Millennials Shadow It – What Can We Do About Security
Today on TechSanity Check, a discussion on “Millennials”, and how they can not live without their devices, and why this can be a good thing or a bad thing for your business.
It could be a great thing to have them knowing that they bring their own devices but with cloud services, corporate information, and lack of knowledge in security, what could possibly happen?
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Related articles:
Millennials Don’t Care About Mobile Security, and Here’s What to Do About It
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Transcript
TTWCP-DAILY-42_2017-02-28_Millenials
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 02/28/2017
Millenials – Shadow It – What Can We Do About Security
Craig Peterson: Hi, welcome back. Time for another TechSanity check and today we are going to talk about Millennials. I promised that yesterday. If you haven’t, by the way, changed your password. If you didn’t listen to yesterday’s podcast, you need to, and you need to do it now. Really. Really, change your passwords now. For anything that’s out on the internet. There are thousands of potential compromises that have been going on since September last year that include usernames, passwords, etc. as I said, we talked about it yesterday. Change your passwords now if you haven’t. So we’re going to get into the next aspect of security. And millennials here, you know, they get plenty of flack and there’s plenty of reason for it. I’m not sure it’s entirely their fault. We can certainly lay blame on their parents and society, their teachers and schools, etc. Etc. But it turns out they don’t care about security. So we’re gonna talk about bring your own device, millennials and what you can do about their security practices, right here. Stick around. TechSanity check.
(TTWCP EARWORM)
Ok. Now I had to admit, I did get some of my passwords changed. I didn’t change them all. But again, have a look at two programs. First of all, 1Password, that’s the one I always recommend, but it’s a little more expensive than anything else out there. But it’s also better. It has group passwords that lets you share them. It provides some really, really good security for them. And if you can’t afford that, the other one to have a look at is called LastPass. L-A-S-T-P-A-S-S. I’ve got information about both of those on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com, and they will save you a ton of grief when these types of problems occur. One of the things [1Password] does, by the way, if you turn it on, is it has a feature that will let you know if a website’s security has been compromised. Or at least there’s reports of a compromise. So when you login to the site the next time, you have a little red line that comes up in 1Password saying that you probably want to change your password because this site is known to have had a security compromise, or thought to have had one. This is one of the real advantages to 1Password. I think they call that Watchtower feature now but make sure you turn that on. Really, really important.
Now millennials think they know it all, right? Well they know what generation hasn’t. Hey, you’re 20-something. You know, you realize you don’t know it all but you kinda act like you do. Well, there is a problem with millennials and these digital devices. Again, they think they know it all. They think they know everything they need to know about these devices and what the devices are capable of and where the security problems might come up. Well, corporate IT departments are having a conniption right now because employees in their twenties and thirties are bringing their own devices into the office. They’re using cloud services in the office and they’re using corporate data with their own devices and with these cloud services. Now I’m going to tell you, first of all you, can’t just shut this down. Millennials really need it. They are so big into some of these cloud services. They are so big into having their devices and have it with them all of the time that if you would take them away you would be causing a riot, really, there in the office. So you just can’t take them away or say no, no, no.
You know the other problem that we have in corporate IT is kind of what’s called the Shadow IT. You’ve heard about the Shadow Government here. Trump’s been complaining about it. And President Trump certainly has something to complain about because they kind of pretend like they run the government. Well, same thing’s true with Shadow IT.
Shadow IT are all of these lines of business, so your marketing guys, maybe the plant manager, on and on, are going out and buying IT solutions. The sales guys, check with them. They’re probably using http://salesforce.com or maybe they’re using an alternative online. Your accounting people. They’re probably using online systems whether it’s something as simple as the QuickBooks or FreshBooks, or all the way up through our fancy ERP system from SAP or others. Your data isn’t yours. It isn’t just in the computer room anymore. It isn’t sitting in that glass room. It’s everywhere. 70% of millennials, according to a survey conducted by TrackVia, 60% of Millennials are not concerned about corporate security when they use personal apps, instead of corporate approved apps. Isn’t that something? 70% of Millennials even admitted to bringing outside applications into the enterprise in violation of IT policies. Compared to just 31% of Baby Boomers. And I gotta tell you, that number is going to be a lot bigger and it’s going to be a lot worse. Look ahead just a few years, by 2020. 46% of all US workers will be millennials, and that’s according to a report from the University of North Carolina from their School of Business. Now think about that for a minute. They’re growing presence in the workforce. They’re known to not obey corporate IT strategies. They’re known to take your corporate data, your intellectual property and just do whatever they want with it, right? They don’t realize the repercussions of what they’re doing and yet they’ve been doing it with their own data forever. You know, they don’t care that Facebook is tracking everything about them in they’re selling all that information. They don’t care. You know, it hasn’t really impacted them yet. And I think that has to do with them being younger. So as they age, I think they will grow up a bit, right? I’ve always said the guys aren’t particularly adults until they’re thirty, thirty-five years old and sometimes they never grow up, right? But they do tend to grow up.
Now IT can establish bring-your-own-device policies and security without blacklisting things on millennials’ phones and then just taking them over. So there are few things you can do here. Most bring your own device solutions tried to blacklist these specific and frankly that’s a draconian measure. They’re going to figure a way around it, right? It’s just not practical. You’re not going be able to keep up with all of the new apps that are coming out. IT departments don’t have the resources to investigate, you know, tens of thousands of new apps every month. Blacklisting, as I mentioned before, can cause problems with productivity because people are used to using these cloud-based apps. And as we just talked about yesterday, these cloud-based apps can have their own major security problems. You know they’re not just sitting there all day long playing video games on their phones. They’re actually trying to use them for business.
So, you know, you’ve got Skype that many businesses use. I tend to not use Skype. It’s a security nightmare. Google Hangouts, Viber, you know that there’s just a ton of them out there. So what do you do? How do you stop them from jeopardizing your data? Obviously you have to start with mobile device management. You need Enterprise Mobility Management Solutions but you have to achieve a balance. And you know I’m looking at this. I’m looking at the solutions that are out there. We sell a lot of these, you know. We sell them in full disclosure here at Mainstream. We have for years. You know, we’re top resellers for some of these. We have IBM Solutions, we have Cisco Solutions, we have Apple Solutions. And they’re all okay to a point, right? But at what point can you cut it off? What can you do? I’m leaning more and more towards training. Helping the millennials know that what they’re doing, the way they’re handling their data can be done effectively and it can be done securely. And keep reminding them. You know, it’s been interesting. I’ve watched, I don’t know if you’ve seen the show or not. My wife really likes it. But it’s about the invention of the bomb and World War II and it’s a TV series. It’s a drama. And, you know, they’ve got pictures up on the walls. And you see this from World War II. All of these things about loose lips sink ships, you know he’s watching showing the eyes of Adolf Hitler or, later on, of Stalin, etc. etc. That’s the kind of thing we have to do, I think, in this day in age. You know, we let them know. Remind them. Make it work. And I think we can make it work. Some basic mobile device management. Some basic training. Some basic understanding and they’ll all figured out. They’re bright kids, okay. They will become adults as time goes on, you know. Technically, I guess, they already are. But it’s experience that really helps teach them. It’s why you have more experienced workers there also because they’ve got the life experience, right? That’s why a 50 or 60 year old can be way better than a 20 year old in so many ways. So many different categories of business. But that 20-year old doesn’t have the same, how do I put this, concerns, right? And are they willing to jump into something that may be someone who’s older isn’t because they’ve had failures before and they get involved with things that are going to change for the better, the way your business operates, and maybe also for the worse. So let’s bring them up. Let’s explain to them. Let’s train them and let’s help them make the best choices that they can, and that we can in the IT security world.
Now, coming up tomorrow, we’re going to do a TechSanity check about our cars, about the feds. You know, do you realize the feds have been tracking our cars for more than 15 years? So we’ll do a little sanity check on that. How much data should our internet of things be collecting about us and what can it be used for and what can we do about it? So we’ll talk with you tomorrow. Take care. Bye bye.
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