Michael D. Moberly   November 4, 2014   ‘A blog where attention span really matters’!

Achieving efficiencies by differentiating the information and data being safeguarded…

Aside, for the moment, statutory and regulatory mandates, I am increasingly confident the day is quickly approaching (in many instances, it already has, in my judgment) when it becomes impractical for companies to assume the costs and time of installing ever bigger, one size fits all, snap-shot-in-time firewalls and data/information security – protection systems and products to try to thwart the growing numbers of intensely sophisticated and global economic and competitive advantage adversaries and legacy free players, aka hackers.

There are two key and inter-related reasons why I believe this to not only be true, but an inevitability.

First, it is a globally universal and irreversible economic fact that rising percentages – 80+% of most company’s value, sources of revenue, and ‘building blocks’ for growth, profitability, and sustainability lie in – evolve directly from intangible assets, primarily in the form of intellectual, structural, and relationship/social capital and other forms of intellectual property.

Second, data/information generation, storage, and archival needs are continually ratcheting up from megabytes, gigabytes, to terabytes+, particularly in intangible asset intensive and dependant companies and R&D sectors.

So, out of necessity to achieve cost efficiencies and a more specified return on investment, technologies must be developed with heretofore unique capabilities to differentiate company information and data that should receive the maximum IT/computer safeguards, which initially I propose, encompass the following four factors, i.e., the (intangible) assets…

• contributory value to a particular project, product, and/or the company’s mission.
• continued materiality to a particular project, product, and/or the company’s mission.
• level of assessed risk to theft, infringement, misappropriation, etc.
• relevance to a company’s reputation (image, goodwill, brand) etc.