Big Data, Bigger Security Risks: How IT Asset Tracking Can Help

• In April 2012, Canada’s Toronto-Dominion Bank, disclosed a security problem of its own making — the loss of 260,000 customers’ data on two server back-up tapes that went missing.
• In February 2012, Emory Healthcare lost ten computer disks containing encrypted personal information on more than 300,000 patients.
• In 2011, backup tapes containing military and beneficiary medical data was stolen from the Department of Defense, resulting in a $4.9 billion class action lawsuit.
• In 2009, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee paid $1.5 million settlement and spent $17 in corrective action after losing 57 hard drives containing data on more than one million customers due to a burglary.

Internal Security Threat on the Rise

These are just a few of the hundreds, even thousands, of data security breaches caused, not by external forces, but by companies’ own internal negligence — including misplaced, lost and stolen devices on which the data is stored.

Companies are spending billions of dollars to fight the threat of cybercrime by deploying processes to keep hackers out of their systems and away from their data. Meanwhile, many of today’s most damaging security breaches occur from within.

This internal security threat is every bit as serious, if not as sensational, as external threats — and comes with the same high cost regulatory penalties, lawsuits, and PR nightmares.

Device Tracking Technology Boosts Security

In today’s world of sophisticated technology, the public wonders: How can a company misplace a critical device containing customers’ private data?

Worse, the explosion of big data in today’s corporations is only going to make the issue of securing data internally even more challenging — and critical.

For a deeper dive, on the topic, please download “Big Data. Bigger Security Risks. How Data Centers Can Track, Manage, and Secure Data With Dedicated Asset Tracking Networks” today.