Addressing Data Security

According to 1to1Media: Gerhard Lindenmayer recently decided that the time had come to completely overhaul his company's data security process.

The growing number of customer data breaches made it clear to Lindenmayer, CIO of telemarketer DialAmerica, that he needed to establish a better method of protecting his clients' data — especially in the case of sharing information with third parties. "Until five years ago we didn't even have any security on the doors," Lindenmayer says. "But we've gone through some awakening years and now we've turned it around completely."

DialAmerica isn't alone in facing this growing threat. More than ever customers' personal and private data is being shared between organizations.... Prat Moghe, chief technology officer and founder of Tizor, a provider of data protection solutions, says one of the biggest challenges for these enterprises is that they have suddenly been forced by law to share customer data with partners and aren't prepared internally. Such circumstances have placed them at risk for breaches. "They don't know how much data they have or where it is," Moghe says. "We have companies that have said, 'We have social security numbers, but we don't know where they are; we don't know where the data is sitting, let alone who is accessing it, or when it's being accessed.'"

For the entire article, see 1to1Media.

In related news, The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has released a fully automated process for members to employ to assess their level of information security against industry self-regulatory guidelines as well as current government regulations. DMA partnered with Solutionary, Inc., a security services organization in Omaha, NE, to customize SecurCompass®, which is Solutionary’s security and compliance assessment tool.

Solutionary has designed DMA SecurCompass specifically to help association members measure their compliance against DMA’s Information Security ethics guidelines. The new DMA members-only assessment tool consists of 42 questions that mirror the checklist of information security procedures that DMA developed in cooperation with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2004.