The need to secure information is for many organizations and persons extremely important. This includes of course business secrets, which could be the difference between survival or not for many companies.

However, many organizations do not value the importance of securing information as much as they should, or they are not aware of all situations where information is at risk.

Here are just a few of all the situations which could be regarded as risks with respect to securing information stored electronically:

• Working at home is a more and more popular method to organize the working process. Who has access to the home computer? Is this as secure as the computer you use at the regular working place? Do you want your children's friends to read your business plans?
• Do you use a portable PC both at home and in a docking station in the office? What happens if this is forgotten on the train or stolen? The PC itself may be replaced at a reasonable price, but what if the information on the PC gets into the wrong hands?
• The same applies if you travel and bring your PC with you. Who has access to your hotel room? Do you want the information on the PC to be read by the hotel manager? The maid?
• Consider highly sensitive e-mails. You are of course aware of the fact that the IT manager probably has access to your mailbox and she may be tempted to use this access?
• You compose documents which should be kept secret and store them on the company's file server. Who has access to your area on the server?
• Your computer is damaged for some reason and has to be repaired. Do you trust the employees by the company which does this with the information on the PC?
• A colleague borrows your computer for some reason. Are you sure that you want all the information you have stored available for him to read?
• The virus control program which you just installed reports that your computer is infected by one of the Trojans Back Orifice or Netbus. You have no idea when this happend as you did not use a virus control program before. You would probably not feel comfortable by knowing that all information on the PC has been available for those who have been able to connect to your PC.

One way to make sensitive information more secure is to encrypt the data. There are several products on the market which may be used to accomplish this. You may choose to encrypt only parts of the information on the computer or the entire hard disk. You may encrypt e-mails and require that your business associates use an encryption tool when sending e-mails to you..

If you are interested in more in-depth information about encryption, we have a special white paper about this topic (in PDF-format).

Per Olav Førland