a good acceptable use policy should be much more nuanced. .