With all of the recent fuss about PCI requirements and how to protect payment cards, many companies have opted to take a far too narrow view of data protection. The PCI rules are absolutely designed to only apply to payment cards. But the same common-sense security guidelines will also dramatically help the security of CRM databases, personnel files, E-mail servers, payroll details and even the full contents of your Web site.
In this week’s Guest Column on the new McAfee security blog, a reader describes a run-in with a nervous customer who had lost a ton of data because he hadn't been doing a backup. Why? It didn't include payment data, so he ignored all of the PCI guidelines he was following elsewhere in the system. So what was so important about this non-PCI-oriented data? “It’s the flight maintenance records for our entire fleet of aircraft.”