Contributing Editorial: Data Breach Laws Go Coast-to-Coast

By Jerome M Wendt and Howard Haile DCIG LLC

Imagine this scenario, you are sitting in your office enjoying your morning coffee when you are called into an emergency meeting and told that a backup tape containing customer's personally identifiable information has been lost. How you react to this revelation is obviously based on what steps, if any, you have previously taken to protect the customer information of your company's clients. So do you calmly notify everyone that all backup tapes are encrypted and thus customer information is safe and your company is not at risk? Or do you start checking websites to find out what the criminal and financial penalties are for storing unencrypted customer information on tape?

Companies do not consciously make decisions to lose money, lose customers, or hurt shareholder value, but if they are not taking the proactive data security step of encrypting your data at rest on backup tapes that is exactly what they are doing. Companies are quickly finding out that taking the proper steps to encrypt data at rest is much cheaper than the alternative.