With the majority of banks and other financial institutions maintaining a very tight grip on their lending purse strings, most corporates are having to justify each additional request for IT expenditure they make.
At the same time, corporate IT managers are under significant pressure – either from their boards or other senior management, including investor sources – to justify their current security expenditures in the face of continuing shareholder scrutiny on all expenses.
Whilst historical evidence suggests that IT security has been an essential part of the necessary investment aspect of business for a number of years, there are signs that IT budgets generally are being cut in the face of the current economic situation.
Data leaks and losses – the main result of poor IT security – have, unfortunately, been with us since the earliest days of PCs in the 1980s.
But the good news is that solutions to data leaks and losses have been available to PC users since the mid-1980s – as leakage and loss risks were discovered, so the industry developed an increasing range of sophisticated solutions.
The arrival of the Internet as a mass communications medium in the late 1990 changed the ballgame significantly, however and even the best security technologies of the period – and security best practices – could not prevent a raft of data leaks and losses occurring.
The net result of these losses was the development of a number of laws designed to penalise those organisations that failed to implement best practices and policies on data leaks and losses, as well as enforcing those policies using relevant security technologies.
The plethora of legislation that seeks to prevent data leaks and losses in UK organisations include the Data Protection Act and, or course, where the company is trading with the US organisation, there is the Sarbanes Oxley Act.
But are organisations adhering to the requirements of this legislation? Read the full whitepaper
