TotalCIO » security concerns

CIO lights up Olympics with green tech innovation

Karen Goulart — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 16:44:23 +0000

Every four years, it’s the same thing. We sit and watch the summer Olympics in awe of human physical potential and our minds begin to wander. What if we’d kept up those swimming lessons? If only we didn’t dump track for the school newspaper. Then we come back to reality, pop open another soda and wonder how those divers can be so darn synchronized. But Olympic-loving readers, take heart — CIOs can shine in the summer games.

Leading off this week’s roundup, from our sister site SearchCIO-Midmarket.com, we have a CIO whose gold medal-worthy green tech innovation is truly energizing London’s Olympic Park. Also, read about how speeding to market with software could kill a trading firm, and read about the CIO’s role in IT transformation.

As chronicled on the SearchCIO-Midmarket.com blog, CIO Symmetry, the CIO of the London summer games scored big, lighting up Olympic Park with green tech innovation. And he didn’t even have to put on a Speedo.

Speed is great for sprinters and the like but can be downright dangerous for makers of stock-trading software. Perhaps Wall Street’s third stock-trading fiasco in five months will drive home this point.

Winning by changing the rules doesn’t sound very sportsmanlike. Unless we’re talking victory over network hackers — then by all means we ought to hear out the argument for changing the rules of writing code.

Think social collaboration is a frivolous pursuit? Perhaps this bar graph can convince you otherwise.

Finally, be sure to check out this week’s CIO Matters column, in which SearchCIO.com’s Editorial Director Scot Petersen looks at the role of the CIO in the midst of IT transformation.

Social media tips and other helpful lists

Karen Goulart — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 07:30:34 +0000

The Late Show Top 10, Billboard’s Hot 100 — everybody loves a good list. (Except, perhaps, those of the “to-do” variety.) To help satisfy that hankering for digestible order, this week’s roundup includes three lists, each offering tips on a different topic: data integration, social media tips for the novice Tweeter and the admittedly hyperbolic sounding, “6 Most Important Bits of Advice for CIOs.” We’ll let you be the judges on that last one. Drum roll, please.

This top 10 list on best practices for data integration is pretty lacking in the joke department, and there’s no celebrity/politician reading it to you, but we bet Letterman never taught you a thing about data management discipline.
We’re not sure these are the “6 most important bits of advice for CIOs,” but they do make a nice refresher checklist.
A little bird told us you’re not so good with the Twitter. Before everyone else finds out and assigns you embarrassing hash tags, check out these four tips on becoming a 140-character-thought leader.
Think all that Twitter and social media stuff is silly? Bayer’s MaterialScience CIO Kurt De Ruwe would beg to differ.
And finally, an insightful take from the trenches on how the antivirus industry failed in the face of Flame and Stuxnet.

Data loss statistics: Emerging culprits

Christina Torode — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:37:50 +0000

Many of the technologies businesses rely on to create new services, make workers more productive and serve customers better are the ones most likely to lead to data loss, according to data loss statistics gathered by a recent security study from IT industry association CompTIA.

The “leading culprit” is data in motion, according to the online survey of 1,183 IT and business executives involved in setting security policies for their organization. In other words, all that data being accessed through unsecured Wi-Fi networks, sent through unencrypted emails, and downloaded to USB drives or websites is putting organizations at risk.

Among the 52% of the organizations that reported a data loss in the last 12 months, 65% said that confidential corporate financial data was lost, 52% said that confidential employee data was leaked, 27% reported losing confidential customer data, 26% lost corporate intellectual property, and 21% suspect data loss but couldn’t identify what was lost, according to the data loss statistics.

Still, context is everything. When compared to the growth in the use of social networking, security risks associated with social networking are pretty low, CompTIA argues. The association quickly pointed out, however, that security risks will rise because of malware, social engineering and data mining on such sites.

As for cloud computing, the top three security concerns included downtime, loss of data during transfers to the cloud and a lack of data encryption.

Those surveyed also had “serious concerns” (48%) about employees downloading unauthorized apps to mobile devices, theft or loss of corporate mobile devices (42%), and risks when using open Wi-Fi networks (41%).

The IT and business executives didn’t specify the types of recent data loss prevention tools they have in place or the ones they are considering, but they did share their response strategies for data loss prevention:

Implement encryption policies for data stored on mobile or portable devices.
Create a stricter separation between work and personal communications.
Reinforce acceptable user policies for mobile devices.
Reinforce or create corporate policies governing the sharing of proprietary information on blogs, forums or social networks.
Further compartmentalize sensitive corporate data to ensure that only need-to-know employees have access.

Let us know what you think about this blog post; email: Christina Torode, News Director