Are You an Information Security Risk?

How Big a Risk to Information Security do you Pose to your Organization?  Take the fun quiz here to find out.

Each week the local, national and international news report significant incidents where information has been lost due to seemingly casual incidents of carelessness. For example, the loss of portable devices such as memory sticks, mobile phones, tablets and laptops. Although we fear digital threats to data security or the risk of devices being stolen, the greatest threats to information security include leaving devices unattended or forgetting them.

Organizations are increasing data security by implementing information technology and information systems to maintain centralized data storage and data access through corporate information systems. This reduces the need for staff to store data locally on personal desktop computers or personal mobile devices. However, limitations of corporate systems such as processing and network speeds are a cause frustration, encouraging staff to store local copies of data.

In addition, the ability and pressure to work outside normal work hours and away from the organizational environment offers many advantages and disadvantages. For example, an employee may plan to complete a report when they get home in the evening. The employee may be able to gain remote access to the data they need stored in organizational information systems via their home Internet connection. However, there is always a risk that the Internet connection or external systems may not be available due to unforeseen circumstances. The simplest solution is therefore to take a copy of the data home to work on which can then be uploaded to corporate systems the next day. Many people adopt this approach every day but in removing data from the organization’s premises, the data are being put at risk and the organization’s data security policies may be being breached.

Take the following test to find out how big a potential security risk you pose to your organization.

Further Reading: data security is discussed in Chapter 5.

Please use the following to reference this blog post in your own work:
Cox, S. A., (2014), ‘Are You an Information Security Risk?’, 18 July 2014, http://www.managinginformation.org/information-security-risk/, [Date accessed: dd:mm:yy]