Ray Ozzie pointed recently to security issues when computers are interconnected. You can check his weblog or the commentary he wrote for CNET News.com (dated August 14, 2002).
Even technology magazines like buzzwords. This is why CNET News.com published his comments with the title "The myth of cybersecurity" while ZDNET (which belongs to CNET Networks Inc.) used the title "Tech's 'dirty little secret' -- cybersecurity."
I guess you can see a trend: cybersecurity.
Of course, I agree with Ray Ozzie. We must do something to protect our data. The technical solutions exist and are neither expensive nor difficult to put at work.
But I want to point out that there also are many security issues involved because our computers are not connected.
As Bob Brennan wrote (also for CNET Networks Inc.), "There are two types of companies. Those that have already experienced a serious data loss and those that will."
Let's look at some statistics provided in this article.
At every company, from the smallest SoHo to the Global 2000, an estimated *60 percent of vital data is stored on individual PCs, with little or no protection (*source: IDC analyst report). Even more staggering, according to another recent IDC report, the data on as many as 299 million business PCs is currently left unprotected.
In addition, according to Gartner Group statistics, the rate of failure for laptops is as high as 15-20 percent per year and every year 30 percent of all PCs are lost or stolen. When a laptop PC fails, user productivity can be halted for days until it’s restored.
Furthermore, the total cost of ownership for a PC now has companies spending $6,000-$12,000 a year to keep a single computer operational. With mobile computing on the rise, IT staffs are facing heightened pressure to provide support solutions for remote workers. Without the PC (whether lost, stolen, or compromised by a virus or corrupted file), employees are unproductive and companies inevitably lose money.
The lesson is clear: communications can be spied on, that's right. But laptops are lost or stolen, files are written on computers but never uploaded to servers (and not saved or 'backuped'), you name it.
So we have security problems when we are networked, and we have data protection problems when they are not.
I guess that security consultants still have busy days in front of them.
Source: Bob Brennan, Special to ZDNet, August 13, 2002
5:41:36 PM
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