Guarding against insider threat: Perimeter Data products.

• Author: Beers, Heather
• Position: Tech Talk

What if you fired your systems administrator today and tomorrow discovered he sabotaged your company's data before leaving, costing you $20,000 a day to rebuild your system?

What if one of your high-level IT personnel manipulated thousands of customers' accounts without leaving a trace, leaving you to wonder who dunnit...and why?

"What-ifs" like these threaten to undermine small businesses every day. And it's these pernicious possibilities that spurred the success of Perimeter Data, a Salt Lake City-based company that provides advanced countermeasures against insider threats to enterprise network data.

What are the odds of an insider attack? Apparently pretty high. And the costs are just as steep. "[Insider attacks] happen all the time; companies just don't usually talk about it. These kinds of attacks are perhaps the most devastating to anybody who has to store and manage critical data, like financial institutions, investment banks and others," says Steve Comrie, CEO for Perimeter Data. "The average insider attack costs companies about $2 million."

With an eye toward prevention, the federal government recently passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires more than 230,000 financial institutions to protect their electronic data, including e-mails with customers, financial transactions and other essential information.

Perimeter Data is at the forefront of this technology helping financial institutions, enterprise companies and government agencies guard themselves against internal data damage.

"Our technology preserves and protects data, providing an irrefutable record of chain of custody, something mandated by federal rules of evidence. We give an accurate...