The physical security of devices and documents is a crucial piece of your company’s data protection plan.
In fact, one of the largest data breaches in history owes to poor physical security: 26 million private records for U.S. veterans, stored in an unencrypted database on an external hard drive, were stolen in a burglary of an analyst’s home. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for employees to think of data security as something that doesn’t involve them — as if it’s an IT issue, a matter of networks and code, purely digital.
Every day, mobile devices or laptops are left in a car or on a desk in the office, unlocked, with the data readily available to anybody walking by. Oftentimes, these devices end up stolen. And when that happens, getting the device back is the least of your worries — the data is typically much more valuable. At that point, all you can do is hope that the thief was after the device and not the data.