Information is at the centre of every organisation; it drives sales, enables the delivery of services to clients, and ensures organisations operate effectively.  If you lose your information, your organisation will quickly grind to a halt.

To manage information effectively, we need to ensure the proper structure is in place.  Many organisations understandably focus on securing their information, but that is only one part of the framework that needs to be in place.  Because the focus tends to be on securing information, most organisations believe it is the IT department’s responsibility which is inappropriate and unfair.  It is massively important there is collaboration across the organisation to ensure that information is secure and managed correctly from senior managers, IT and compliance departments.

We need to think about the whole picture, from cyber security, record management, retention, data classification, to name just a few of the issues that need to be addressed.

Not securing your information and having the proper management structure in place will lead to issues that will slow the growth of an organisation.  We have often seen businesses struggle to deliver services to clients and consolidate IT systems and organisations because the information is not updated or not structured.  Failing to manage data properly inevitably leads to an increase in cost and organisations having to divert resources to clean up information.

Having said that cleaning and consolidating information is a complete waste of time if you haven’t got the proper security controls in place. Information will go out of date fast, and authorised access to information both internally and externally can compromise the organisation and could lead to having no access at all because of malicious attacks.