It's a whole new world! Or is it?

It is a great time at J2 Software and we are excited to launch our brand new website. We had a look at our web presence and realised that we had not kept our site as current as our solution set.

So much has changed in the last year and it is about time we showcased it. J2 Software represents awesome brands and this allows our clients to get full visibility over the network and ensure that the right level of control is implemented to ensure compliance. J2 believes in providing real solutions to real business problems.

I welcome you to the new site, and we look forward to being part of the journey with our customers. 2015 and beyond is the time to move security away from being device focused over to being user centric. The trusted user provides both the biggest threat to data security and they can also be the biggest ally in the fight to protect your information and stay out of trouble. So let us all make sure that J2 Software is there to help you make 2015 the safest ever.

J2 Software has gone through one of the toughest business cycles in history brought on by global recession, but we survived through hard work and the support of our clients. We have put measures in place to ensure sustainability and given the platform for growth.

Out staff may be slightly different, our address may be new - but we have started the expansion, added new business units and solutions as well as added several customers to our list. Dtex Systems has launched Advanced Human Analytics to reduce the risk associated with protecting against the insider threat - providing our clients instant access to information you cannot get from a log file or event viewer. We can show you when a staff member is looking to move or when their behaviour changes which indicates risky activity as soon as they occur.  

These are tough economic times and the threats are changing... The threats are changing? really.....Or are people just thinking up new ways to make an illicit profit with your information?

Are the areas of concern really different; or has some smart marketing machine simply given them a new name?

The era of "CLOUD" is here.....this is something new? or have we been getting email from thin air for the last 10-15 years? Has your ERP system never been offered as ASP?

BYOD..... surely we have had this for years? The USB storage device has not just been invented, we have used these for ages. The digital camera or MP3 players - all gave us storage many years ago. The difference is now these are all on once device - but the risk is the same.

Protection of sensitive information... is this a new requirement? Surely not, all of these items have been around for ages and it is now the big flavour because big organisations and governments are publicly losing information through breaches and internal leaks.

We have always needed to keep our sensitive data secure for competitive advantage; we have always needed to know what information is moving around our businesses, we have always needed to protect corporate reputation and image. This has not changed, but now it is law!! 

So where to start, I often see people so heavily engaged in discussion and debate about what the biggest threat is, where's the risk and what's the danger, so busy analysing the different areas, creating matrix after matrix, risk after risk that the problem becomes so massive (in the mind or on the whiteboard) that there is no way they are in a position to start to cover these threats - it is just too big a problem to solve. I call NONSENSE!

My advice is SIMPLE, start somewhere, anywhere - that's what must be done. Start somewhere, it is really that simple. A small step in improving your data security and compliance position is a great start.

• Do you know who opened the shared drives and folders today? Can you list them? I mean these shared repositories contain all the corporate secrets - can you at least tell me who accessed the shared drives and folders today, last hour, last week.......
• What did these users do when they were there? Did they merely read the      information to do their job, or did they copy the data elsewhere. USB device? Desktop? Printer?
• Has that same sensitive file been attached and sent as an email attachment? To      whom? Was it checked or is it now lost forever?
• Are your staff spending half their day on social networks or IM chats? Is the      10min here or 15min there really a problem? Add up the time - 2-3 hours of this a day is easily 25 -30% of the work day. Will those staff be happy with 75% of their salary for the work they have done?

So let's all get started. Visibility is the first step - otherwise all the guess work is exactly that - GUESS work. You cannot know your true risk areas, if you don't know what is really going on.

So get started..... call me - we can help?

Cheers for now,

John Mc Loughlin