ICO takes action against Google

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) have written to the world's leading search engine Google to advise them their recent Google Street View project significantly breached the Data Protection Act.

Since April 2010, The ICO have had the power to impose fines of up to £500,000 on organisations who breach the Data Protection Act. Within this legislation includes specific reference to the encryption of data.

"Organisations can minimise the risks of security breaches involving personal information by ensuring that all portable media devices containing personal information are encrypted. Staff must be adequately trained and organisations should give proper consideration to restricting staff from downloading large volumes of data onto memory sticks and other portable devices. All personal information held within buildings and offices should be protected by adequate security arrangements to prevent theft or the loss of the data."

The full legislation is available on the ICO website.

Google's breach is so far the highest profile case and has resulted in Christopher Graham, who is appointed as Information Commissioner by HM The Queen writing directly to Google, who will now have to sign an indemnity to appear on the ICO's website as well as be subject to a full ICO audit. Christopher Graham said, "It is my view that the collection of this information was not fair or lawful and constitutes a significant breach of the first principle of the Data Protection Act."

"The most appropriate and proportionate regulatory action in these circumstances is to get written legal assurance from Google that this will not happen again - and to follow this up with an ICO audit."

2 of Redstor's leading cloud services include full end to end encryption. Redstor Protector combines laptop encryption, device trace, remote data deletion, automatic backup and port access control. This enables organisations to fully lockdown their laptops in the event of them being lost or stolen. You can find out more about how Redstor Protector can help you protect your data by downloading our whitepaper here.

Redstor Online Backup is an automated backup service, your data is sent over your existing internet connection to one of our secure Data Centres before mirroring to our secondary Data Centre for Disaster Recovery purposes. From the moment the data leaves your site, whilst in transit and right the way through until it resides in our Data Centres; it's fully encrypted to give you that peace of mind your data is secure and protected off-site.

If you're unsure of the current level of protection for your data then you should call the Data Protection specialists Redstor on 0118 9515 200.

Backup Issues and Online Backup

The 360IT event in Earl’s Court London yesterday it highlighted some key data protection issues within the IT industry particularly within the UK. UK based SME’s are amongst the least prepared for disaster recovery planning.

Key figures from the research highlighted the following:

· 44%* did not have the ability to recover data to alternative hardware.
· 50%* of those surveyed admitted to suffering the consequences of downtime at some point in the last 6 months.
*(of 70 SME’s surveyed by Acronis)

Further researched conducted by Vanson Bourne surveyed 600 SME’s which produced some intriguing results.

· 72% of SME’s still rely on an end of day backup strategy which for smaller organisations is recommended, however, considering the survey questioned organisations with the number of employees ranging from 250-1,000 one may expected the hourly incremental data changes to be significant with the potential for data loss to be unthinkable should such a situation arise.
· 10% of SME’s only carry out weekly backups.
· The research also highlighted that for companies whose core competencies are not in IT backup and recovery issues can be extremely stressful with 59% of IT managers feeling stressed and under pressure to deliver.
· In the UK 38% of firms are failing to address desktop backup and laptop backup. Considering a large portion of live “work in progress” data is stored on end user machines this is leaving UK SME’s unnecessarily vulnerable to data loss.

The event also highlighted an industry shift towards “online backup or cloud backup” which is Redstor’s main focus and in particular emphasis on the ability to recover to alternative hardware if the need arises.
The real question for businesses operating in the knowledge economy today is what price can really be put on the safety and security of your data?
Redstor has been addressing these backup and storage issues since 1998 with Redstor Protector, Online Backup and Schools’ Backup as well as enterprise storage solutions and managed storage services for EMC and other recognised industry players.