Category: Data Security

Published on November 6, 2014

Usernames and passwords are what most computer applications use to identify users and secure data. But passwords--especially ones complicated enough to be secure--can be difficult to remember. Without an efficient self-serve password reset program in place, employees who forget their passwords or get locked out…

Published on October 23, 2014

PGP (pretty good privacy) is a program that lets users encrypt data for secure and private communications. A user can encrypt a message with PGP and transmit it knowing that only a user with the matching decryption key will be able to decrypt and read…

Published on October 15, 2014

Self-serve password reset programs help make organizations more productive and keep data secure. In organizations without a self-serve password reset solution, Help Desk staff spend a lot of time resetting passwords. In addition to the time spent resetting passwords, there are many security vulnerabilities inherent…

Published on September 30, 2014

Mainframes are able to work with and process data using many different operating systems, applications, and protocols. They are also able to save that data onto many different kinds of storage media. What follows is a brief overview of some of the most common types…

Published on September 16, 2014

With the number of high-profile data breaches in the news this year, following the breaches of 2013, it would be easy to conclude that these sorts of incidents are an inevitable part of dealing with data. The news stories of data breaches are certainly coming…

Published on September 9, 2014

Selecting what data sets each user or group of users has access to greatly impacts your data security. Selecting appropriate user permissions is a necessary balancing act between security and utility. You must find the appropriate balance between limiting the risk of data being lost,…

Published on September 3, 2014

Understanding the different states digital data can be in can help you select the kinds of security measures and encryption that are appropriate for protecting it. There are three basic states of data: data at rest, data in motion, and data in use. Below you…

Published on August 19, 2014

File sync services like Dropbox, Box, and Skydrive make it very easy to store an individual's data across multiple devices and share it with friends and colleagues. These freely available file syncing and sharing services are incredibly convenient, but also make it possible to inadvertently…

Published on August 14, 2014

Under ideal circumstances, when employees leave your company, it is on good terms and they are just going off to pursue other opportunities. There is typically a two-week notice period where the employee and company wrap up loose ends, where the employee provides summaries on…

Published on July 24, 2014

Deciding how to spend limited data security budgets requires you to think critically about where the biggest potential threats to your system and data will come from and what the most effective ways to eliminate those threats are. Once the basic security protocols are in…