Ben and his little Data Loss Accident

It is 8 o’ clock in the morning. Ben gets up from his bed. The first thing that he does after grabbing a cup of coffee in the morning is check his email using the hi-tech highly over-rated HSIA USB modem. He checks for the MIS system mail and starts working on it. Realizing that he is already late, Ben fetches his favorite 4 GB USB drive from his bag and inserts it into his desktop PC and copies the employee information data that he had been working on from home the other day. On his way to office in a hired cab, he transfers this data to his laptop and continues to work on it. Then he emails this file to his Assistant Manager to sync it with the company database. Meanwhile he reaches office, hurriedly pays the cabbie and enters his office chamber.

A great new Monday morning! Ben was busy updating himself about the status of the work when he realized that something was missing from his pockets. His purse?  No! His credit card?  No! A chill went through his spine with blazingly fast thoughts of impending consequences. Ben realized he had accidentally left his pen drive in the cab. The company employee payroll data with a collection of social security numbers in now free to be surfed upon by 1 billion people of this world on the internet. Ben once told that his favorite USB drive had made his life easy for sure but now he realized that the same USB drive might make his life highly miserable. Well there goes down one more fan of USB drive!

Even more surprisingly there is at least 1 Ben in every company in this world. And every Ben either had the same experience or will have the same experience in the future. The problem with most of us is that we think we are immune to these kinds of incidents until one great day the same thing happens to us.

It is not necessary that sensitive data will be always stolen from the company. In other cases, employees tend to misplace or lose data unknowingly which leads to the loss of the company itself.

Nowadays IT managers focus more on IT administration, IT maintenance and governance and Management Information Systems. But the most important fact is that even if IT infrastructure is there to store and process data but as long as the data is not safe, IT is useless no matter how fast it processes your data, automates business processes and accelerates your business. Protecting business is as important as making it grow.

As a matter of fact, each and every company should set aside a part of their annual budget exclusively for information security and Data Loss Prevention, be it through Physical end-points like USB drives, CD/DVD, printers or through Network paths like Emails or Instant Messengers.

In a preview interview with Dark Reading, Gartner security analyst Adam Hills said that security projects and functionality are gaining attention in the corporate boardroom and claiming a larger portion of the IT budget pie. “IT spending in 2009 is basically flat, with some companies making cuts, but we’re seeing security spending increase slightly,” Hills says.  “If both of those hold true throughout the year, then it’s clear that security spending will end up comprising a larger portion of the total IT budget [than in 2008].”According to Gartner, most importantly,  security is gaining attention at the highest levels of the organization.

IT Security spending is increasingly becoming a Board-Level Decision.