compliance

The heads of seven business organizations sent PCI Security Standards Council General Manager Bob Russo a cry for help earlier this month, saying the recession is making it "increasingly difficult" for merchants to meet the requirements of the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

The Stanford Hospital & Clinics, part of Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., has shifted about half of its applications from traditional server platforms to VMware-based virtual machines (VM) -- and found it strongly impacted decision-making on security.

While most companies use data centers to store their primary business information -- such as backups of important files and customer data -- real-time log data and unstructured transactional data are quickly becoming major issues as well. Most industries will face a significant data problem in the future, as compliance requirements force them to not only retain more data, but also make such data easily searchable.

Automation of security is a concept with momentum this year as some of the larger federal agencies, including the DoD, NSA, Agriculture and Energy, are pushing for a new direction beyond the current FISMA audit mandate for compliance.

From HIPPA to Sarbox, a slew of regulations to protect customer and employee data force CIOs to step lively to comply. The punishment for failure to do so is costly and even dire. But once a company folds -- and more are folding every week given the economy -- what happens to that data?

Today's companies are challenged not only with managing rapidly growing volumes of information that are spread across many technologies and geographies, but also with heightened regulatory and legal oversight on their information management – not to mention how to manage all of this amongst tightening IT budgets in a tough economy.

They are etched into the conventional wisdom of IT security, but are these 12 articles of faith (to some) actually wise, or are they essentially myths? A panel of experts offer their judgments.