Principles for protecting your organization's information assets.

• Author: Wiler, Vicki
• Position: IN FOCUS: A Message from the Editor - Editorial

According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, nearly 58 million records were reported compromised in the United States last year--40 million of them from Target customers during the Christmas shopping season.

At $188 per record, according to Ponemon Institute's "2013 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis," the direct cost of a data breach can have a huge impact on the bottom line. Other costs due to customers' loss of confidence could supply a knockout punch. Target reported that its 2013 fiscal fourth quarter profits were down $440 million due to its breach.

As a professional with responsibilities around safeguarding your organization's information assets, you'll find plenty of help in this issue of Information Management (IM) and the Hot Topic that is tipped inside.

In our cover article, Virginia Jones, CRM, FAI, provides an overview of U.S. federal privacy laws and their information governance implications. A comprehensive discussion of these laws is available in her ARMA International Educational Foundation report "Requirements for Personal Information Protection, Part 1: U.S. Federal Law," available at www. arma.org/bookstore.

Any organization that has international customers must also be concerned about other countries' legislation. Experian's "2014 Data Breach Industry Forecast" predicts that the rise of the cloud, which allows data to move seamlessly across borders, and the EU regulations that "will be enforced based on where the customer lives, rather than where the data is located," will lead to an increasing number of complex information-related violations. Google recently found out how expensive this can be, as France levied the maximum fine possible under French law 150,000 [euro] ($205,000 U.S.)--against it for violating its privacy law.

Cherri-Ann Beckles covers this terrain in her feature article, "Managing Privacy in Recordkeeping Systems: An...