Everyone from Walmart to my 10 year old nephew is using cloud computing. Small and mid-sized businesses see it as a great way to use the types of services that were only available to large organizations in the past. Large companies see it as a way to scale quickly and provide new services fast. My business runs completely in the cloud. Ten years ago this would have been impossible.
Businesses are taking advantage of filing sharing services from Onehub, DropBox, Egnyte, Box and others to share documents across PCs, Macs, smart phones and tablets. Evernote is a great service for sharing meeting notes and documents with colleagues. Numerous other services exist for collaborating with customers, business partners, development teams and anyone who needs access to information quickly and from any device. The cloud has become a big virtual file cabinet for most of us.
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Data breach headlines are almost becoming a cliché. Not a week goes by when I don’t read about people stealing information from a company or someone losing a confidential document. Just this week 435 credit card numbers and 1,175 social security numbers at the University of Maine and 1,007 online store transactions at the University of Arkansas computer store were compromised by hackers. This may not be as large as the 280,000 social security numbers stolen from the Utah Department of Health in April 2012, but it’s a big deal to those people affected.
The cases above were deliberate acts, but sometimes a data breach is unintentional. It could be as simple as an employee forgetting they had confidential documents on a USB flash drive and misplacing it. Or maybe someone accidentally emailed an HR spreadsheet with employee’s personal information to a friend. We all love email look ahead, but sometimes it can bite you.
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How often have you accidentally sent an email to the wrong person? If you’re lucky, there are no consequences other than apologizing for sending someone the wrong information. Unfortunately too often, there may be dire consequences. If you sent confidential company information to your competitor, that could be a big problem. You could be in legal and financial trouble.
Email is still the medium we use the most to communicate information to friends, coworkers, customers and business partners. It’s available on any platform and it becomes a default filing cabinet for many of us. Because of its ubiquity, a person with malicious intent can cause a lot of havoc by simply emailing sensitive information to themselves or a confederate.
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That almost sounds like the title to a bad movie, almost. In reality it’s a real problem today, since most of the important information inside any business is digital information. In the past, if you wanted to keep your secrets safe, you locked your filing cabinets or stored paper documents in a safe. Today, information is all over the place and in many forms. Someone leaving your company could walk out the door with the keys to the kingdom.
Much of our important information is either sitting in databases or documents. These may be on premise or in the cloud. Most of us think that if it’s in a database, we have it secured, but a lot of people run reports that export the data into regular spreadsheets or word processing documents.
But it’s not just what we think of as traditional documents. It’s also in presentations, videos, photographs, image and audio files. Just think about how damaging the tapes of conversations from the Nixon White House were during the Watergate scandal. It’s also email messages in your inbox and on email servers. Voicemails on your cellphone. Or it could be source code to your software product.
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Two pieces of legislation before the United States Congress are intended, according to its supporters, to prevent Internet piracy and protect freedom and American jobs. The Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are legislative responses to these threats. Unfortunately, rather than protecting intellectual property and jobs, they would in fact impose bad regulations on American businesses and censor the Internet as we know it.
The stated goal of these bills is to stop copyright infringement by foreign web sites. According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and other groups representing the music and film industries, piracy is rampant and is negatively affecting their businesses. They claim the only way to protect American jobs and businesses is with these measures.
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