If you ask the 50 banks that recently had customer data exposed when their accounting firm lost a number of their audit laptops to theft, the answer is no. Incredibly, the accounting firm’s lost laptops apparently did not utilize data encryption even though they contained sensitive customer information. This left the banks in the un-welcomed position of having to notify customers of a data breach.

Anecdotally, our experience doing security audits across many industries indicates that much (maybe even most) of the risk of sensitive data loss in an enterprise is associated with their vendor’s lack of adequate security controls.

Ironically, when a company outsources a service they are also outsourcing much of the security risk. For example, Read more