This summer has seen a great number of data breaches all over the world. Some of these are high profile, like Epson Korea and the rash of Sony hacks. Some are small, like an incident in Louisiana where copies of confidential documents were found on a city street. And some just make you shake your head, like the play book of the Green Bay Packers being scattered all over the street.
46 states in the US have data breach notification laws that address when personally identifiable information (PII) is breached. Many countries outside the US have data breach notification and security laws that cover similar circumstances, with some of the strongest in the EU. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, since 2005 there have been about 2600 data breaches made public affecting 535 million records – the real numbers may be higher, since laws differ on when to notify affected customers.
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This week has seen some severe weather and upheaval in the eastern part of the United States and the Caribbean. On August 23, a 5.8 earthquake hit just outside of Washington DC. People felt the shocks from Florida to Maine. While this is nothing new to people in southern California, it’s a bit uncommon in New York and Baltimore.
This weekend a major hurricane is bearing down on the same region. The Bahamas got hammered and the National Weather Service is predicting Hurricane Irene to bring high winds, lots of rain and big problems from the Carolinas up to New England. While people and businesses near the coast start boarding up windows and evacuating, everyone is worrying about what will happen.
Businesses are worried if they will be able to operate after the storm passes. As seen with major flooding near the Mississippi River in the spring of 2011, natural disasters can cause major havoc with a business’ information and operations.
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One of the problems of all of our newfangled portable devices is that they are very easy to misplace or steal. How many times have you accidentally left your phone or laptop somewhere? It’s even worse with iPads and Android tablets. Just last week I heard over an airport PA that someone left a laptop at the TSA security area. These things are so small and light we forget about them if we’re not using them.
Since I use so many devices, I use Dropbox to sync files between them. They have apps for my MacBook, my PC, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices. But Dropbox also has a great feature to help you locate your device. Whenever you turn on the device, the application syncs to Dropbox and records the last IP address of the device.
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Everyone loves paper. It’s everywhere. We print ink on it. We read words on it. We draw pictures on it. We wrap food in it. Unfortunately we also seem to cling to it for our business processes.
It amazes me how many times I do business that involves paper documents. Don’t get me wrong, paper still has a lot of great value for certain things, but moving it around as part of a business process isn’t one of them. In today’s world, typing, printing, reading, signing, scanning, faxing and filing paper documents is slow, cumbersome and fraught with a lot of risk.
Document management systems have been around for over 30 years. They began as simple repositories for scanned images and then for electronic documents. Back in those days it was common for people to create documents with typewriters, with offset printing techniques or write them by hand. Today every document is created on a computer.
Since business documents start on a computer, why not keep them electronic throughout a business process?
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Everyone from my kids to my mother and business partners is embracing cloud computing. Small and medium businesses are going at it like gangbusters. Large companies are moving slowly, but just about everyone is looking to move some of their operations into the cloud.
My business runs almost exclusively in the cloud. It’s true that we have desktops, laptops, smart phones and tablets, but all our important information lives in the cloud. I use DropBox, OneHub, DocuSign, Freshbooks, GMail, EverNote, Skype and a host of other services.
Before using any computing system, we have to decide what information is sensitive and what is not. And should we put those documents and pieces of information into a cloud-based service?
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