User Safety

User safety is to be considered at all times by anyone in an organisation and is also recommended to be followed at home. User safety is when guidelines are put into place to prevent any users being at risk or personal data being exposed to the World Wide Web. For example if a user is working on a machine in the workplace and runs an application which has not been verified and authorised by their IT department, this is breaking the user safety policies. The fact that the application is not verified or is not allowed to be used on a work machine could mean that is has not being verified as being safe to use on the IT systems. This could lead to future harm to users, such as users in the organisation having private information leaked such as a personal address of phone number which could later on lead to identity theft.

There are ways to prevent users safety from being at risk, these solutions are:

·         Follow your IT department policy’s and guidelines carefully

·         Do not run unauthorised software on the IT system

·         Don’t download any untrusted files

·         Be responsible when browsing the web

Information Security

Information security is vital in any IT Situation; this includes all sized organisations and home users. Security of information is important because if the information gets into the wrong hands it have be a huge security risk. Large organisations have security measures and protocols on place to try and prevent this from happening but it cannot always be stopped, such as if a user is working from home and is working whilst running dodgy software this can compromise company data as the dodgy software may be programed to upload that data into the cloud somewhere. If security of information is not followed properly this can lead to data security being compromised, which could be dangerous for the organisation if it was to fall into the wrong hands.

The best way to keep information secure would be to:

·         Not agree to save any credentials (Such as login details)

·         Not store any important information on an unsecure computer (Such as a computer with no antivirus)

·         Not to have work files on a computer running counterfeit software (Such as a computer with pirated software)

System Performance

System performance is vital to any user on any machine; the system performance is what gives the user a pleasurable experience on a machine. Compromisation of system performance can be caused by many things, the most common issue with systems are web browser performance, and this is mainly slowed down by having unnecessary toolbars installed as well as having a large cache and cookie store.

A cache store is when you load a website for the first time, the images and text of the website is saved locally to speed up the loading of the web page. The purpose of this is so when the webpage is visited again the cache store checks for changes on the website and updates itself with the new information; this is for the purpose of not having to load the full website every time the browser is opened.

The cookie store works in the same way as a cache store but its purpose is slightly different. A cookie store collects information about a user such as usernames and passwords. This information is collected when you are signed into a website for the first time such as Facebook. The purpose of this is so when the webpage is revisited it looks at the cookie store on the computer and sees a user has logged into that site before. Then from here the user is automatically logged into a website.

The downside to these two services are when a user is heavily using the internet on a low end computer or an older one is that every time the web browser is launched the whole cache and cookie store is loaded, then if you add on the toolbars alongside them. New users to a computer is usually fine into a certain point such as if the user was to sign into multiple sites on a regular basis and visit new websites on a regular basis this would cause the computer to provide bad system performance to the end user.

This issue can be solved. When most users notice that there machines are providing very bad performance there solution is to go to a store and purchase a new computer, but in reality it is a lot simpler than that. Any user can easily speed up there system performance by carrying out various simple tasks on a weekly basis such as clearing there browser of cookies and cache. This is usually done by launching the web browser and opening the settings tab, then navigation to advanced settings and selecting clear browsing data.