Where is your information right now?
Aug 26th, 2020 by Jesper Kråkhede
A simple question for management after five months of working from home: Where is your company´s most sensitive information right now?
Before March you probably thought you knew. It was on the file servers, in the business systems and maybe on a few laptops. Since then your staff have been downloading, sharing and printing from their kitchen tables. Some of it is on private computers. Some of it is in cloud services that IT never approved, because people needed to collaborate and found a way.
I´m not blaming anyone. People did what they had to do to keep the business running. But the information is out there now, and the policies written for an office don´t follow it home.
This is why I keep saying that classification must have a technical component. It is the only thing that follows the information. A policy in the intranet doesn´t.
So, ask your security department three things. Do we know what our most sensitive information is? Do we know where it is? And is it protected by something more than a rule in a document?
If the answers are no, that is your next investment, not another firewall.
You can´t protect what you can´t find.