Monday, July 07, 2008

Don't worry about losing your laptop.

I've received two letters in the past year from former employers alerting me that they had lost a computer that contained some of my confidential information. Apparently, I'm not alone - according to a Dell survey, 12,000 laptops are lost at airports alone every week. Over 50% of those laptops are purported to have sensitive corporate data on them. The vast majority of these lost laptops are never reunited with their owners.

I'm surprised that so many corporate Information Security teams place so much faith in the ability of their users to safeguard important corporate information. Individual employees shouldn't be solely responsible for guarding important information. The bulk of that burden should be left to security professionals.

Corporate InfoSec teams should be using SaaS applications to house a lot more of their sensitive data than they are currently. The InfoSec professionals employed by SaaS vendors are much more skilled at protecting data than the average employee is and by using SaaS applications, confidential data isn't stored on individual employee computers and therefore can't be lost. Don't worry about losing your laptop - use SaaS applications instead.

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