Endpoint Protection

The Information Commisioners Office (ICO) or the privacy watchdog has published figures on data breaches that makes disturbing reading. What’s more is that the ICO  is getting so concerned that it will be introducing fines on comapnies and public bodies that recklessly or deliberately break the rules. Fines up to half a million may be imposed on losses of information. In total, 434 organisations reported data security breaches in the past 12 months, up from 277 the year before. This is what Deputy information commissioner David Smith said: “The majority of organisations get data protection right, but regrettably a significant minority of management teams are failing to take data protection seriously enough. Unacceptable amounts of data are being stolen, lost in transit or mislaid by staff. Far too much personal data is still being unnecessarily downloaded from secure servers on to unencrypted laptops, USB sticks, and other portable media.”

Well what a surprise! But what is really interesting and scary is that there are fines coming! But I thought that if you breached the Data Protection Act then you would be fined or sued anyway. However, what is clear is that this affects all businesses; large or small; SMB or large multinationals. So Data Loss Prevention is for all organisations that have personal data stored but it is not sufficient to just use device control, the ICO is saying any data loss from any channel! So does that mean that first generation products that really only do encryption and device control will be replaced by the second generation products that provide device, IM, and all the goodies? I think this is a call to action for vendors to smarten up their act and work with others to gain functionality rather than buy and try to integrate. You can read some more here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8354655.stm