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The conclusion of David Gibson, VP of strategy, Varonis on 10 simple steps which can be employed to prevent data from being misused or stolen.

8. Audit Permissions and Group Membership Changes

Cleaning up permissions and group memberships is critical, but keeping everything in order is impossible without an audit trail of changes over time. Only by tracking all permissions and group membership changes can you be sure that only the right people continue to have access to your data sets. Enforcing access controls is simply impossible without a record of all the daily changes. If inappropriate access or group membership is granted, an audit trail of who made the change and when can help ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

9. Lock down, delete or archive stale data

In many organizations stale data is clogging up vast amounts of storage space and making it harder to manage. In addition to the cost of storing all of this stale data, keeping it on your active servers also increases the risk of it being misused. Automation can analyze access activity and identify any data that is not being used. Once the data owner confirms that he data is indeed stale and no longer needed, data may be archived or deleted.

10. Clean up stale groups and access control lists

Unneeded complexity slows performance and makes mistakes more likely. Organizations often have as many groups as they do users – many are empty, unused or redundant. Some groups contain other groups, which contain other groups, and so on. In some cases, these nested groups end up creating a circular reference where group ultimately contains itself. Also, access control lists often contain references to previously deleted users and groups (also known as “Orphaned SIDS”). These legacy groups and misconfigured access control objects should be identified and remediated to improve both performance and security.

Constant vigilance and automation are going to have to be your watchwords given the myriad number of threats which are now part of the IT security landscape. Automation will also have to be part of your armoury and, of course, you will have to keep up-to-date with all the new relevant threats. However, if you keep these top 10 tips that the head of your agenda you will be making your organisation a safer place to do business and are less obvious targets for hackers or insiders bent on stealing your secrets.

In follow on from a recent blog from Craig Carpenter, VP, Marketing, Recommind, I wanted to expand on how organisations can best extract maximum value from Big Data, in particular the importance of unstructured information.

We all know that data growth is accelerating at a rapid pace and storage space seems to be moving in lock step with that – but there’s no value in simply storing it and in fact there are considerable costs to that approach.

Most companies today have the ability to analyse data to identify facts – e.g., we sold this product to this person on this date. But organisations are missing valuable information without considering the relationships between those facts. Through the use of machine learning and automatic categorisation technology, organisations can identify the relationships between entities such as people, titles, instances, dates and departments. And from that they can better predict future trends, being able to figure why someone did something, rather than just what they did and thus ascertaining whether the same conditions may exist in the future and if so, what the result will be.

Big data is valuable (when analysed) because it’s different from what was considered data before. Data now is not only numbers, its words and numbers (and potentially images and audio and video too). Those words could be regular words but they could also include slang and vernacular. They could be in multiple languages. Put those together with the numerical data and you have a much bigger, if sometimes messier picture of what’s going on. But today’s tools are starting to be able to extract value from that messier data and include data sources that weren’t previously analysed using software.

Let’s look at a couple of examples of where big data analytics is being put to work.

According to recent statistics from WIPO the number of patents filed each year, worldwide is almost 1.5 million, with more than half a million patents granted in that time. Without the tools to accurately index and categorise information, R&D departments may find it difficult to cross check patents they hold against potential breaches of their patents. Similarly when searching for prior art they need to pull in all sorts of data sources in various formats to make sure they’re not about to infringe on other company’s patents. We’ve seen recently how costly that can be in various high profile cases. Such automation of the patent analysis process is big data analytics in action.

Fraud in healthcare is a huge problem worldwide, but especially in the US. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates that between $70 and 234 billion is lost to healthcare fraud annually – effectively stolen money that results in higher healthcare costs for the rest of the population. Software exists today that can accurately index and categorise information and ultimately identify relationships between entities that in fact indicate fraudulent acts.

By surfacing information that resides in the countless repositories and extracting intelligence that aligns with business goals, organisations and can reduce fraud, or identify new opportunities for valuable intellectual property. And there are many other examples.

By embracing technology to help them identify these opportunities, businesses can embrace and take advantage of the data explosion, rather than hiding from what could end up a data minefield. In the third instalment in this series we will look at some of the risks associated with big data – and how best to ameliorate them.

Data breaches have risen by more than 1,000 percent in five years, with local governments being the main victims.

The data breach figures were released under a Freedom of Information (FoI) request and showed that local governments had seen a rise in data breaches of 1,609 percent, while other public sector organisations saw a rise of 1,380 percent.

The rise in data breaches may prove to become an expensive oversight, as the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) now has the power to issue penalties, with over £2 million in fines handed out to organisations regarding the Data Protection Act.

Singapore-based NewsPage, which specialises in developing and building mobility and management software, is to be bought by consulting firm Accenture.

The move comes as Accenture seeks to develop and improve platform mobility and management capabilities.

Fabio Vacirca, senior managing director of Accenture's consumer goods and services practice, said: "This acquisition is important as it will enhance Accenture's ability to help global consumer goods companies by supporting all route-to-market sales and delivery models across mature and emerging markets."

The Glencore Xstrata deal has been brought to a halt after major shareholder Qatar says it will vote against the £30 billion move.

The Qatar sovereign wealth fund owns 12 percent of Xstrata’s shares, and had indicated back in June that is was unsatisfied, saying that it was “seeking improved merger terms".

Qatar has now stated that: “will vote vote its entire shareholding in Xstrata against the proposed scheme".

Free-Wi-Fi will be provided at Lord’s Cricket Ground, after the owners signed a deal with BSkyB owned The Cloud, to provide the service.

The contracts will last five years, and is already active in the grounds, media centre and refreshment areas.

The Wi-Fi would provide free internet access to 28,500 people when the stands were at full capacity.

Airbus is to deliver 50 planes to China in a deal expected to be worth £2.2 billion.

The deal comes after the EU and china had come into dispute regarding the carbon Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which had affected Airbus as a European company in China.

The news comes as German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits China on a trade-visit, and improve Chinese investment in Europe.

Dutch based chip manufacturer ASML have sold three percent of equity to Samsung as the technology giant seeks to create next-generation chip technology.

AMSL, as one of the world largest chip tool manufactures, has been invested in by other computer giants including Intel and TSMC.

The deal will see Samsung invest £617 million into the chip manufacturer, in order to develop new lithographic based chip technology, which would allow for more power-efficient and faster versions.

4G services may be delayed, after Telefónica threatens legal action, against the decision by Ofcom to allow Everything Everywhere to launch the service early this autumn.

Telefónica have contacted Ofcom, threating legal action according to the Guardian, if rival brands Orange and T-Mobile, owned by Everything Everywhere, are allowed to go ahead with 4G services.

The move would see Telefónica appeal against the ruling to the Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT). This would include a temporary block to the decision by Ofcom, delaying 4G service delivery by Everything Everywhere.

Fujitsu have won a five-year contract, worth $68 million, to provide IT services to trustee group Perpetual.

The deal comes as Perpetual looks to overhaul its IT infrastructure and create efficiency and cost-savings.

The implementation of IT services will begin in the second half of 2013. A statement released by Perpetual detailed that: "The new structure will create more variable cost base and deliver cost savings included in the Transformation 2015 strategy".