Thieves within the Business

One of the major concerns for businesses is data breach. Iron Mountain's Senior Vice President stated that they are focusing on monitoring data breach from the outside, but the real problem is from inside of the organisation and its employees.

A study lead by the information management company Iron Mountain, states that more than 30% of the 2,000 European office workers surveyed had confessed to forwarding or taking confidential information, and almost 15% had taken confidential information to a new job. And to top it off, one third of them said that if they were fired they would delete or/and share confidential information.

Peter Eglinton form Iron Mountain, stated that "You can see who's hacking in and taking information, but people don't leave a trail," he added that "Therefore, if you don't have good policies in place, it's very difficult to work out what has happened with information."

He continued to state that "HR or finance will have an awful lot of access to very sensitive information," and that "Sales and marketing will have access to customer data, and some of the service organizations will have a lot of information about their patients or their customers."

Half of the employees who admitted to taking confidential information to their new job said that they had the right to take information as they were involved creating the information.

Eglinton: "The information you create in your daily work doesn't belong to you because you created it, it belongs to the organization that's paying you to do that job."

The study also showed that the majority of those who took database information gave it  to their new employers and were then added to the new customer database. But what can businesses do to protect their data? Solutions can range from encryption software to tracking files across multiple sites which are all offered by information management companies.

What is your opinion on taking confidential information from an organisation?