Thought Leadership and Industry Trends
In a conversation with CDS, Cody Breunig, privacy and digital forensics expert, discussed the importance of data protection and the role of a gatekeeper in ensuring the security of sensitive information at his organization.
After a data breach is discovered, notification becomes essential. Companies are under tremendous pressure to determine what data has been taken and who they must notify, sometimes in as little as 72 hours. That’s where eDiscovery expertise can make a key contribution.
As the economic and legal spaces become increasingly globalized—and corporate and law firm teams find themselves mired in cross-border and multi-jurisdictional matters—simplified, universal access to critical case data in the cloud becomes more and more necessary.
The coronavirus is here and is impacting our daily routines. Organizations have responded by mandating that everyone works from home to be safe from exposure. Social distancing is the new norm. Virtually all businesses now must cope with managing a virtual workforce to some degree. That comes with new security risks for the data that businesses spend millions of dollars to protect.
Imagine you are the CIO of a large financial institution and you just discovered two unencrypted laptops stolen from your premises, which contained customers’ personal information (also known as ‘personally identifiable information’ or PII). The highly visible data breach is likely to result in bad public relations and potentially a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the individuals whose identities were stolen.
While many companies have moved at least some of their data to the cloud, others have been more cautious about taking these steps because they want to ensure their data stays in the U.S. Some cloud providers do not have enough locations in the U.S. to enable all data to remain in the country.
Data breaches reported in the media seem to be almost a daily occurrence leaving companies with both immediate and long-term damage that must be addressed.
Often discussions about data only focus on one aspect of it at a time, such as privacy, cybersecurity, retention, big data, etc. However, in order to truly protect data, organizations need to take a broader perspective. Data is an asset that has real value to every organization and its value tracks its many uses. In other words, its value varies with each user and purpose for which the data is used, and this must be considered in developing a management plan for enterprise data.
eDiscovery technology isn’t limited to helping with document reviews in a litigation context. As discussed in a prior post, it can be used to comply with notification requirements in the case of data breaches.
Cybersecurity is a big problem for many companies as evidenced by the constant media coverage of massive breaches. When these situations happen, experts come in to fix the breach, but that still leaves businesses to deal with their notification obligations. That’s where eDiscovery expertise can make a big difference.
