Creating and fulfilling an information security policy

The reasons to have a comprehensive data policy are many and varied. Your data is your intellectual property, your company secrets and, in general, it is sensitive information that fraudsters, blackmailers and rivals would just love to get their hands on.

Your data is also likely to be entwined with information from your clients and trusted partners; the sort of people you need to keep happy, and not the sort of people you want to look like a haphazard fool in front of.

And yet data is compromised by senior people all the time: think of civil servants leaving suitcases full of secrets on trains, or — in the case of MPs and senior police officers — being snapped by photographers carrying wads of paper with important notes facing outwards for all to read.

Because of these and other high-profile cases, data loss is moving quickly from the realm of ‘silly mistake’ to that of ‘criminally negligent’, with punitive measures potentially being levelled at people who risk other people’s information.

For many organisations yet to update their security policies, file sharing currently looks like lots of employees — a mixture of senior and junior ones — with private logins to personal accounts uploading and firing off company data.

This presents a few problems: one is that this is totally uncontrollable. How many people are sending and receiving data on your behalf, who are they and who else has access to these channels?

Most scarily, what if someone leaves and decides to take all that data with them? The implications are mind-boggling and you won’t fully discover them until you read about the breach in the papers the next day.

An information security policy is vital, but so is practicing what you preach and creating a secure, official, company-wide conduit for transferring files between your people and your partners around the world.

By doing this you could avoid an embarrassing episode at best, a day in court at worst.

Things to consider:

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