As part of our Cyber Essentials accreditation for managed staff desktops, we have recently withdrawn the local admin account functionality from Run Advertised Programs on staff PCs.
While the local admin account withdrawal happened more suddenly than we had anticipated, we were planning to remove it from RAP this summer anyway. This is in line with our Cyber Essentials accreditation (which is required of all public sector organisations and those trading with them). Cyber Essentials is all about ensuring the security of our network and as such it will no longer be possible for staff to install software under a local admin account by default. Software installed by staff using the local admin account is not set up to receive patches and upgrades and as a result can go out of date and become a security risk very quickly.
However, we recognise that there are requirements for lots of different software packages in a university environment and as such have created the Non Standard Software Request form on UniDesk to provide staff with a route to request assistance in installing such software. Our intention is that we would hopefully be able to package software and make it available to staff in RAP – if we can achieve this, we can also ensure that the installed software gets any necessary patches and upgrades.
If you have any questions about the new process, please contact the Information Centre as usual.
Information Centre
information.centre@stir.ac.uk
https://stir.unidesk.ac.uk/tas/public/ssp/