Occasionally cyber-security incidents make the news, but most go unreported. The numbers are staggering. The US Department of Homeland Security says US critical infrastructure experienced a 20% increase in cyber incidents in 2015 from the year before. Manufacturing was the most commonly attacked sector, representing 33% of all critical infrastructure cyber-security incidents. Manufacturing sites were attacked twice as often as the second-most attacked industry, energy.

Security experts says the most common approach to security—the IT equivalent of a single door with a strong lock—is a terrible idea. As cyber-security expert Kevin Mahaffey explained at the 2016 CeBIT Security conference in Hannover, the fortress of protection approach is not secure. “Big walls on the outside and nothing on the inside” is how he described it. Unfortunately, this is how many companies approach data security. But once that initial password screen is breached, the whole of manufacturing IT is there for the snooping or taking.

“No matter how smoothly your data management systems may work today, the savvy CAD manager should keep in mind that things change constantly, and a new set of data management challenges are always on the horizon. The question is, how can you proactively plan for them?”

That’s Robert Green’s advice in his latest article on Data Management.

• Data is exploding at an alarming rate…especially in the CAD environment.
• IT is not always fully-attuned to the data management needs of CAD professionals…and that’s getting more and more dangerous every day.
• Cloud storage is raising a whole new list of questions…many of which are going unasked and unanswered.
• New standards and security measures must be implemented…but are being ignored at most companies.

What is your company’s risk in the new data management age?

Robert Green provides you with all the questions you should be asking and 6 crucial action steps you must take to reduce your company’s exposure in his article, A Data Management Wake-Up Call for All CAD Managers. Check it out to get his key takeaways.

There is a lot of talk these days about cybercrime. News of large-scale IT security breaches are not unusual. Blame is often assigned to the sinister motivations of rogue governments, terrorists, or anarchists. But those closest to the problem say the root cause behind most data breaches is lax internal security, not the skills of cunning hackers.

A recent survey by the Ponemon Institute claims 71% of employees have access to data they should not see, and more than half say this access is frequent or very frequent. Other findings from the survey point to lax internal security as a serious problem in organizations of all sizes:

• 4 out of 5 IT practitioners (80%) say their organizations don’t enforce a strict least-privilege (or need-to-know) data model;
• 73% of end users believe the growth of emails, presentations, multimedia files, and other types of company data has very significantly or significantly affected their ability to find and access data;
• 76% of end users believe there are times when it is acceptable to transfer work documents to their personal devices, while only 13% of IT practitioners agree;
• 67% of IT practitioners say their organization experienced the loss or theft of company data over the past two years, while only 44% of end users believe this has happened;
• 43% of end users say it takes weeks, months or longer to be granted access to data they request access to in order to do their jobs, and only 22% report that access is typically granted within minutes or hours.