Companies could place themselves at risk of legal
liabiliy if they take advantage of developments in data storage to
store every piece of data in their organisations,Art
Coviello, executive vice-president of EMC and
president of RSA, has said in a keynote address at theRSA London Conference.
Coviello appealed to companies to discover what data they have,
who is looking at it and what they are doing with it, and to
classify data and users before they store data.
He said this was essential to be able identify the highest-value
data in the organisation, to protect it adequately, to use it more
effectively, and to reduce information "clutter". It would also cut
the risk of creating information honeypots for
data thieves, he said. "Top secret, internal consumption only,
and publically available should be enough to start with," Coviello
said.
"Just as there is a legal ecosystem in which we operate, the
criminal community has a parallel illegal one," he said.
Firms have to develop and monitor policies and processes for
data management to stop unauthorised access and use of the
information, he said.
