It’s amazing the amount of discussions there are on how to secure information in the cloud when we are walking around with sensitive information on a portable hard drive, maybe even a USB stick!
There have been two cases recently of lost personal information one was information pertaining to Canadian students and the other in April 2013, the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization (IIROC) admitted that the personal information of 52,000 clients from dozens of investment firms had equally been compromised.
Remember the UK HM Revenue and Customs that lost computer discs containing the entire child benefit records, including the personal details of 25 million people – covering 7.25 million families overall in 2007. There are loads of reported cases and probably many more unreported!
OK so how do we solve this? According to Daniel Horovitz it is about security awareness and policies that are enforced. With this I concur with completely. However I am also thinking that if no personal data was stored on any local device anywhere, that it was all web-enabled, private cloud, shared cloud. It would bring closer the BYOD device movement, and surely it must be safer than a mobile HD? Clearly security awareness and policy enforcement is essential, but it still does not seem to be working. If it was then these incidents would not be happening.