Stephen Burrows, managing director of the Wigan-based Centre for Assessment, gives advice on how businesses can protect themselves and their clients' details from missing personal data.
"Attitudes to data protection are changing fast and rightly so.
"We are all concerned about the loss of 25 million child benefit claimants' personal information, the missing details of three million learner drivers and that NHS patient details have
been misplaced.
In the wrong hands this information can have detrimental consequences, and across the UK, people are taking the protection of personal information much more seriously.
We're working in a world increasingly served and driven by computer technologies so it's important that companies look at the controls they have in place and identify ways to tighten up their data protection. After all, the systems are only as secure as the weakest link.
One of the measures being brought in to address this is ISO 27001.
This new Information Security standard provides a systematic framework for an organisation to account for its information assets, assess the security risks and implement effective controls to avoid these.
ISO 27001 is suitable for organisations of all sizes.
We're confident that Government departments, financial institutions and the wider business community will, in the very near future, be looking to implement and gain certification to ISO 27001 in order to gain the public's confidence that their data is indeed protected.
Centre for Assessment will certainly be recommending the new standard to clients, many of whom are already certificated to ISO 9001.
