Why security matters

- [Instructor] You'd almost have to have been living under a rock to not have some awareness of the problems and challenges surrounding information security. For me, there are two big buckets of concern over security in business. The first centers on business assets, protecting proprietary information, intellectual property, financials, business planning, and the like. Losing control of this information can present some serious risks to revenue. If your competitors know your next moves, they're going to take advantage of that. But what gets more attention in the media is exposure of personal information. This used to mean exposing your client's identity or credit information to bad actors, which opens them up for identity fraud and opens you up for big liabilities. But over the last few years, we've increasingly seen personal information in the sense of private communications, like texts and emails being hacked and released, and attacks on reputation and credibility. Document security is a subset of the overall security umbrella, and it has some distinguishing characteristics. Let's settle on a working definition for document security. I'm going to say that it's the processes and policies relating to storing, retrieving, and controlling business files throughout their life cycle. And that last clause, throughout their life cycle, is one of the special characteristics of document security. These files tend to not live forever. At a certain point, they will be obsolete. And so, document security also needs to take into account safe archival storage and the ability to retrieve archives if necessary. As I've said on other occasions, we should probably get used to saying file security, not document. Document still has the connotation to a lot of people for MS Word documents. But what we're really talking about is any file that is used to collect and share company information. That could be a written document, an email, a presentation, a drawing, a video, and on and on and on. This course will focus more on the what and why of documents security rather than the how. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on individual tools or technologies. My goal is to expose some of the concepts and considerations around this topic and help get you started. Of course, when appropriate, I'll give you concrete examples, but much of this course will be more theoretical and general.