Trevor Smith, Executive Vice President at Fasoo partner Brite Computers, recently penned an article titled “Protect data, protect the bottom line”. In the article, he talks about the importance of protecting confidential and proprietary information and how the loss of this data can negatively affect your bottom line.
Data loss can come from inadvertent or malicious internal action as well as external threats. Recent data breach related lawsuits against Home Depot is one example of how external threats can cause major financial damage to a business.
Numerous internal threats from the likes of Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning or unknown employees can cause the same problems. Regardless of the source, if your confidential customer or company information gets into the wring hands, your organization can be hit with fines, lawsuits, brand damage and ultimately loss of customers.
According to Smith. “… everyone from the small business owner to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company feels a similar sensation: sleepless at night, tasked with keeping company data secure. Meanwhile, the threats appear as a giant game of Whack-A-Mole — as soon as a vulnerability is eliminated, another suddenly appears.”
The answer is to protect the data using data-centric security. This helps you manage both internal and external threats. Since you encrypt and assign security policies to information as soon as its created, you can protect and control it regardless of location or format.
One area keeping the CEO up at night is the unlimited locations where company data can reside. Gone are the days when a company stored all its information on hard drives inside the data center. File-sharing services, like Dropbox, Box and Google Drive, make it convenient to share files with anyone, anywhere. This helps productivity, but also increases the risk of sensitive data getting into the wrong hands.
Another concern is the fluid nature of business relationships. Employees change companies more frequently than in the past. Your trusted employee today may be your competitor tomorrow. The same is true of customer and partner relationships. Today the confidentiality of these relationships is governed by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Once the relationship ends, you have to rely on your partner to comply with the NDA. In today’s world, it’s unlikely to happen.
As you look at the critical information that drives your business, think about the consequences of protecting that data persistently. That means you have ultimate control of who can access it and what they can do with it regardless of who has it. Since business is dynamic, you need a way to dynamically change user access and permissions on the fly. By controlling your information, you ultimately protect your bottom line.
