Network Security News

Both human beings and corporations can be very conservative in terms of accepting the current state of security situation. Inside, many companies do not accept how severe could be consequences of information leaked out due to inadequate security precautions. It also gets worse with the amount of documents growing rapidly. This is elaborated in ZDNet blogs' IT Security: Context is King.

The article goes: one of the big blockers for enterprise collaboration uptake is ediscovery and compliance - and depending on the business entity the familiarity, processes and confidence in dealing with legal issues. This is a broad topic, but you can simplify it down into two broad camps: companies that are set up for regular subpoena around information and those that aren’t. This latter group tend to be the more paranoid of the two, having read and heard of terrifyingly short time frames to trawl through all electronically stored information (ESI) - email, documents, databases, instant messages, voice mail - before the legal clock hits zero and the discovery is picked over by eagle eyed lawyers.

Again oversimplifying, there are fundamentally two types of data: structured, meaning tracked through processes (in theory) and relatively easily rolled up into a format that can be searched and analyzed for the above legal activity, and unstructured, which can be less easily retrievable.

For businesses who are geared up for legal activity, such as banks and pharmaceutical companies, there is little mystery to all this: it’s all part of the processes and cost of doing business. However, large swathes of business are not equipped for this type of activity, hoping legal action will never happen to them, and often have already overstretched IT departments also responsible for protecting intellectual property and compliance.

The problem is there are no universal solutions for this problem. On one side, information must be quickly and reliably available to all the authorized users. On the other hand, the amount of information and interconnections between its streams beget severe technical problems: there must be reliable, safe and secure means to store, find and access growing amount of documents, from email messages to the complex presentations/whatever kind of documents used in every given case. The task of creating associative links and monitoring their validity should also be solved efficiently, otherwise it would take unacceptably much time to find required pieces of data.

Along with growing variety of modern Net-related risks, from social engineering-based to pure network bugs and design flaws, it would make the task of maintaining solid information database hardly solvable, unless the infrastructure, policy and people expertise in IT are all adequate.

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