Datasheet

20
Part I: Building the Background
✓ Identify all steps taken to contact and warn consumers that their infor-
mation may have been compromised.
✓ Provide an outline of the plan that will prevent the recurrence of such a
data breach — and your timeline for implementing it.
The extent to which they can’t provide these answers is a clue to how much
control they’ve lost over their data.
How IT Risk Affects Business Risk
Without electronic information, business would cease to function — which is
why data loss is the biggest risk that businesses face in the twenty-first century.
Reducing that risk means meeting a daunting challenge: protecting electronic
information. The risk is more intense now, because of two technological
developments:
✓ More advanced and pervasive communication devices (as described in
the preceding section).
✓ A massive reduction in the size of portable storage.
Both of these have business advantages — but they also make it easier to get
away with more!
As these technologies continue to develop, IT organizations are faced with
the requirement that critical information must be readily available for
exchange to, from, and about customers, partners, and employees. Security
measures have not kept pace; no wonder data leakage is rapidly becoming a
major concern for businesses and consumers alike. The sad story of a data
leak has become a familiar news item — complete with its embarrassing loss
of customer information, potential monetary loss, and (worse) loss of faith in
organizations and their ability to protect critical information.
Fortunately, the loss of sensitive information — whether by inadvertent or
malicious means — can be controlled. Although information leakage is dif-
ficult to plug completely without impeding business processes, it has to be
done to reduce the risk of malicious data breaches.
IT risk — buckets of it
All organizations run according to risk. Traditionally this has been limited
to financial and operational risks; the operational side of the house didn’t
05_388433-ch01.indd 2005_388433-ch01.indd 20 1/23/09 9:36:07 PM1/23/09 9:36:07 PM