Data Leaks For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Defining Data Loss

In This Chapter

• Understanding how the world of data has changed

• Identifying IT risk as a big part of your business

• Getting The Big Picture

• Discovering the biggest threat to the twenty-first century

• Taking a holistic approach to data loss

Why worry about losing data — there's always more where it came from, right? Well, that's part of the problem. Like other kinds of stuff, data accumulates. By 2010, we'll have a vast pile of that electronic stuff, more than if we had a Ph.D. in Having Lots of Stuff: the most extreme an estimate up to 988 billion gigabytes of information. Where will we put it all?

In addition, how we handle all that stuff is speeding up. How are we to keep up? A recent educational estimate from a North American teacher illustrates this change: For students starting studies in technology at the university level in September, over half of what they learn in their first year will be out of date by the time they get to their third year — and all of it will be out of date by the time they start work. The Department of Trade and Industry in the U.S. estimates that in 2010, the top ten technical jobs that will be in demand won't even have existed in 2004.

Meanwhile, computer circuitry has crept into nearly everything you use — and many of those things now gather information from you and about you. If your kids know how to program every electrical device in the house, and you gave up on that about 15 years ago, it's an indicator of what's happening. ...