5 Million And Counting

The White House has lost 5 million emails which is a pretty impressive feat. More worrying is that there is confusion over what is there, what isn’t, and who is responsible. If this had been a company then they would have been hauled up in front of a judge and forced to answer diffcult questions, however governments are a different story and seem to operate on their own rules. When it comes to data loss a government does have a reputation, but there isn’t the competition - you can’t choose to pay your taxes to country X… however it is up to a government to set a standard and precedent which will give give its citizens confidence that, if nothing else, they can look after your information.

Perhaps it is time to have a watchdog for governments and information protection?

May 9, 2008 | Filed Under Compliance, Reputation, data-loss | Leave a Comment 

Technology & Regulations: Which Leads, Which Lags?

One great question I was asked during my talk at the Affärsvärlden Bank & Finans Outlook 2008 Conference, was whether the technology to help with compliance and governance was ahead of the regulations or behind.

This is a tough one to answer, primarily because the regulations are always changing. However, from 30,000 feet, the story is the same, you need to be able to prove that you say what you do, and that you do all you can to {protect customer data | ensure that systems are secure | prevent fraud | etc}. To this ends, the technology is there to help with compliance and you can automate a lot of it. Patch management of systems, followed by auditing which ones are up-to-date and which are not can be tedious in the extreme if you don’t have the technology to help. Not to mention the management and monitoring of updates to applications, endpoint protection and password strength checks, the list is (almost) endless. Technology helps and the other big benefit is that you can get a view onto your IT infrastructure and its compliance at any time - not just when the auditors are knocking on the door.

So, if you are looking at compliance, or are just getting into IT governance, look around at the tools available to make it as painless as possible.

April 29, 2008 | Filed Under Compliance, Regulation | Leave a Comment