Yesterday, I wrote a post titled “What Global Companies Are Spending on Google” in which confidential information about advertising spend on some of Google’s major accounts was leaked to the public domain. From an outside perspective one may ask what is all the fuss about that information becoming public? Well here is one reason, one can roughly work out who is paying less or more for their advertising and come to the conclusion that they are operating on different price lists. So you can see why this information is so critical to Google that this information is tightly secured.

So is your price list under lock and key? Companies from as far back as we can remember operate different price lists for different customers. Some pay more and some pay less, depending on many factors. It is not uncommon for a manufacturer to get customer “A” who buys 100,000 units per month to pay a higher price per unit than customer “B” who only buys 70,000 units per month. Now if customer “A” finds out that they pay more per unit than a customer that buys less units per month, it could become devastating to the ongoing relationship.

A company’s price list is the life blood of an organisation because it impacts on all aspects of the business from it ability to pay its bills to delivering a return on investment for its owners. Persistent security tools like Enterprise Rights Management should be enforced on price lists and any price sensitive document, while the print of these documents should be highly restricted.

So where are you today with respect to securing your price list? You may say it is only in the hand of one or two people for it to be a cause for concern, and yes that may be true but how do you protect such data persistently from malware? If a form of malware is launched on your network to access your confidential information and cannot be immediately detected by your intrusion systems it’s game over.

This is why confidential information like your price list should be persistently protected while at rest i.e. stored on a hard disk, in motion i.e. being transfered over the network, and in use i.e. being edited. Only a tool like Enterprise Rights Management can provide the required security needed, such that even when it is stolen the information cannot be accessed because of the protection on it. Now is the time to protect your confidential information using persistent security.