How can we get ahead of the curve to prevent our users from causing their own troubles? The solutions are often simple but time consuming processes, multiplied by the number of users. Some of the recent pandemic problems we've encountered that are completely preventable include malware infections and installing software incorrectly.
Malware infections mostly come from scareware sites that convince people to download and install their antivirus product to get rid of a non-existent problem. The security of information, particularly with people dealing with accounting and HR information, is of great concern for people to be infected with malicious software. There is also AD account information and passwords that could be sniffed out.
The problem of installing software incorrectly has been time consuming and frustrating. If you'd tried to install Adobe Reader or Adobe Flash within Firefox recently, you're probably aware of what I'm talking about. Adobe has a "distribution manager" software that it uses to install its software now called GetPlus+. It allows a non-administrator user to install the software the first time, but when the next update comes out it requests an admin to login every time Firefox is started.
What can be done to stop these preventable things from wasting IT's time so that we can work on and respond faster to more pressing matters? What is needed for user education to get us (as an organization) past this?
