Gramm Leach Bliley

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In this series on defining your company’s information security classifications, we’ve already looked at Protected Information under state PII breach notification statutes, and PHI under HIPAA. What’s next? Customer information that must be safeguarded under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), a concern for any “financial institution” under GLBA.

GLBA begins with an elegant, concise statement of congressional policy: “each financial institution has an affirmative and continuing obligation to respect the privacy of its customers and to protect the security and confidentiality of those customers’ nonpublic personal information.” Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Things get complicated, though, for three reasons: (1) the broad scope of what constitutes a “financial institution” subject to GLBA; (2) the byzantine structure of regulators authorized under GLBA to issue rules and security standards and to enforce them; and (3) the amorphous definition of nonpublic customer information.
Continue Reading Adding yet more class to Information Governance (Part 3)

 will be missed, but his wisdom will endure. Who else could have observed “No one goes there nowadays. It’s too crowded”? The information governance equivalent is “No one has information anymore. There’s too much of it.” In the last decade we have witnessed the systemic utilitization of computing power. Data used to be housed predominantly within a company’s own systems, but now, through remote storage, SaaS, PaaS, and other cloud solutions, more and more information is hosted by third-party providers. Also, as marketplace forces compel organizations to leverage or outsource functions that used to reside internally, operational service providers increasingly create, receive, maintain, and process information on the organization’s behalf.

It follows that information governance (the organization’s approach to satisfying information compliance and controlling information risk while maximizing information value) can no longer simply be an internally-focused exercise. IG “has come to a fork in the road, and must take it.” Service provider selection, contracting, and oversight are now primary vehicles of information governance – because when it comes to governing your organization’s information, “the future ain’t what it used to be.”
Continue Reading 90% of information governance is half contracting