Re: Suggestions on best practices for idle timeouts

[Frank Barton <bartonf () HUSSON EDU>]

Emily, We go through this every so often, and "rounds are done" in our case
the gripe seems to be more on the "I might put up a powerpoint slide for 45
minutes, and not touch the machine" because most video applications will
prevent the computer from screen-saving, or sleeping

One thing that I will note is that, while we started with an
across-the-board policy, that doesn't work, and you will probably need to
break your computers up by business need. PCI Compliance mandates a 15
minute idle-lock for example.

I may be the odd duck, but I like to keep my idle timeout *very* low (to
the tune of 2 minutes), so one thing that we are looking at doing is
mandating maximums, but allowing people to set them lower. The other thing
that we found helpful was to put in a "warning" state - i.e. screen-saver
after 5 minutes, require password after 30 seconds of screen-saver. so that
if the user was in a situation where they had a slide up, they had a brief
window to abort the lock

That being said, we picked up a handful of these mouse jigglers (
https://www.cru-inc.com/products/wiebetech/mouse_jiggler/) for use at the
help-desk, when we are running time-consuming processes on machines that
are brought in.

As you go through your discussions, I would be interested in hearing what
you decide, what policies are written, etc. as I am sure others on the list
would be too

Thank You
Frank

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 1:43 PM, Emily Harris <emharris () vassar edu> wrote:

> We are in very lively discussions about best practices for idle machine
> timeouts.  Most of the discussion is around timeouts for faculty machines,
> as they could set up a computer with a video or movie and not touch the
> machine again for 2 hours.  We are specifically talking about timeouts for
> Single Sign On applications.  Has anyone been through these discussions and
> come up with some acceptable standards?
>
> Thanks!
>
> ----
> Emily Harris
> Interim Information Security Officer, CIS
> Vassar College
> 845-437-7221



-- 
Frank Barton
ACMT
IT Systems Administrator
Husson University