Focus on taming technology to maximize information security.

• Author: Miller, Vicki
• Position: IN FOCUS: A Message from the Editor - Letter to the editor

No one knows better than records and information management (RIM) professionals that technology is both a blessing and a curse for business. While new and ever-evolving technology tools drive innovation and make many business processes easier and more efficient, they also generate tremendous amounts of information and increase the difficulty of protecting it.

A look at the October 21, 2015, data breach report from the Identity Theft Resource Center shows that there have been 620 breaches of U.S. organizations exposing more than 175 million records this year. And no industry sector is immune--from medical/healthcare organizations, which have accounted for about one-third of the breaches and more than half of the records exposed this year, to education, with the fewest records exposed.

The average cost of a breach in the United States, according to the "2015 Cost of Data Breach Study: United States" conducted by Ponemon Institute for IBM in May 2015, ranged from $5.9 million to $6.5 million--an 11% increase over the previous year. The average cost for each lost record containing sensitive or confidential information increased 8%, from $201 to $217, the report said.

In an excerpt from the ARMA-published book Confidentiality, Privacy, and Information Security, author Beth Chiaiese, CRM, provides a great amount of guidance about the policies and processes that will help your organization protect its information. Although written primarily for the law firm environment, this advice is applicable to all business environments.

Rising in tandem with the cost of data breaches is concern about protecting individuals' personal information. The Internet of Things (IoT) --the network of physical objects embedded with electronics, software, and sensors that enable them to collect and exchange data--is a relatively new threat to personal privacy that organizations and individuals...