Data Hung Out to Dry

Posted by Mark Brousseau

A new survey reveals that in the last year, 4,500 memory sticks have been forgotten in people’s pockets as they take their clothes to be washed at the local dry cleaners.

However, when compared with the same study twelve months ago, the number of these devices languishing forgotten in people’s pockets has halved, and yet it’s still a staggering number of possible data breaches.

However, the study sponsor, CREDANT Technologies, has a theory that this decline is likely to be a change in users’ habits as opposed to a significant breakthrough in people’s vigilance. In fact, its experience on the frontline of this battle is that users are now downloading information onto smartphones and netbooks, which have boomed in popularity in the last year, so although on the surface the decline looks promising in reality the situation has just been spread across a multitude of other devices.

Sean Glynn, vice president and chief marketing officer at Credant Technologies said “Although this study shows a positive drop in the number of lost memory sticks we would urge users to take more care than ever not to download unprotected customer details and other sensitive information that if lost could lead to a security breach, especially now there are harsh fines afoot.”

Concluding Sean Glynn said “This survey is just one illustration of the stark truth that device losses are happening everywhere, everyday, worldwide. Organizations want to leverage the business benefits of mobile computing and provide their employees the flexibility to work wherever and whenever they want to. However, this must be balanced with the requirement of protecting the organizations data. If sensitive or valuable data is being carried then people should protect it with encryption to prevent unauthorised access at any point - as it could easily end up in the wrong hands.”