Texas K-12 CTO Clinic 2015

In the eyes of the law, any unauthorized access of sensitive data is a "Data Breach". Most of us will experience a sensitive data "incident" sometime in our career. It is a matter of when, not if.

When sensitive data gets into the wrong hands, the organization finds itself in a defensive posture, having to answer many questions: how did the data end up in the wrong hands, what safeguards did you have in place, who had access to the data and why, why were there lax procedures, did you have the right policies in place, was your staff trained on the right procedures, etc.

Even when you are the victim of hacking, you find yourself defending all you did or didn't do leading up to the hacking incident. In the eyes of the person whose data was exposed, you are the criminal (for not adequately protecting their personal information).

It's not just computer data either. Sensitive information resides in many places in an organization. So what do you do? Here's what we are doing at Spring Branch ISD to safeguard sensitive data.