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Article Excerpt
May 29, 2007 at 01:19 PM
By now, it should not surprise you that sensitive and confidential data is on your network. Corporate strategy and intellectual property, staff working and personnel files, customer and partner account requirements, client identification numbers and histories, even competitor documents? you name it, it is out there somewhere, on your network.
The fact that it is there is not always your fault; often staff make exposed copies, without your knowledge, in the process of doing business. However, whether or not it was your decision to have and hold the data, it is your responsibility to secure and protect it. Failing to do so surely will cost your organization. The manner and integrity with which you do this-how well you control this data and what practices and technology you use to manage it ongoing-makes all the difference to regulators, and your bottom line.
The Illusive Data-at-Rest
While all critical data must be sheltered, the real information security challenge centers on that truly illusive data set: the unstructured portion of the data pool (we are talking about the millions of files scattered across your network storage devices, servers, laptops, and desktops), into which organizations have little visibility. These files (PDF, PST, Excel, Word, etc.) often encompass 70 to 80 percent, on average, of an organization's data pool and almost always represent multiple terabytes, even petabytes, in volume. This information often is described as "data-at-rest" (as opposed to "in-motion") because it sits on disk drives, waiting to be accessed by the right- or wrong-person.
In its March 2006 report, "Protecting Confidential Data," the Enterprise Strategy Group estimated 95 percent of unstructured data types are confidential in nature. Even a slightly...
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