Alan Calder on IT Governance, information security & ISO 27001

Zurich Insurance UK not only lost 46,000 customer records, it took one year to discover the loss. The fact that the loss took place during what should have been a routine outsourcing operation just makes the matter worse. At £2.27m (reduced from £3.25m by agreeing to early settlement), the Zurich Insurance UK data loss works out to have cost the company nearly £50 per record - and that’s without the management time spent on dealing with the FSA investigation and the undoubted negative publicity which the report will generate.

The basics of data protection are still obvious: first, you have to be aware of the fact that you are in possession of personal data, and you have to be aware of how and where it is being processed. Then you have to take some basic steps: apply encryption, apply access control policies, apply secure transmission and receipt procedures (surely, after the HMRC CD-Rom fiasco most organisations would have got to grips with this idea?) and don’t allow personal data to be downloaded to USBs or other portable devices.

I covered exactly these basics at the most recent Data Privacy & Laws conference (video due out shortly, apparently) and the general response was: wouldn’t it be nice if we could get top management to understand that this is what we need to do? Well, perhaps £2.27m will help financial companies focus (although the long history of fines on financial sector companies for failing to protect personal data argues otherwise) better on this key responsibility of theirs.

The UK’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) this week fined Royal Bank of Scotland Group £5.6m for ‘failing to have adequate [IT] systems and controls in place to prevent breaches of UK financial sanctions’. The Australian IT News quite rightly identifies this as a massive failure in IT governance - which, of course, it is.

IT governance is defined as “a framework for the leadership, organizational structures and business processes, standards and compliance to these standards, which ensure that the organization’s IT supports and enables the achievement of its strategies and objectives.“ (IT Governance: a Pocket Guide)

“RBSG’s automated screening failed to screen the majority of trade finance SWIFT messages generated in the international trade transactions that it carried out,” said the FSA; it could have gone on to say something like: ‘RBSG’s Board of Directors evidently does not have in place any formal process for ensuring that it’s IT infrastructure supports and enables its compliance to UK laws and regulations or the achievement of its strategies and objectives,’ but it didn’t. That, nevertheless, appears to be the case.

It always seems to me a pity that organisations have to be pushed, by substantial fines, to do things that have significant business benefits - but there we are!

King III has now been in force for about 4 months in South Africa. Judge Mervyn King made the point, at a recent ITWeb conference, that “one of the most critical interdependences is IT, because it’s technology that is going to save the planet“. We call this Green IT, and believe that energy-efficient IT management must become a core part of IT strategy in the future.

Risk management becomes ever more important, as more and more IT is outsourced - but there is more to IT risk management than simply disaster recovery or supply chain management. Increasingly, IT risk, information risk, project risk and business continuity risk must be considered as part of a coherent approach that identifies and seeks to mitigate all forms of unacceptable strategic and operational risk to the organisation; that, of course, is what IT governance is really about.

While Forrester’s recent report says that Green IT initiatives persist, in spite of budget cut backs and other challenges facing IT teams today, the reality is more likely to be that savvy IT leaders recognise that Green IT initiatives can make a substantial contribution to reducing the direct cost of running the IT infrastructure.

Gary Hird, for instance, has led the John Lewis Partnership’s Green IT strategy for some time and he talks about JLP went about this in Green IT in Practice, now in its second edition.  It’s a fascinating and practical description of how one large retail organisation set about driving down its IT costs, reducing its carbon footprint and meeting customer requirements.

Other writers have also addressed these issues: George Spafford focused on the Governance of Green IT, which has a particular focus on managing energy consumption. The recent emergence of EN16001 should give a boost to those looking for a structured approach to energy management.

There is lots of information, advice - and case studies - available for organisations that want to tackle Green IT.

There’s a few more things I dislike about the Kindle - the naff little ‘key board’, for one, which doesn’t make for easy typing; the failure to number book pages for another - why does Amazon think it’s useful to use a page referencing system that is totally different from that which has been used for books since before Gutenberg?

And the Kindle’s automatic screen rotation is really annoying - if you lie on your side (reading on a beach, for instance) the screen can’t make up its mind which way to orientate itself and so keeps changing from landscape to portrait!

And try reading a book that has genealogies and other reference material, where you want to flip back and forth between different pages and sections (for instance, reading Wolf Hall, where supporting information is quite useful) - it’s just too hard!

I’ve recently added both a Kindle and an iPad to my collection of eBook readers. I’ve been using the Sony eBook reader since 2009 and thought it would be useful to compare the leading products as this area of hardware hots up. All eBook readers can carry more eBooks than you are likely to want to read in a month, and all eBook readers substantially reduce the effort required to carry today’s massive tomes around.

The Kindle, from Amazon, has two major strengths and a couple of significant weaknesses. The most impressive aspect is the Whispernet technology - the worldwide roaming 3G application which lets you search Amazon.com directly from the Kindle, and with one click to select, purchase and download books directly to the eBook reader. This is a brilliant innovation. The fact that browsing speeds are, relatively speaking, quite slow (3G doesn’t match most broadband connections for speed) and that searching for books isn’t as simple as doing it through a web browser are minor drawbacks in comparison to the overall facility of direct purchase and download.

The other big advantage is its size - you get a large screen, which means that you get more text on the screen in front of you than with the Sony Pocket. More text means fewer page turns, which means fewer clicks on the neatly placed ‘next page’ button. Size, though, is the first big draw back of the Kindle - unlike a book, the Kindle is not something that you can drop into a pocket, or a beachbag - it’s a chunky item, very slightly smaller than A4 in size and quite heavy. Of course, it’s a bit neater than today’s 500+ page book, but that doesn’t make it easy to cart about.

The second big limitation is that you are, effectively, limited to reading books available from Amazon. While it appears to be technically possible to transfer other eBooks and pdfs to the KIndle, it’s not a simple process and is one which still eludes me. The eBook selection on Amazon.com isn’t that great, to be frank - and far more useful selections of popular eBooks are available from retailers like Waterstones - but, of course, you can’t download a Waterstone’s eBook to your Kindle reader.

The Kindle is, in effect, a tool for buying and reading eBooks that are sold by Amazon.com. It is designed so that you can’t use it to buy eBooks from Amazon’s competitors. If Amazon was giving it away for free, as a device to encourage you to purchase eBooks from Amazon, there would be a justification for getting one - but it is a relatively expensive and very limited product. On this basis, the Kindle simply doesn’t compete with alternatives like the Sony eBook Reader - which is not only lightweight and pocket-sized, but with which you can purchase eBooks from any retailer or publisher, download and read them, and with which you can also read pdfs and other electronic documents from almost any source. As a practical, workaday tool, I would take the Sony eBook reader over the Kindle any day! 

I’ve just taken delivery of an iPad, so will be talking about that in due course.

As the UK enters its new age of austerity, with public sector organisations finding draconian budget cuts, one must fear that citizens’ personal data will be increasingly at risk. The UK public sector (led by the NHS) has never been that amazingly good at protecting personal and sensitive information, as newspaper articles and the Information Commissioner’s website regularly attest.

The ICO has just taken enforcement action against three councils who failed to protect personal information, including information about children. The council’s failings were all pretty standard: unencrypted USB sticks, unencrypted laptops, inadequate staff training and inadequate supervision. These are all relatively simple - if costly - to remedy; the basics - essential DPA policies and procedures should all of course be in place already.

What still seems to be missing, though, is a real committment, on the part of public authorities, to taking the business of data protection seriously - I guess that we’ll actually need to see a series of £500k fines being levied before we see the majority of organisations raising their game on the field of protecting their citizens.

A new AIIM study on SharePoint takeup has recently been published. This report builds on their survey of a year ago. Barb Mosher, writing about the AIIM report on CMS, draws this conclusion from the two surveys:

“SharePoint 2007 will be in use for a while to come, and SharePoint 2010 will likely see even more uptake by organizations for a number of reasons. The problems related to SharePoint, whether it’s 2007 or 2010, are not going to change. Not because of the platform itself, but because the strategy, planning and governance that are required to implement it are still not being taken seriously.

What will we see in surveys run next year? The way it looks now, nothing that different than this year or the year before.”

And that tends to be the story where project level governance is concerned: those organisations that plan ahead, that put in place methods for dealing with the wide range of SharePoint issues - from ghost sites through to backup failures - will usually end up with robust, effective and useful SharePoint services. Effective SharePoint governance really can be the difference between success and failure - both short and long term - with a SharePoint deployment. For this reason, Microsoft publish guidance on SharePoint Governance, and our own SharePoint Governance Toolkit helps with MOSS implementations.

The Economist’s extensive and interesting July article on CyberWar is essential reading for management in all organisations that have any reliance on the internet for communications, data sharing, business partnering, or business platforms.

The collateral damage for businesses, in any cyberwar, could be huge. Assuming, for the moment, that the Internet itself is able to survive most forms of war carried out across it, the reality is that many organisations simply don’t have adequate defences in place today to keep themselves protected and safe from the electronic warfare being waged acorss the infrastructure.

As a minimum, all organisations should take steps to secure their network perimeters. This is relatively straightforward to do: it involves a penetration testing exercise, carried out by an external, professional security testing company, who will identify all potential vulnerabilities in your network defences and provide you with structured advice as to what remedial steps should be taken.

You may form the view that cyberwar is not a significant threat for your business; there are, however, very close links between those currently involved in cybercrime, and those who might be involved in either cyberterrorism or cyberwar. Dr Mehan’s book, CyberWar, Cyberterror, Cybercrime, sets this all out very clearly. As result of what she’s saying, one has to assume that the only sensible course for the average organisation is to assume that they will be badly hurt if they don’t put their security house in order and to take the necessaty steps to ensure that their network defences are secure,

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has received over 1,000 reports of data breaches or losses since it was set up, and has issued a stern reminder that organisations must ensure that data is well protected. The biggest culprit is the NHS. The ICO’s Security Breaches Report shows the breakdown of breaches.

As we’ve said on our website (Data Protect Act Penalties), sooner or later the ICO will start levying fines for egregious breaches of the DPA - it would make sense to get one’s DPA compliance house in order before that happens, wouldn’t it? Simply buying and using the tools in our DPA Compliance Toolkit would prepare most organisations to face the worst!