I love my iPod and my iTunes. I have always liked to pick and choose the tunes I wanted to hear and not have to listen to the entire album/CD if there were some songs that I didn’t care for. Plus, I like to listen to a variety of singers, all mixed together. I’ve created dozens of playlists for various events and activites I do. I have an eclectic taste in music which I am broadening all the time while listening to what I think is one of the top radio stations in the entire country, located right here in the Des Moines, Iowa area. Add to this the many great podcasts that continue to be churned out, and you can imagine how many weeks of total play time are stored on my computer within my MP3s.
Podcasts are great ways to increase the awareness of your personnel for privacy and security issues. They reach the audio learners in a way that print copy alone misses.
I feel so strongly about the effectiveness of podcasts for audio learners that I’m including them in my new quarterly subscription awareness resource being released in just little over a week. I will tell you more about it as the release date approaches, but my goal in doing this is to create an awareness product that truly does speak to ALL personnel at ALL levels of an organization, using terminology understandable by non-security and non-privacy folks, and incorporating my experience and background in education to use the proven concepts that must be utilized to effectively communicate to all three types of learners:
· Visual (this is typically the only group current awareness products speak to)
· Audio (those who learn best by listening to information)
· Kinesthetic (hands-on learners; those who need to do activities to learn)
However, one thing that I have thought about by including the MP3 podcast file in my package is whether or not organizations are blocking the use or download of such files on their corporate networks.
The information security and privacy practitioners I spoke with largely indicated that they *ARE* providing MP3 files directly on their network for their network users to listen to, but most had not really thought about the impacts of allowing their network users to download MP3 files from Internet sites.
Bandwidth and storage issues were the impacts that came most quickly to my mind with allowing these downloads from the Internet. But, there are more.
My new poll (see the right of the screen and scroll down) tries to determine whether the trend is for organizations oto block MP3 Internet downloads on the corporate network, or to allow them. Please click a button and let me know!
After the poll closes in a couple of weeks I will discuss the results, along with providing a list of the risks I’ve identified related to allowing MP3 downloads to corporate networks.
Tags: awareness and training, capital 106.3, Information Security, ipod, IT compliance, itunes, mp3, Podcast, policies and procedures, privacy