As an organization develops, implements and improves its  business continuity and resilience strategies, more attention is being given to regulatory driven compliance requirements.

There is also a concern to be addressed over the current political environment and the shift in the compliance landscape and compliance enforcement for which organizations need to be prepared.

Such a scenario exists over the growing emphasis of compliance requirements focused on the field of e-discovery.

Legal firms are certainly seeing the same dynamics and as a result, a new legal organization officially was formed and called “The Organization of Legal Professionals.”   The goal of this new group (OLP) is to promote standards and certification for e-discovery professionals and providers and ultimately “…provide the legal community with a means of assuring its clients that its e-discovery professionals possess the requisite level of competence and understanding of e-discovery principles.”

You can read more about this in an article written by Robert J. Ambrogi that was posted on the legal.com blog watch by clicking here.

In a recent survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute, and supported by the security firm Imperva, it was found that 71% of the firms interviewed don’t view the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) as a strategic initiative for their organization(s).

The data in this report states at least the following reasons for the lack of strategic importance linked to PCI DSS: (1) its hard work and requires constant monitoring and maintenance, (2) there is the perception that good security does not increase market share — i.e. consumers do not reward companies when nothing bad happens, and (3) most companies reported that they don’t believe the worst will happen to them — and — even if it does, they anticipate being able to handle the cost of the breach and move on.

Another observations was that 79% of this very same group has experienced a data breach that involved the loss or theft of credit card information.

The data in this report also hints that to incur the cost of a breach is cheaper than paying for what it takes to protect the systems and data.

George Hulme wrote about  more details of this report’s findings in an article posted on the InformationWeek’s Security Weblog — which you can read by clicking here.

You can also access this free report by registering at the following website:

https://www.imperva.com/ld/ponemon.asp

In an article written by Greg Lawn for Computerworld magazine, the timely topic of e-discovery was addressed from a viewpoint of suggesting what to do to avoid a potential e-discovery disaster.  Because so many companies are now exposed to more regulations and compliance issues than ever before, every company should have an awareness of this issue as a regular agenda item in management meetings.

While the processes to follow do not have to be overly complicated, those processes should reflect a best practices approach when being implemented into an organization.  Greg Lawn’s articles attempts to do that by listing the following major best practices to help an organization avoid such a disaster scenario:  (1) Talk to your company’s legal department regularly about e-discovery, (2) Make your information-handling practices routine and consistent, (3) Keep an audit trail of your activities, (4) Know who had the data under legal hold request and when, (5) Understand what spoliation is, (6) Be ready to preserve all data, and (7) Know what have and what you don’t have.

Click here to read details for avoiding an e-discovery disaster.