Sometimes when I talk to small businesses, I get a common response along the line, “we are a small company, therefore no one is interested in what we do”. Some companies, including medium and enterprise sized companies don’t know how much data is leaving their firewall on a daily basis. I think it is very good to be paranoid about information security, even the people you consider to be your most loyal staff can betray that trust. How many times have staff left the business with your data with the aim of going into direct competition with your business?

Technology is created to be your ally to ensure that you focus on your core business, letting it take the bulk of the work off your hand. For example Data Loss Prevention makes sure that data formats like social security numbers, passport numbers, account numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, etc do not leave the perimeter of your organisation. There is also Enterprise Rights Management, also called Information Rights Management that helps you to secure all your unstructured data which represents about 85% of most organisations’ data.

Not being paranoid about information security can be a downward spiral for your business, as customers may begin to suspect that you are selling their data to other organisations, especially when they get calls from competing businesses with data that has only divulged to your business. Apart from this other employees will begin to get into the habit of helping themselves to corporate data if they realize that little or no action has been taken against previous data theft. Your Internet security may also be weak, and may be leaking data through malware or spyware.

What I am saying here is don’t leave anything to chance, it is always better to take the necessary steps and invest in the security tools that meet the requirement of your organisation, rather than being labelled as an organisation that has a poor approach to information security.

I’ll like to hear from you whether it is good to be paranoid about information security?