Technology is going against itself in the unwanted battle against data security and ease of information access. And the contradiction sandwiched between the two just cannot be ignored, so says Cisco’s vice president and general manager of security technology business unit. Let no one show the predicament that envelopes these two important factors which are both needed in the Web 2.0 world.
For instance I am the head of the accounting department of a huge marketing firm and I need to access the financial input the company is making for the month. That would entail me going into the company data that contains pertinent information about the company’s list of clients, credit card information, addresses, contact information, social security number, and other pieces of facts and figures so vital that if it falls into the wrong hands may compromise your clientele’s financial future. Identity theft and credit card is a huge industry that people will actually kill for. Now my colleague, who leads training department, needs to access the company’s source or in the olden days what is commonly termed as mainframe. Now he does not need the part of the source that gives out the detailed information that I can access and that is the key rule applied in most companies nowadays – the on board policy on data security.
Now the danger is, what if anybody within the same level of management as I am accesses the company’s data using any of these: mobile internet laptop utilizing mobile wireless internet or mobile internet or mobile broadband or any other wireless technology and at the same time opens up a social network site on his mobile internet-capable laptop or smartphone or iPhone. Hackers and internet criminals will have a field day using other technology to exploit these opportunities, maybe download the data and sell it to a competitor.
The predicament that complicates this scenario is that for the past decade, internet mobility and collaboration made easy by the ability of effortless internet access has shown tremendous potential in massively increasing company productivity, speeding up company progress, and providing a competitive edge against competitors. Let us take for example a statistical example. The seventies and the eighties saw the growth of personal computers to quickly get data encoding done and the country’s growth saw a two to three percent increase annually. Now when the technology to connect these computers and LAN and the internet was introduced, the gross national product suddenly catapulted to four to five percent. That is what connectivity and quick transfer of information does to the development of an organization. And mobile internet is showing the same promise when it comes to data sharing and communication.
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