Employees at all levels are potentially subversive. To build strategies that clarify and enforce what is expected of staff is key to protecting the company's data and so also the company itself. There is little point in employing expensive hardware and software to protect the company’s data if staff has no knowledge of what is expected of them, or what procedures should be followed. For instance employees may choose to download their personal email from Hotmail or Yahoo, thereby circumventing the expensive email control system. Unless they are explicitly made aware of the hazards to the company of this type of activity, they will carry on regardless. Spending a fortune on preventing viruses entering your network and then letting your employees bring in their sons or daughters homework on disk to be printed out on the office colour printer brings similar exposure and possibly opens the door to the more obvious sins of surfing porn or sports sites!

The establishment of a sound and solid security policy throughout the company will without doubt reap benefits in many areas. To supplement this policy implementation a dependable ‘Security Management’ application package will not only make the management of security policies easier to monitor but will in addition create an environment within the organisation where employees will positively influenced by the knowledge that the system is being regulated. If the company then makes use of a well thought out policy management program they are in the best possible position to prevent the worst from happening.


Unfortunately there are no guarantees. To stay on top the security department will always be in conflict with ‘bad guys’, there will always be a new challenges, new viruses, new worms, new trojans and new ways to place illegal personnel with new nasty gadgets to steal your company’s assets.

Remember – ‘There is no such thing as total security only levels of insecurity’.