Tim Thorp, CIS Training & Communications Manager, CIS

You Cannot Secure a Mess

At my house, I have a desk covered with bills and receipts and my wife’s schoolwork. Every week or so, I clean it up. Many items wind up in the trash, but things that I want to keep go into a file cabinet and things that I need to keep, no matter what happens (stuff like social security cards and other legal papers) go in a fireproof safe. Money goes to the bank; I don’t keep more than $100 on my person or in my house.

Therein, you can see that for physical data and items of value, I have a storage model that is progressively more secure as the items become more valuable.

What about digital items (files and databases)?

As for electronic items, a similar set of storage entities is available to me:

• Desktop and email – temporary storage of recently received files,
• The local computer file system – a place to store files that I want to keep,
• The departmental file server – a place to store files which I need to keep, no matter what happens – it would be good to note if these systems are/are not firewalled and/or encrypted, but I really don’t know the answer to that,
• Administrative information systems – these are systems, such as FRS and Banner, which are deployed and managed by CIS to be secure and fail-safe.

So, am I all set?

No, absolutely not. The reason being, I haven’t cleaned up my files for an awful long time. As a result, I have files which require secure storage in my email and on my desktop.

Well, it’s killing my conscience to write this piece, knowing that I need to clean up my files, so I am going to stop and clean them up.

How about you? Is it time to put down the security newsletter and clean up your files? If so, get right to it!

Until next time, ciao.

Tim Thorp
CIS Training & Communications Manager
863-7371
http://training.brown.edu