The Daily Telegraph, a UK newspaper, has just reported on some research done by the Ponemon Institute for Dell computers. The research has found that in a year about 800,000 laptops are either lost or stolen at airports all over the world. Shocking numbers, consider how many of these laptops contain sensitive information which is now totally out of the owner’s control.
The research highlights some scary statistics. In the US about 12,000 laptops go missing each week, 10% within Los Angeles. When asking the travelers if they took any steps to protect their content they found nearly 60% admitted no protection around their confidential information.
How do you protect against losing such devices? You may have encrypted the hard disk, but what if in the laptop bag the sensitive documents resided on non-encrypted USB drives or CDs and DVDs? Are you able to protect these storage devices? DLP products might be able to destroy the copies of the documents, but it needs some form of remote access to the laptop to issue the self destruct commands. These laptops might be powered up without internet access and the content stolen. The report is doing the rounds with other news websites that are suggesting varying methods on how to solve the problem and the issue of laptop theft has been in the press for many years.
Of course, I’m leading to the use of information rights management as the best solution. Not only would IRM ensure the documents were encrypted and access to them denied once the laptops and related devices are lost, but the responsibility for protecting the information doesn't need to rely on the end user. Deploying IRM and integrating with the content management systems, network file storage servers and also providing users with pre-sealed document templates ensures that content is correctly classified and protected without placing a burden on the end user make that decision.
We obviously use Oracle IRM within the company and a few years ago we had someone lose a laptop at an airport (Don't worry Mark, I won't name and shame... oops). Our response was simple, we disabled his Windows account credentials and temporarily revoked his rights to content on the IRM server whilst we sorted out new account details and reset passwords. We were safe in the knowledge that all the important documents on that laptop were secure.
If you want to learn more about how this technology can help you protect your organizations content either contact your Oracle sales representative or email us and we can give you access to our easy to use online evaluation system.
Comments (1)
this is just because of lack of security that such huge amount of loss is happening in just one week.
Posted by refurbished computers | June 22, 2009 1:49 AM
Posted on June 22, 2009 01:49