July 05, 2006
How secure is your outsourced IT data?
The Data Protection Act (DPA) is in force in the UK for eight years now, but its provisions are not yet completely understood. Or at least, the provisions are not enforced. This is clear from a trend among senior IT decision makers to use live data to test applications.
A study conducted by Vanson Bourn reveals this unhealthy practice in the IT outsourcing industry. Nearly half of the IT decision makers are not even clear on the provisions of the act, and 44% use real data for testing purposes.
This obviously runs the risk of data dissemination to a third party. Confidentiality is of utmost importance in the data-driven IT industry, and greater care is a must for IT companies and executives. As the Vanson Bourne research indicates:
By exchanging known values, such as addresses, with other known values, customer data can be transformed so that it is unrecognisable from the original but can still be processed by the systems across the organisation, with important fields, such as postcode, left intact.
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