Policy Issues

Last week's Systems Management Pipeline Poll asked if your organization has the security tools and policies in place to sufficiently protect your customer, employee, and other confidential enterprise data, and unfortunately, the answer was largely no. Given the number of high-profile incidents and the expectation that pending legislation will hold more businesses responsible for compromised data, the fact that only one-third of the respondents said they have both sufficient security tools and policies in place to guard customer data is more than a little alarming. Businesses simply cannot afford to leave confidential customer data exposed.One of the biggest gaps seems to actually come from the lack of effective polices. Half of the poll respondents said they had good security tools in place but lacked effective policies for the prevention of data thefts. Simply put, the best security tools in the world are useless if the organization doesn't implement effective policies related to things like access.

Only eight percent said their policies were fine but their security tools were lacking. That same number said both their tools and policies were sub-par. Clearly business and IT need to get on the same page here to not only deploy the right data protection technologies but also to set and execute the appropriate policies.