Question

You have been asked to give a presentation to your company’s board of directors on the treatment of data as a corporate asset, similar to the treatment of cash, equipment, and facilities.

(a) Justify to a skeptical board member why data should be regarded as valuable company assets.
(b) Identify and briefly describe two distinct threats that could reduce or destroy the value of data.
(c) Recommend measures that the company can take to protect against each of the threats you identified in part (b).

Answer 1

Hi,

Please find the answers:

(a) Data can be stored in many forms like Physical or on electronic medium. Data stored in any form should be regarded as a valuable asset by the company. Reputation of a company mostly depends on how well the company manages and protects its data and information. Day-to-day business operation of the company can halt if the company loses its data /files etc. Simple equation is that if company loses data means losing money and goodwill.

(b) Data Theft or breach - stealing company's data by unauthorized persons such as hacker.
Server crash - The event of server (for example: database server gets crashed and becomes unavailable). All the data tables, procedures, etc will be lost.

(c) Encryption of sensitive company's data ( files, source code, usernames, passwords, credit cards etc ), customer and employee data etc. Strong encryption often shields the company from data theft attacks.
Data Backup and Replication: Crucial data should be replicated across multiple data centres and backed up in a secure fashion and on timely manner.

Let me know if you need more help on this.

Hope this helps.