16 Apr 2010

Converged security 'is crucial'

Businesses must ensure they protect all areas of their IT infrastructure in order to ensure they are safeguarding their confidential records, it has been claimed.

Martin Smith, chairman and founder of the Security Awareness Special Interest Group, said that communication across company departments can be difficult and lead to holes in security that criminals could exploit.

However, firms must ensure they take a top-down approach to data security to discourage this form of illegal activity.

Mr Smith commented: "When you protect one part of the chain as hard as you like, but another part of the chain is weak and lets you down, then your work is in vain."

According to a paper written in collaboration between the Information Security Awareness Forum, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Federation of Fraud Forums, Portsmouth University and the Security Institute, in-house security strategies are not reacting swiftly enough to tackle the problem of converging data security threats.