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The Commerce Department recently reported that it has lost over 1,100 laptops in the past five years with the Census Bureau accounting for 672. I'm deriving from this that keeping count of human population is somewhat easier than keeping track of laptops. As you might imagine, some of these laptops contained critical information including personel related data.

In the missing laptops derby, Census Bureau is far and away the winner. Coming in a distant second is NOAA (yes, they're the weather guys!) which lost 325 laptops. Details of the entire story here.

At least one congressman is trying to tackle the problem in the only way he knows how - via legislation.
Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, is putting forth legislation that requires all federal agencies to tell the public when they have data breaches of sensitive information. I commend Tom Davis for his efforts but the long term solution will be multi-dimensional including both legislation and technology. I think ongoing battle to secure privacy data will result in increasing traction for Software as a Service (SaaS). I know SaaS already has traction but it's mostly because of its simplicity of deployment and management.
It's also most popular in the SMB market but security concerns will drive its use into large enterprises and as a model for legacy systems as well. Mark my words, it'll happen.

Posted by andreyee in Privacy/Information Theft |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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