There have been a number of high profile incidents lately involving data being misplaced, stolen or lost.  And these aren’t just minor incidents involving little known players.  Last month, the Department of Defense admitted hackers had accessed sensitive data from its state-of-the-art fighter jet program, while last week the National Archives announced that it had misplaced a 1 TB hard drive containing huge amounts of Clinton-era data, including Social Security numbers, addresses, and Secret Service and White House procedures.  And lest one think this is a US-only problem, just this week the UK’s behemoth NHS (National Health Services) reported “losing” thousands of medical records between January and April of this year.

Why are incidents like these happening at an accelerating pace?  Two reasons: 1) skyrocketing data volumes and types, and 2) a shaky information management infrastructure using out-of-date technology.  There’s not a lot that enterprises and government entities can do about the proliferation of things like email, IM, SMS, texting, blogs, wikis and Twitter; as countless examples have attested, trying to prevent such media from being used can be exceedingly difficult if not impossible.  But what these entities can do is implement intelligent systems capable of automatically categorizing, indexing, accessing, preserving, deleting and collecting data in whatever form it might come.  As former Senator Bob Graham recently opined in the Washington Post, good records management is in everyone’s best interest – especially when dealing with particularly sensitive information.

And this problem will not go away anytime soon, at least not until enterprises and government organizations get serious about their information management needs.  On the positive side, the technology available to address these information management issues – automated categorization software, data loss prevention (DLP) products, more intelligent archives, etc. – are increasingly proving themselves up to the task.