Less data, less risk
A message to CIOs:
Given the recent controversy over the government's well-publicized request of ISPs (Internet Service Providers), I have a thought for any far-sighted, consumer-oriented company: Purge your data.
Here's the problem. The more data you hold, the more of a target that you become. Hackers want to break in, the government and civil lawyers wants to subpoena it and the chance that you will eventually screw up and get a privacy lawsuit are directly proportional to the amount of information in your corporate cyber coffers.
It costs a little money, but I advocate putting into place a data purging policy now, before it's too late. Stick to it and you've got some push back against all of the above hassles. Ignore the marketing greed and its snarky practitioners trying to squeeze yet another drop out of a database.
Set guidelines for transactional history purging, former customer record deletion and in general, force the sys admins to clean house once a quarter.
The best corporate offense is a good cyber defense.
Posted on June 06, 2006
