Datasheet

Part I: Building the Background

get a handle on data loss, leakage, breaches, all the places data is wandering

away into the wrong hands. It’s out of control and growing, but hard to put in

front of a CIO who’s looking to trim costs, migrate to Linux (or to Windows)

or not, drag the company into virtualization, develop new services or applica-

tions, reconsider managed services versus in-house operations, and the rest

of the standard IT brouhaha. And now here comes this “little” data issue —

that’s about to get a whole lot bigger.

There’s already a bunch of sensitive stuff bouncing around the ether. It’s

estimated that 1 in 50 documents contain confidential and/or sensitive infor-

mation, given that we do everything by e-mail then: If we send a minimum 50

e-mails per day, an organization of some 20,000 strong will create over 10 mil-

lion sensitive e-mails a year, just waiting to be stolen. And there are between

35 and 60 billion e-mails sent worldwide — each day! That’s 700 million that

are sensitive every day (best-case scenario) — that’s 255 billion potential

targets per year for a skilled criminal (still best-case scenario). However you

look at it, this is a massive problem — and one that needs to be resolved.

Meanwhile, as individual users become an ever-larger source of information,

here come some more scary statistics . . . .

✓ Percentage of companies citing employees as the most likely source of

hacking: 77 percent.

✓ Annual growth rate of e-mail spam message traffic: about 350 percent

(estimated 2006).

✓ Average number of spam e-mails delivered every 30 days: 3.65 billion

(estimated 2006).

✓ Average size of an e-mail message in 2007 (estimated): 650 KB

✓ Percentage of all e-mail traffic that is unwanted: about 84 percent (esti-

mated 2006).

Even if 70 percent of the digital universe is generated by individuals, most of

this stuff will be handled along the way by an enterprise, businesses, public

services, governments and associations: could be on a laptop, USB key, CD,

phone, PDA, iPod via a network, stored in a data center, or a hosting site,

across wireless or IP network, or Internet switch, on some storage or even

more likely in a backup system. This means that organizations must take

responsibility for security, privacy, reliability, storage and compliance for an

estimated 85 percent of all the information. Or to convert to numbers, a mere

840 billion gigabytes of information.

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