Study: Businesses falling short on data disposal
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Study commissioned by BT Group finds that many organizations fail to clean sensitive data off secondhand hard disks.
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While many high-tech firms scored well in a new study of how they treat customers online, more than a third of the surveyed companies still share personal data without permission.
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There are many advantages - and hazards - involved in backing up today's  small office data. Here's some help.
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Thirty-seven percent of disks bought in the U.S. during a survey had personal data on them. Of 133 disks bought in the U.K., 44% of them didn't even work. But of those that did, 19% had enough information on them to identify the organization from which they had come, 65% had enough data to identify named people, and 17% contained "illicit" data.
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Many corporations today employ multiple techniques to protect against data loss. Unfortunately, the various approaches are often applied and managed in an uncoordinated manner. Ironically, the nightly backup, for some critical classes of applications, becomes almost irrelevant, representing a tertiary, "last ditch" level of data protection.
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Businesses may be spending millions on expensive security technologies aimed at thwarting data leakage and compliance violations, but many companies are still failing to sufficiently address access controls for protected information and IT systems.According to the latest report from Ponemon Institute, most IT workers readily admit that their companies are doing a sub-standard job of keeping tabs on the level of access available to employees, temporary workers, and independent contractors.In Ponemon's 2008 National Survey on Access Governance, based on interviews conducted with roughly 700 IT professionals, 78 percent of those people surveyed reported that their employers are not regularly reviewing policies or tools that control admittance to their systems or information.The situation has resulted in an environment where many workers retain the ability to view sensitive data or manipulate IT systems that they should not be able to access based on their job responsibilities, researchers said.Some 69 percent of those interviewed said that their companies' access policies were either enforced poorly or not at all, with only 30 percent of respondents stating that their organizations go to the trouble of validating their guidelines.The overwhelming lack of proactive efforts to keep a handle on issues of access are somewhat shocking based on all the attention being given to data security and compliance issues over the last several years, and many business could greatly improve their overall standing simply by improving their policies and enforcement capabilities, said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of research firm."Traditional approaches, including homegrown technologies and manual management processes, have proven to be fraught with failure and risk. Unless enterprises acknowledge business as usual is failing, we believe rampant access mismanagement will continue to plague organizations," Ponemon said. "When it comes to access rights, companies don't want to constrain workers and make their jobs harder, but they have to manage things in a more systemic way that look at the risk versus the benefits, and many organizations are obviously having difficulties with that."Approximately 55 percent of those participating in the survey said that their employers' ability to grant access based on a worker's role and job function is either poor or nonexistent, including 42 percent who said that their companies have no policy to manage things in such a manner.The rapid pace of change in the responsibilities among today's workforce is one of the biggest hurdles that companies struggle to overcome, said executives with Aveksa, a maker of access control software that sponsored the Ponemon report."This entitlement drag issue is a major problem. IT organizations are under pressure and often either valued or devalued by business based on how quickly they deliver access," said Brian Cleary, vice president of Marketing for Aveksa. "Clearly, the findings here show that that while companies are doing a good job of providing initial or changed access, there is no automated way to go back and make a determination to understand if a workers' current level of access is appropriate."Lessons learned from Jerome Kerviel Issues of access control are of fundamental importance to corporate risk management, perhaps best exemplified by the recent reports of the activities of Jerome Kerviel, a stock trader at French firm Soci?t? G?n?rale who is accused of losing nearly $8 billion of his company's capital in unapproved transactions carried out by circumventing rules built into the brokerage's IT systems.Had Soci?t? G?n?rale been actively monitoring the access controls for its transactional systems, Kerviel likely would have been caught long before he gambled away such a stunning amount of money, the experts contend.A major factor contributing to the continued loopholes in access management is a lack of support for improving policies and applying technologies used to govern the issue by senior management in many companies, according to the report. Some 74 percent of respondents indicated that senior management in their companies does not view access governance as a strategic security imperative. "It seems that the perception is that it's still tough to get senior executives to sign off on the necessary funding, but situations like Soci?t? G?n?rale may help prove how big of concern this really needs to be," said Ponemon.Another major contributor to the problem is the need for cross-organization collaboration, which complicates issues of access dramatically.And while 83 percent of those people responding to the survey said that collaboration among business units, audit and compliance groups, and IT security departments is vital to keeping their operations in line with government regulations, 57 percent said those teams never partner to oversee access issues."This has to be an area of great concern, because if companies consistently score poorly on compliance audits it's been proven that this actually starts to diminish their reputation and brands," Ponemon said. "And as more organizations suffer losses, there will likely be new regulations put in place that make it even harder to operate; most businesses I know don't want more regulations, but if more people fail to create their own controls, more regulators will get involved."
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Researchers conclude that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes of digital info last year. And there's barely enough room to store it all. By the Associated Press.
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Data breaches contribute less to ID theft and fraud that most people think, according to a recent survey by Javelin Strategy & Research. Losing your checkbook or wallet is more likely to put you at risk.
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Researchers report that 37 percent of old hard drives still contain personal data from former owners.
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Traditional antivirus technology may be too slow to protect users, researchers say.
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Companies are struggling to cope with tighter corporate governance regimes, which might even work against the goal of achieving improved IT security they are partly designed to promote.
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A recent survey of Fortune 1000 companies shows that if you're not using disk-to-disk systems to cut your backup window, you're behind the times. Here's why the technology is so hot.
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By Kimberly Pierceall, The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif.  Feb. 18--When data backup programs try to share shelf space with  better-known, sexier software titles, economics usually favors the latter.
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(Source: Network Appliance)  This paper takes a look at using data virtualization to provide end-to-end data reduction efficiencies. It features three user case studies on how users were able to have a significant impact on bottom-line expenses through data virtualization, as they relate to the storage acquisition and ongoing data storage management costs.
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A proposed law would require companies to keep detailed data about peopleâs Internet and phone use.
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Some firms find it a challenge to comply with new law on retaining digital records for court.
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(InfoWorld) - Technologies aimed at bolstering enterprise data protection remain tough to manage, but companies can derive significant benefits if they utilize the tools with a pragmatic approach, said security industry experts. A recurring theme among the consultants, technology makers, and customers gathered for the InfoWorld Enterprise Data Protection Forum being held in New York today was that the first step businesses looking to improve their information defenses must take is to locate and evaluate all of their truly vital records. Beyond that assessment process, having the ability to centralize efforts to drive data protection tools and strategies across their entire organizations is a key to their success, the experts said. From encryption technologies to DLP (data leakage prevention) systems, companies are faced with a range of alternatives for addressing their information management and security needs. Finding the right way to apply the various tools is one of the most crucial issues for most companies today in making headway with their data protection projects, industry watchers observed. "Unified management is the key; if you look at how you manage this process, you must have a top-down view into operations," said Phillip Dunkelberger, chief executive at encryption specialists PGP. "Most enterprises are trying to solve these problems with point solutions, but that's like playing whack-a-mole; you must look at this issue universally from protecting laptops to archiving and tape backup as well as in managing your custom applications." As external threats continue to evolve and businesses are presented with new security concerns like smaller, more powerful removable storage drives, IT security teams must try to adopt technologies that will allow them to take a more centralized approach, compared to individual point products, Dunkelberger maintains. The PGP executive unsurprisingly expressed his belief that the careful application of encryption technologies across an enterprise, among other tools, can provide just the type of top-down, metered approach he recommends. Installing and supporting all the various pieces needed to improve data protection remains one of the most challenging tasks for enterprises to handle, he said. "Operations teams have to make these systems work, and work cost effectively -- they need to know who to report to if there is a breach and how to respond to it," said Dunkelberger. "If you think about the future, there is a need to be more transparent to gain customers and at the same time protect their information; there's a need to shift thinking and methodology," said the CEO. "We can't do the same work over and over again. We need to take the opportunity to look at new technologies and sit down with our business partners to advance a plan." Other experts speaking at the conference said that enterprises are finally realizing that they can no longer focus on perimeter defenses alone to protect their sensitive information and that customers are getting a grip on the notion of defending data assets and intellectual capital versus merely attempting to better lock-down their networks. Gerrit Nel, global data security solutions and services development manager at IBM's Global Technology Services group, said that companies should focus on employing endpoint-based technologies that can handle DLP and other security policies. "It's better to return to the approach of addressing things at the endpoint and then building protections back into the network," said Nel. "Companies need to start looking at the value of the entire data chain; there's a need to get rid of the user aspect of data governance and inform people what they can and cannot do. Endpoints can be multi-user and data can be saved on removable devices, and there's a need for solutions to protect and encrypt data there as a result of those factors." While many enterprise customers already complain that they have too many endpoint-based technologies in place that create management complexity issues, companies should reconsider what they have installed and look to apply newer tools that offer the same type of centralized management espoused by PGP's Dunkelberger, Nel said. Another emerging concern for managing data protection is the emergence of SOA strategies within many areas of enterprise IT, said the expert. Having the ability to push governance policies across those systems will be one key to allowing for the benefits of SOA in the future without creating new security hazards, Nel said. "Many of the solutions we see today are based on SOA-type architecture and exploit Web services, so we recommend that when looking at solutions companies ensure that they can integrate those applications with their existing business applications and feed their policies in," he said. "Look for vendors that can really help solve these problems and not just point solutions aimed at addressing one part of the process."