Planning for Compliance
Ask most executives about their most pressing
business issue and they may bring up compliance. Organizations today face more
regulation than ever before. And the penalties for failing to protect data are
steep.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, however, can help ease the regulatory
burden. It includes a number of features that can help you make data more
secure. It also makes it easier to manage security policies, a requirement for
many businesses.
While the data protection laws vary from country to
country, there are several common pillars:
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Confidentiality. Confidential, personal, and sensitive
information cannot be exposed to unauthorized organizations or individuals.
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Integrity. Data cannot be modified by unauthorized
organizations or individuals, and the completeness and accuracy are
critical.
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Availability. Information must be available to the right
people at the right time to support timely and accurate financial reporting
and to fulfill demands for information by regulators, investigators, and
court subpoenas.
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Procedural rigor. An organization must also be able to
prove that it performed compliance procedures when needed and that its
technology controls were active and they performed throughout the period in
question.
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Auditing and Logging. Auditing and logging trace how
individuals access and use resources and the execute business procedures.
Systems that process sensitive data must securely log, maintain, and provide
critical event information to ensure a clear audit trail.
Complying with all that regulation can be
incredibly time consuming and burden employees with bureaucratic documentation.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, however, provides features that can
help protect data, document your security efforts, and make it easier to audit
your policies.
Doing nothing, however, is not an option. If you do not provide a means for
employees to share information, they will do so on an ad hoc basis. That will
make it exponentially more difficult to secure data and to track information
needed in an audit.
Early in your deployment, you should consult with your organization’s legal
resources to determine your requirements. Once you know what your
responsibilities are, you can design a solution using the features in Office
SharePoint Server 2007.
A little planning now can help spare you from the pain of an embarrassing
security breach, combing various servers looking for information needed in a
lawsuit, or having to track down individual employees to audit changes made to a
particular file.