This month the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has served a Monetary Penalty Notice of £130,000 to Powys County Council, after the details of a child protection case were sent to the wrong recipient. The penalty is the highest that the ICO has served since it received the power in April 2010. The severity of the penalty reflects the fact that the local authority had already received a warning from the ICO to tighten up its security measures following a similar breach.

Over the past 18 months Pro2col has worked closely with a number of County Councils looking to implement a simple way of securing ad-hoc, person to person file transfers.  Additionally, with County Councils looking to centralise or share the cost of services (Shared Services), Ipswitch’s MOVEit DMZ with the Ad Hoc module has proved a very popular choice, especially considering the cost of the Enterprise licence in comparison to other vendors. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I was asked if I recommended using transport encryption or file encryption to protect company files and data.

My answer: “Use both of them, together!”

For starters, here’s a real quick summary of both encryption types:

Transport encryption (“data-in-transit”) protects the file as it travels over protocols such as FTPS (SSL), SFTP (SSH) and HTTPS. Leading solutions use encryption strengths up to 256-bit.

File encryption (“data-at-rest”) encrypts an individual file so that if it ever ended up in someone else’s possession, they couldn’t open it or see the contents. PGP is commonly used to encrypt files. Read the rest of this entry »