It’s the end of the day. Your company’s 900 workers are filing out of the office after a productive eight hours. Numbers were crunched, proposals pitched and hands shaken, and now they are going home, secure in the knowledge that the fruits of their labour are safely stored on electronic media.
You, however, are not quite so sanguine. Tasked with ensuring the integrity of corporate data, you know from experience that most of those 900 saved their work only to their own hard drives, ignoring requests to save to your backed-up and secure network drives, and that every once in a while one of them will click on an e-mailed crack that will merrily chew its way through your company’s most precious resource – its data.
Sure, you tell yourself, the majority of employees only have 15GB of storage residing on their desks. Some firms run to bigger drives, some smaller, but you’re sitting right at the industry-average 15GB. That means if a user looses his or her own data, at least it’s only a small slice of the corporate pie.
That’s the upside. The downside is 15GB is a lot of spreadsheets, database records and business reports, and those ones and zeros represent valuable corporate assets.
Individually, those vulnerabilities are sufficient to keep you wide-eyed at night. Collectively, they represent a situation that is not going to get better any time soon.