In times of economic downturn organisations are having to be doubly wary about laying people off. Not only do you lose important company history as the people walk out of the door – you may lose your database as well.

Everyone who has been with an organisation for some time will have knowledge of an organisation. How it works, the ins and outs of who does business with whom – their minds a veritable database of your business. And some may feel justified in taking the bits they don’t know personally or can’t remember at any rate.

So if you don’t want your company business to become another company’s business you may want to secure your information before culling your workers….

Most fired workers steal data on way out the door, survey shows

Most fired workers steal data on way out the door, survey shows
Symantec-sponsored Ponemon survey finds that 59% of respondents took data with them
By Ellen Messmer

February 23, 2009 (Network World) A survey of 945 individuals who were laid off, fired or quit their jobs in the past 12 months shows that 59% admitted to stealing company data and 67% used their former company’s confidential information to leverage a new job.

That’s according to the “Jobs at Risk = Data at Risk” survey published Monday by Ponemon Institute LLC. The research firm found that 61% of respondents who felt negatively about the company took data, while only 26% of those with a favorable view did. Only 31% of those surveyed said they had “trust” in their former employer to “act with integrity and fairness,” 25% were “unsure” and 44% did not have trust.

Of the respondents, 37% said they were asked to leave, 38% said they had found a new job and 21% moved on because they anticipated layoffs.

The respondents described their work roles as 20% corporate IT; 10% financial and accounting; 24% sales; and 8% marketing and communications, with the remainder spread across fields that include general management, logistics and transportation, research and development, and human resources. They came from close to two dozen vertical industries, such as manufacturing, health care, education and government.

“There are many tragic scenarios now where people are under tremendous pressure,” said Kevin Rowney, founder of the data-loss-prevention division at Symantec Corp., which sponsored the survey because it wanted more insight into the data-theft problem.

Rowney said he personally knows of a bank where employees on the day they were laid off all tried to grab corporate information about high-worth individuals, thinking it could help them in the future.

According to the survey, e-mail-related information and hardcopy files were the most popular types of documents to walk away with. Least popular were making off with PDFs, accessing database files or stealing source code outright. Thefts were carried out by simply walking out with paper documents or by transferring data onto a CD, DVD or USB memory stick, or sending documents out as e-mail attachments to a personal e-mail account.

Some admitted they knew taking information was wrong, but 79% who admitted to taking the data offered various reasons why they did so. They said the information might be useful in the future and said such comments as “everyone else does” and “the company can’t trace the information back to me.”

Rowney said he believes a lot of this behavior is “emotional in a time of stress” rather than “sneaking individuals” carefully plotting a data heist over months. “A lot is in the heat of the moment, people make unwise decisions,” he added.

Surprisingly, 24% of the survey respondents said they still had access to their former employer’s computer systems after they left, with over 50% of them saying that the access continued for between a day and a week, and 20% said it lasted for more than a week.

While Rowney acknowledged that “there is no silver bullet” to prevent all thefts of paper documents and electronic data, he said there are many steps that companies can take to use technology and enforce clearly defined data-protection policies to prevent a lot of the problems.

I’m still not convinced about the longevity of anything electronics based – if we are talking “LONG TERM” archiving that is, and please don’t get me started on permanent retention and disposal of electronic records. Permanent so long as the software doesn’t change, permananet so long as you keep everything live and migrate it across the platforms…..

But what about cloud computing?

On a personal note, I do use the cloud as a backup to my land based backup processes – they can’t all go out of business on the same day – or maybe I shouldn’t say that….

Iron Mountain aims cloud-based storage service at inactive data

Iron Mountain aims cloud-based storage service at inactive data
Off-site storage vendor adds Virtual File Store service for archiving static data files
By Lucas Mearian

February 23, 2009 (Computerworld) Iron Mountain Inc. today announced a cloud-based storage service for data backup as part of its digital archiving and storage-as-a-service offerings.

The new Virtual File Store (VFS), offered through the Boston-based vendor’s Iron Mountain Digital division, is being pitched as an enterprise-class archiving service that gives users a lower-cost means of storing and managing static data files than keeping them on in-house systems does.

John Clancy, president of Iron Mountain Digital, said in a statement that the online storage service is targeted at the “50% to 60% of corporate data” that is inactive.

“Storing all that data in-house is not a sustainable storage strategy for companies today that are faced with soaring storage costs and shrinking IT budgets,” Clancy claimed. He added that VFS can free up “precious storage resources” for users while ensuring that archived data is secure and easily accessible if needed for electronic discovery or other purposes.

Elliott Townsend, IT manager at Bruns-Pak Corp. in Edison, N.J., said as part of Iron Mountain’s announcement that the data center design and construction services firm is currently using VFS along with Iron Mountain Digital’s LiveVault service for backing up server data. The combination gives Bruns-Pak “an extremely robust and cost-effective disaster recovery solution,” Townsend said.

Iron Mountain said VFS offers virtually unlimited storage capacity and can be integrated with a company’s existing storage infrastructure to migrate inactive files to the vendor’s data centers over a VPN. Authorized users can then retrieve files on an on-demand basis via a secure Internet connection, and applications can be set to automatically access data as needed.

The new service is priced on a gigabyte-per-month fee that factors in the length of retention time as well as the amount of data being stored, according to Iron Mountain. But representatives of the company were unable to give specific cost information today.