Today I’ll like you to head over to Simon Thorpe’s blog to read his latest blog post titled “Data loss, encryption & security in health care - is your medical data safe?”. It starts off by giving you an idea how bad the level of data breaches are in the health care sectors are especially in the US and UK.

Simon goes on to discuss protecting health care records using persistent security in the form of Enterprise Rights Management, also called Information Rights Management. Persistent security secures records while it is moving over the network, when it being used and when it is stored on any form of storage media.

Simon, I am sorry to say I do not expect data security to get any better over the life of the current parliament as the government has embarked on spending cuts which is most likely to impact data security. Read my post on the UK government spending cuts.

Access Simon’s blog post titled “Data loss, encryption & security in health care - is your medical data safe?” here.

Last month Gartner released another research paper titled “Getting Your Organization Ready to Deploy Enterprise Digital Rights Management”, authored by Eric Quellet who has written many papers on Enterprise Rights Management at Gartner. This paper is based on 4 key findings, 3 of which I think are very significant namely;

• The overcomplication of deployments by attempting to accomplish to many goals.
• A lack of proper preplanning and predeployment activities to successfully leverage Enterprise Rights Management.
• Sometimes Enterprise Rights Management is not the right solution required to protect sensitive documents.

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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.

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I found this interesting article on the computer weekly website on how to protect data that is circling outside the enterprise firewall on non-IT-controlled devices, written by Andrew Jaquith of Forrester Research. This article recognises that the enterprise security perimeter is quickly dissolving, therefore organisations should take the necessary steps to deploy the right tools that allow for persistent security.

I previously reviewed a research paper on enterprise rights management authored by Andrew on this blog, and I recommend that you also read this article, especially if data protection is one of the area of concerns for you and your organisation. Now head off to the computer weekly website and read the five patterns for securing data on devices you don’t own.

To access the article click here…..

I was reading a recent article where an employee of the Manchester Police lost a USB drive. The Daily Star that reported the breach wrote that a high-ranking source in the department said whoever lost the drive was in for “a right rollicking”. Meaning some punishment of some sort will be awarded to the person responsible.

But who should be blamed for a data breach, employee or employer? Whenever there is a data breach, it is the person that looses the data who is made the scapegoat. There are many information security endpoint tools that can help users keep confidential data safe from prying eyes. I believe organisations should take a serious look at their internal processes whenever there is a data breach, and ask what can be done to reduce human error or a deliberate effort to steal data. We are all humans and things get lost and forgotten, the question is what needs to be done to make the confidential data inaccessible to unauthorised persons?

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Since the last election the current UK coalition government has outlined plans to cut £6.2bn, most of what the new government calls “wasteful spending” to start to reduce the budget deficit. The government plans to cut £95m from its IT spending as part of its effort to save £6.24bn in its first round of cuts. Many within IT circles are concerned that this makes government both at the central level and local levels more vulnerable than ever before to all sorts of computer and data security attacks.

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The Office of Inadequate Security recently reported a major data breach at East Devon District Council where the personal data of almost 2,000 council workers was leaked. The incident happened when a former manager of the council sent the data in an excel file to a private email address.

The council says the incident was “unauthorised” and affects 1,891 staff, councillors, employees of Leisure East Devon and pensioners formerly employed at the council. This is a situation that could have been prevented using both Data Leak Prevention (DLP) and Enterprise Rights Management (ERM).

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Enterprise Rights Management Video Promotion (30 seconds)

Watch this 30 second clip on why you are better of with Enterprise Rights Management than resulting to legal action to recover your stolen intellectual property.

Via: Credit Score - click on image to view a zoomed out image.