Cyclope-Series Team Blog

Considering the continuously evolution of technology, businesses are now able to track lots of information about customers, prospects, employees, competitors etc. But, as every good thing is most probably followed by a bad (or at least less good) thing, along with those data gathering capabilities the concern for privacy, safety and security has also increased.

Now, there are a set of questions that rise up in a manager’s mind: What kinds of information does your business gather and use? Who has access to these data? What might it be used for? These are normal questions that have to be answered by every manager interested in having a healthy and stable business by preventing confidential information from leaving the company. When consumers, employees or partners give you personal information they must be assured that you will use it accurately and responsibly. And beyond that, you must also comply with a wide range of privacy protection rules and regulations.

Data breach is one of the biggest security headaches for companies today. In this respect, companies invest millions of dollars in systems that assure protection against outside threats. Unfortunately, most of the companies often do little or nothing to protect against internal threats and data leaks which seems to be the larger problem. While some internal threats are created maliciously, many of them are totally unintentional. Still, this does not change the situation at all: both of these present a large security hole that needs to be stopped.

Employees are the most valuable resource a company has. Employees are the ones who make the business stand up but they are also the ones who can bring you in front of unpleasant events. If employees are not motivated enough to do their job the entire company has to suffer.  That’s why beside the regular HR tasks managers have, an important issue is how to prevent employee theft and data leakage. In order to eliminate security risks in organization, the most common managers’ approach is employee monitoring. A common mistake managers make is to rely on the fact that the employees have been educated in this respect, privacy policy has been created, confidentiality agreement has been signed, and that’s all. Well, surveys have shown that this is not enough. There is a need for monitoring these policies enforcement. By monitoring the applications, the documents, the e-mails each employee or department accessed, it will be much easier to prevent data theft and if this still happen, to determine the responsible for this.

Shocking statistics reveal that breaches caused by insider theft are going up dramatically. Insider-theft breaches doubled in 2008 versus 2007. Considering the current economical situation this is not good news at all. Still, I wonder if the recession will fuel more insider-theft breaches during 2009. For now, there are thousands of millions of records that have been compromised this year due to security breaches, not to mention the number of individuals affected. This is why managers have to understand that knowing the ins and outs of privacy protection is vital to your business. If your business shows that you understand and protect privacy, your customers will want to do business with you. Otherwise, you can expect to a slow, but certain “death” of your business.

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