* Senior managers need to make e-mail and other data security initiatives a top priority
Physical and electronic breaches of messaging systems and other data repositories continue to make headlines.
Physical and electronic breaches of messaging systems and other data repositories continue to make headlines.
Last week, for example, Boeing announced that in early December a laptop was stolen from an employee’s car – that laptop contained the Social Security numbers for 382,000 current and past employees and, for many of these people, their home address, date of birth and other information. This past summer, an officer in the state of Victoria, Australia requested his own file – the system from which he requested the information returned 7,000 pages of sensitive data on nearly 300 of his fellow Victorians via e-mail.
This points out two things. First, there is a growing need for security capabilities focused on protecting against these types of data breaches. In many ways, e-mail needs to be the primary focus of these efforts because of the growing array of sensitive information contained in e-mail, from confidential corporate records to information on customer purchases. Plus, mobile devices, almost all of which are e-mail-enabled, are placing a growing proportion of sensitive data outside of the corporate firewall. A Pointsec study in late 2005 found that 86,000 mobile devices were left in Chicago-area taxicabs during just one six-month period.
Second, senior managers need to make e-mail and other data security initiatives a top priority. At a recent meeting of CIOs and other senior managers in New York, I sat next to a gentleman that told us about the experience of his company. Senior management in the company feared data breaches from lost laptops so much that they did two things: first, they implemented a two-month program to install encryption software on every laptop used by employees. Second, they implemented a policy that anyone who lost a laptop would immediately be fired.
Messaging security will become even more critical in the future, particularly as unified communications systems contain an ever-growing array of e-mails, faxes, voicemails and other sensitive information.
