Construction Informer

This time of year there is no shortage of crystal balls foretelling things to come. One prediction that may be weighing heavily on the minds of construction pros was broached by Verizon in its “Top 10 Hot Business Technology Trends for 2008.”

The company points out that the proliferation of data away from the main office portends to be a challenging issue. Since more and more construction firms, along with everyone else, are opening up their networks to suppliers and partners in order to craft some new efficiencies they will find that in so doing their data will be increasingly strewn across networks that they don’t control. When you add in the data that is being carried in cell phones, PDAs and mobile computers you can see the potential for problems.

Verizon says it is necessary to “protect every end point, application, user and device connected to…networks,” along with making sure that everyone connecting to the networks are authorized users.

To me the greatest point of challenge is at the user level. You can much more easily and effectively put safeguards in place on systems than you can on end-users and their equipment. The keepers-of-the-big-picture in companies are going to have to figure out what kind of data is being carried in all of these devices and then identify not only fool-proof backups for sensitive information but also address things like the need-to-know, and policies regarding the use of passwords or other schemes to make sure only the appropriate people are using the devices.

With those things as background here is my short list of steps in locking down end-user devices.

• Establish and enforce policies regarding what kind of company information can be kept on each type of device.
• Make sure that only the appropriate people are using these devices by funding the most reliable and effective methods that will ensure this.
• Require regular reviews of the information and data that is actually being stored on each of these devices.
• Fund the most effective backup system you can find for these types of devices.
• Train everybody who uses these devices so they know the policies, the types of information and data each device can have on it, and how to do the necessary backups.

To some all of his may seem a bit overboard but remember it often isn’t a single stray piece of data in the wrong hands that hurts you, but rather the aggregate of many stray pieces that does.