While the dandy highwayman may no longer stop a coach shouting ‘stand and deliver’, and the Great Train Robbery consigned to history, it doesn’t mean money is never stolen. Instead of months of meticulous planning new age bandits can, and do, virtually rob banks from the comfort of their living rooms. They hide behind a computer screen silently hammering away at the bank vault until they manage to break in. And it’s highly lucrative as, if it works on one door, the likelihood is it can be replicated on hundreds of others and in one night millions can be stolen from hundreds of vaults.

The sad truth is cyber thieves can, and will if you let them, visit your premises and ransack your filing cabinets to steal your plans or poach your customers and intellectual properly without physically setting foot in your building. In today’s virtual world millions of people can now attack you and distance is not a factor. I suppose that could be considered progress!

Virtually safe and sound

In the real world, if you buy and fit the strongest lock available on the market it might make your building secure. However, every time you give another person a key the strength of that lock is weakened as you’re now reliant on each person’s sincerity and their ability to protect your key. The question is simple, how strong is the lock if everyone can open it?


The same is true for your virtual assets. Whether it’s the customer database, your research and development data or even who is your top performing sales person – if it has a value to you it deserves to be locked away.

Many organisations think that, by encrypting their data, they’re secure. However, and here we must dispel a security myth, unfortunately it’s not true. It comes back to the strongest lock scenario outlined previously. Encryption means nothing unless they keys remain protected and accessible only to those who should have access to decrypt and consume data, otherwise the data that companies believe is protected remains woefully exposed.