Norfolk Constabulary
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Customer Statement - Peter Herring, Norfolk Constabulary |
Peter Herring, InfoSecurity Risk Assessor/Auditor, Norfolk Constabulary.
"Norfolk Constabulary has 2 members of staff in its InfoSecurity department, covering a number of sites in the county. We decided to deploy Lumension® Device Control to enable us to restrict the use of removable storage media such as floppies, CDs, USB sticks, USB printers and digital cameras on 3,000 desktops spread throughout the county. Our default policy had been to deny all USB device usage, however, certain parts of the force needed to be able to connect devices such as cameras. For example, where officers were examining images of traffic offences and accidents, or to load images of people on to the sex offenders register. In the case of the Sex Offenders Register, we also needed to prevent the connection of any other type of device e.g. printer, USB memory stick, CD writer, etc.
We chose to deploy Lumension® Device Control more than three years ago, because it allows us to tightly control USB usage, while enabling necessary USB device use for certain members of the force. We have linked up Lumension® Device Control with our Active Directory. The default setting is to deny all USB access. As access is required we get authorisation from officers' line managers. Device Control also gives us the option to allow officers to read from a device, but not write to it and there is an option to create an audit trail of any data downloaded to an authorised device.
We are bound by the Data Protection and Computer Misuse regulations and Lumension® Device Control helps to reinforce this across the organisation. For example, people sometimes want to take work home on a USB key so that they can complete work at home, However, we do not want this happening because we do not want any records to be downloaded to or stored on home PCs. When required, staff are provided with laptops for use at home which are also protected by Lumension® Device Control.
The beauty of Lumension® Device Control is that we have got offices throughout the county and it enables us to control USB, floppy and CD device usage centrally. If a member of staff is working in another office on the other side of the county, we can set up his user profile so that he can still access data on a device. However, we are still protected against any potential risk to data from contractors or other temporary employees as their USB, floppy and CD device access will be denied. Without Lumension® Device Control, we simply would not be able to control and manage device usage."