Friday, August 17, 2007

Is all Data created equal?

How many places do you have data stored? Excluding the data you have residing on servers, what about the data you have stored on your personal devices?

You may have multiple data stores. Your laptop of course, your PDA, mobile phone, USB sticks and removable hard drives. Any more?

In most organisations, “corporate” data, such as accounting information and even email, is secured, protected and managed for back-up.

So, are your spreadsheets and presentations any less valuable to you? The business won't stop trading if they are lost, but what about your productivity? What would happen if they were all lost tomorrow? Are you relying on email as your archive?

This raises three questions
1. What is the security and protection for data on mobile devices, if they are lost or stolen?
2. What is the back-up process for this data?
3. Should this data (documents) be treated differently to other data (accounting)? If so, is that explicit in policy?

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