Every day, someone from some company is compromising your data security. Sensitive data is leaking out through your corporate firewalls and, to be honest, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to stop the flood. Whether data leakage is intentional or not there are just far too many leaks in the dam and not enough fingers to plug all the holes. These leaks existed long before the Internet and long before technology came along to supposedly enhance our work lives. Who is responsible for all these data leaks? You and your fellow employees are responsible, unintentional or not.
We bring our work and laptops home with us, talk on the phone, email, instant message, print, fax, and regularly make backup copies of all the important documents. We gossip with our friends and regularly network with employees who have long since left to a competitor. There are even tools such as Linked-In, Plaxo, Spoke, and others that make it quite simple for us to stay in touch with virtually everyone we have ever had contact with during our careers. If you think you aren’t culpable and that you alone are the sole person who has never leaked sensitive information, just what did you do with all that sensitive data when you switched careers and went to the competitor? Did you burn everything, destroy all documentation and data? I suppose you have also wiped all memory from your brain too. Let’s face it, the flood gates have been open for far too long.
The point I make is that you can spend inordinate amounts of capital investing in vendor solutions that promise the world and deliver on very little or you can get real. You can get real about what can be reasonably protected without over spending on technology because no matter how many tiny holes you fill to stop data leakage somehow it still manages to leak out. Perhaps building in-line email security solutions first to plug the biggest security hole of all makes more sense than creating alternate solutions to stop behaviors we absolutely can’t control.