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Information exodus: when layoffs mean data leakage |
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| Written by Neil Sutton, on Tue-September-2009 |
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 Employees are being let go in droves as companies attempt to weather the continuing economic downturn but an unintended consequence of all the layoffs is a near catastrophic impact on IT security.
According to a study released Tuesday by Telus and the Rotman School of
Management, annual breach costs for Canadian businesses have almost
doubled in the last year from $423,469 to $839,149 per organization. A
key contributor to this growth is the number of employees, dismissed
from their jobs, who take valuable data with them.
“As job losses mount, the threat to the environment rises,” says Walid
Hejazi, a professor of business economics at the Rotman School and one
of the co-authors of the report, Rotman — Telus: Joint Study on
Canadian IT Security Practices. The study polled about 50 participants
in nine focus groups across Canada, focusing on organizations with 100
or more employees.
This is the second annual study for Rotman and Telus. The organizations
undertook the study to provide Canadian businesses with relevant
domestic data. Too often, says Hejazi, Canadian businesses get their IT
security information from U.S. sources. But Canada has a very different
threat landscape from the U.S. — government, health care, financial
systems and privacy regulation are all handled very differently up here.
“As a business professor at the Rotman School, (I say) we need to
develop clarity. It’s very, very important that information be allowed
to flow.”
Despite the rise in challenges to security due to the economic
downturn, preparedness on the part of Canadian businesses has not risen
commensurately, says Hejazi.
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