TeamViewer is targeting a more proactive approach to IT management that will see common problems solved before humans have to intervene, according to its CEO.

The remote access software firm has released a series of AI-powered tools in the past year, including TeamViewer Intelligence , which summarizes support tickets for IT staff and generates automatic fixes for common issues.

Elsewhere, TeamViewer DEX monitors enterprise devices in real time to identify and fix IT issues before they have a negative impact.

This tool is also capable of searching historical enterprise data to investigate IT issues, such as connecting the dots between software crashes and a recent update roll-out, or flagging if seemingly anomalous tickets point to more widespread issues that have yet to rear their head.

To expand the usefulness of its solution, the company has turned to partners such as Salesforce. As part of the sharpened focus, TeamViewer DEX and TeamViewer Intelligence will integrate directly with Salesforce’s AI agent platform Agentforce, in order to streamline IT resolution workflows.

Oliver Steil, CEO at TeamViewer, spoke to ITPro about how this offering reduces the age-old burden of support tickets on IT staff.

“[I]f a user is registering, so to say, the devices to that Salesforce offering, then automatically you can deploy this proactive capability, which I call TeamViewer DEX, it will be part of the Salesforce platform, it will be seamless,”

“It will be run on every device, every managed registered device it will run, and therefore you get the full benefit of these capabilities for those devices from the Salesforce platform.”

TeamViewer acquired the digital employee experience (DEX) firm 1E earlier this year, for an agreed sum of $720 million. In bundling these features into the TeamViewer platform and pairing them with its internal AI models, the firm has sought to greatly improve workflows for solving IT issues.

TeamViewer is doubling down on Salesforce ties

It’s clear in our conversation with Steil that TeamViewer’s partnership with Salesforce is a key way the company aims to reach IT admins, by bringing its functionality to platforms they’re already accustomed to using.

“When we were discussing with Salesforce how we can elevate the partnership that we’ve had for years now, we got to learn that they are making a very active move into IT service management,” Steil said.

TeamViewer realized that integrating its proactive IT management offering within Salesforce could dramatically improve user experience, Steil told ITPro, with the partnership enabling more autonomous IT monitoring and user resolution.

Within TeamViewer’s existing monitoring, IT admins can monitor management, issue resolution, and configuration from a centralized dashboard and produce AI-driven summaries of recurring incidents.

Its own AI solutions can then generate code for an automatic fix to common problems, Steil explained.

“So if we've seen that person X had an issue in a printer installation in an office environment, maybe, then an IT expert had connected to this computer, solved the issue through settings changes. We capture this and we can write an automation that in the next incident, when it happens, when somebody else comes and wants to install the same printer, that this potential issue before it occurs is actually resolved and remediated.”

Each step of this process requires automation, Steil added, with automatic inspection of sessions paired with AI-generated code and AI systems used to pick between the 3,000-odd automations that are available within the platform to solve the issue.

This is an opt-in feature and Steil stressed that TeamViewer checks in with customers to ensure they would like the platform to inspect and summarize their sessions.

OT devices are in the crosshairs for TeamViewer

Going forward, TeamViewer is seeking a “large number” of its 650,000 paying customers to opt-in to its AI platform, Steil said, as it looks to further integrate workflows and expand its AI partnerships.

He added that OT devices are a very important part of TeamViewer’s offering, including machines in operational environments, vending machines, and retail point of sale (POS) terminals.

“We really want to extend that capability of proactive issue resolution, proactive IT management, into this area,” he told ITPro.

“We have use cases, very nice uses, for example, boarding card readers, boarding card scanners at a gate. [It’s] very important to know that they are up and running and if they're not, then remediate this. Because if you have the situation where the flight is boarding and then the scanner doesn't work, it's creates friction, significant friction, so we want to avoid that.”

Other examples include production, warehousing, logistics, Steil added.

“We really want to bring that notion of proactive management to those devices as well, because they are operationally incredibly important,” he said.

“So they’re big value drivers – you can argue making knowledge workers happy using their IT is very, very important in banking, insurance, financial services, government. But if you think about operations, the disruption that you create with non-properly-working devices is often even bigger, because often it affects even more customers and it’s not so easy to fix.”

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Information management is getting harder. Organisations face increasing data volumes, more stringent legal and regulatory record-keeping requirements, stricter privacy rules, increasing threat of breaches and decreasing employee productivity.

Companies are also finding that their old-fashioned, legacy archive strategies are increasingly ineffective. This is driving many organisations to rethink their approach, developing more modern information governance strategies.

Download this whitepaper to learn more.

An overwhelming majority of European companies are relying on inaccurate business data for their decision making.

In addition, four-fifths of sales and marketing staff, and as many as 83 per cent of IT professionals lack confidence that the information in company databases is accurate and up to date.

The warning comes from research carried out with business executives in Germany, France and the UK by Informatica, the information management vendor.

The research found that companies understood the need for accurate data, and a full 99 per cent of companies surveyed had "clearly defined business objectives for their databases and data management".

But confidence in the data varied widely, according to the seniority of the executives being questioned.

Senior executives were the most likely to believe that their companies' data were accurate. But managers responsible for collecting and storing, or acting on, the data were less confident. Just four per cent of middle managers in sales and marketing felt their companies obtained their data objectives "perfectly".

The research comes as businesses are placing more reliance on accurate data, to reduce costs and to win or retain customers.

According to Bert Oosterhof, European CTO at Informatica, this is causing companies to struggle. If line of business managers do not trust the central databases, they will create their own data sets using tools such as Excel. This, in turn, leads to a proliferation of data sets and makes it harder for companies to create "one version of the truth", Oosterhof said.

"The problem is one of inaccurate or incomplete data," he said. "In addition, large organisations have various systems, and IT struggles to get that data out of those systems, and into a form the business needs."

IT departments need to do more than apply a technical solution to the problem, Oosterhof suggested. Instead, they need to work with the business to understand how data is used.

More than 25 per cent of the content that workers view each day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio by 2013, according to research by Gartner.

This proliferation of video will make content producers rethink their information dispersal techniques, presumably refiguring the way they provide information to include more technology.

Training procedures and information management strategies are to include more video and audio in order to appeal to a larger audience. Information managers, architects, record managers and content creators will need to adjust their content delivery in order to keep up.

This information all comes as internet video has become mainstream. Short, bite-size videos on channels such as YouTube have drawn wide amounts of people to that website. Consumers are now demanding the ability to be able to search within the video, meaning new technology must be created.

"Consumerisation has become a force of unmatched potency in the past and the same will be true when it comes to the explosive spike in the popularity of consumer online video, fuelling a similar interest in video within businesses," said Whit Andrews, vice president and analyst at Gartner. "Video use on the web is growing swiftly, with 73 per cent of the internet audience watching a video online at least monthly - that is about 90 million viewers."

According to Andrews, video search will incorporate proven methods from social networking, social tagging, video and audio transcription and conventional enterprise search.

Up to 30 per cent of an organisation's data could be "dirty", according to a top informatics researcher.

Delivering a lecture after winning the British Computer Society's (BCS) Roger Needham Award, Professor Wenfei Fan said that businesses and their customers could be negatively affected by "dirty data" any information which is inconsistent, inaccurate, incomplete or out of date. "Poor quality data can give us trouble the problem is everywhere," he said.

According to Fan, Australia has 500,000 dead people with active Medicare cards, while the US Pentagon's bad data quality led that organisation to attempt to send over 200 dead soldiers back to Iraq.

"In the UK, we're doing no better," he said, saying this country has issued 81 million national insurance numbers to a population of only 60 million.

But it's not just the public sector. Fan said that in a customer database of over half a million records, 120,000 become invalid within a year. And, the error rates for industry range from a fairly accurate one per cent to as high as 30 per cent.

And such dirt can lead to high costs, he said. Among other examples, he cited the case of Lehman Brothers, which inaccurately entered 300 million for a 3 million trade, taking 300 billion off the FTSE 100.

It's not just a problem for high finance, but for retail, too. Fan noted an example from Dell, which sold 15,000 computers in Chile for 79 when they were actually worth 303.

Fan claimed dirty data costs US businesses as much as $611 billion (412 billion) and US customers as much as $2.5 billion (1.68 billion) each year. "Real life data is dirty, and dirty data is costly," Fan said.

While he admitted 100 per cent accuracy was essentially impossible, Fan called for better tools to cross-reference databases to detect incorrect data.

Fan is chair of web data management in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. The Roger Needham award is given by the BCS and Microsoft to a UK-based researcher within ten years of their PhD for their contribution to computer science.

The entertaining lecture can be viewed [a href="http://emea25537091.emea.acrobat.com/bcs_

needham_2008" target="_blank"]here[/a]; click option eight' to go directly to Fan's lecture.

It was the data breach that kicked it all off a year ago this week, the government admitted HM Revenue and Customs had lost two discs containing records on 20 million people.

The tax body had dumped data on a third of the population including children onto a pair of unencrypted discs and sent them off with a courier, not once, but twice.

In the uproar that followed, more and more stories about data breaches in the public and private sector began to be noticed and reported. Indeed, since the mess at HMRC, some 277 such mishaps have been reported to data watchdogs at the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). Lost USB drives, stolen laptops and even papers left on a train have left millions of people in this country open to identity theft and fraud not to mention, a bit pissed off.

The government responded with amusingly ignorant debates in Parliament and massive reports two were released in one day offering reams of advice on how to avoid another HMRC.

But it's not exactly rocket science, now is it? In case you haven't been paying attention, we've gathered up the top 10 lessons to be learned from this year of data breaches.

Lesson One: The public wants to know about data breachesIt's no surprise newspapers jumped all over the HMRC incident. Uncovering a massive government error, caused by funding cuts and incompetence, is the stuff of happy dreams for journalists trust us on this one.

The tale of millions of records including banking details going missing because of such complete and utter foolishness didn't sit well with the public at all. And it shouldn't. Everyone affected faces identity theft and fraud because of incidents like this one; phishing attacks based on the HMRC debacle have already occurred, and those didn't even require the discs to fall into the hands of criminals.

So HMRC became a watershed. The odd big data breach was covered by the press before last November, but usually only if the story was connected to a large fine. Now, every lost laptop or misplaced memory stick was cause for a headline and outrage. The public you, me and everyone else had learned that poor data management could hurt them.

Unsurprisingly then, people have started calling for data breach notification laws. Companies are not legally required to tell their customers and citizens when data goes missing, but surveys have suggested the general public want such legislation, even if IT directors aren't so enthusiastic. Lesson Two: People can be sackedIt's something many people have called for over the past year someone to be held responsible for data losses. While the head of HMRC Paul Gray did step down after the breach, it was also for overall organizational concerns, which were certainly highlighted by the breach, but not the only symptom of troubles at the tax body.

But since then, laptops and USBs and discs have disappeared, and no one has been publicly sacked except in one case, involving Colchester Hospital.

the manager was duly fired

While some might say the manager was made a scapegoat, others clearly hope such disciplinary action becomes more common. Either way, keep watch of those laptops, or risk your career.

Lesson Three: USB drives don't stay in pocketsMemory sticks are great you can transfer data easily and quickly, stick it in your pocket, and then lose it all on a pub floor.

Back in May, the MoD did just that. A USB was discovered on the floor of a Newquay nightclub. The unencrypted stick contained data on military personnel, training exercises, and soldiers' accommodations.

Thankfully, whoever discovered the roving USB did the right thing, and rather than hand it over to terrorists, turned it into responsible authorities a tabloid newspaper.

And just this month, the government lost a memory stick in a pub car park; this time, it held passwords to Government Gateway, a massive online public sector portal.

So while USB drives might seem a cheap and cheerful data transfer tech, they can be costly. Just ask PA Consulting. That firm mislaid a memory stick containing the details of all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales. For that, the Home Office ended its 1.5 million contract.

Lesson Four: Laptops are easy to stealLaptops and portable hard drives are not only easy to carry around, but relatively pricey equipment. Unsurprisingly, if it's worth stealing and it isn't nailed down, it's going to get stolen.

So don't leave laptops near open windows, in unlocked car boots or anywhere a devious member of the public could spy it and snatch it. The MoD, the NHS and other government agencies can all attest to this, though they don't seem to be learning the lesson very quickly.

A Tooting-based hospital saw six laptops vanish in one incident this year, while two were stolen from a hospital in Brent.

Thieves nicked a laptop belonging to secretary of state for communities and local government Hazel Blears through a smashed window, while a MoD laptop holding details of 600,000 people was stolen from a car.

Laptops aren't the only theft-friendly devices. A few drives containing Royal Air Force personnel data went missing from a military base earlier this year.

And it's not just public sector organisations losing laptops. Associated Newspapers lost one computer containing bank account details.

Lesson Five: Encrypt everythingWith all the roving USB drives, stolen laptops, discs lost in the post, isn't it time encryption became the norm?

MI5 uses the tech as well which is handy, as it lost a portable computer through an open window in October.

And while the General Teaching Council failed to pay attention to the moral of the HMRC story don't put important things in the post its lost disc was helpfully encrypted, meaning the 11,423 affected teachers could sleep a little easier.

The majority of the other cases in the past year haven't involved encrypted media but why not? The tech is cheap and relatively easy to roll out. The point could become moot in the next few years, as the next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system is expected to have encryption built-in though does anyone want to wait that long or depend on Microsoft to keep us safe? Didn't think so.

Lesson Six: People are the weak linkNo matter what tech you use, or what policies you put in place, it all comes down to people and their skills do they know about data security and are they even capable of keeping things safe?

Indeed, speaking at a Gartner security summit, Martin Smith, chairman of the Security Awareness Special Interest Group (SASIG), said that no matter how shiny and cool and secure a firm's tech was, "the people screwed you in the end."

With that in mind, the government has announced all civil servants handing private data are to get security training a good first step, but it needs to be expanded. Is there any arm of the government which doesn't handle people's private data?

Lesson Seven: Hold less informationOne of the problems with the HMRC case was how much information was on the discs. After the breach, reports revealed that less information was actually requested by the intended recipient the National Audit Office but the tax body didn't have the time or money to strip fields out of the data base, so more information was sent than necessary.

And as the government looks to collect more and more data on its citizens, for projects like the national identity card scheme, this problem will only grow. This point was hammered home in a report from none other than the Home Affairs Committee, which said the government should keep watch on "function creep" and adopt a principle of what it called "data minimisation", collecting only essential information.

"What we are calling for is an overall principle of 'least data, for least time'," said committee chairman Keith Vaz at the time. "We have all seen over the past year extraordinary examples of how badly things can go wrong when data is mishandled, with potentially disastrous consequences."

The ICO has also repeatedly called for less information to be held, but the government doesn't seem to hear its own watchdog barking

Or that's what a few organisations learned this year.

An Oxford man bought a computer on eBay for just 35. Quite a bargain, given it held the banking details, credit card numbers and even signatures of a million people. Apparently, the device was sold by an "ex-employee" of digital document company Graphic Data.

Kirklees Council found itself the subject to a potential data breach after a virtual private network (VPN) server a supplier previous used was sold on eBay for just 99p. Not only did the buyer win the Cisco equipment for one heck of a discount, but security codes were still programmed onto the device when it was hooked up, it reconnected to the council's private servers without any prompting. Whoops.

Another savvy shopper got more than they bargained for via the auction site after successfully bidding on a second-hand camera for just 17. Not only did the buyer win a Nikon digital camera, but also a memory card complete with photos and documents relating to suspected terrorists being investigated by the device's previous owner, MI6. James Bond would be ashamed.

Lesson Nine: Shopping online isn't perfectly safeNo, it's not time to panic. The vast majority of online transactions are carried out without any trouble at all. But when it goes bad, it can be ugly, as mail order clothing retailer Cotton Traders found this summer.

Hackers managed to steal the credit card details of as many as 38,000 customers from the online clothing shop, including enough information to leave people open to card not present' fraud.

And although the attack happened in January, customers were not alerted to it until June. How many of them do you think will do their Christmas shopping online this year?

Indeed, a survey by Symantec suggested 93 per cent of people wouldn't hand over the details to a firm which had already had a breach makes you wonder what the other seven per cent are thinking?

Lesson 10: Data breaches can cost you. A lot.According to research by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach by record is 47.

About half of that cost is from lost business, with the rest from detection, notification, and cleaning up after the fact such as issuing new account cards or helping victims avoid fraud. Based on the study, the 25 million records lost by HMRC cost some 625 million.

At the time, Quocirca's Bob Tarzey said: "There is no evidence that the HMRC data loss last year cost anything it terms of the data actually being use to exploit tax payers as it is not even clear that the data reached the public domain, however, the cost to HMRCs reputation was immense, if it had been a company this may well have led to a share price drop."

Merchant Securities Group was fined 77,000 even though it didn't even have a security breach, but simply because its methods risked enabling one.

At the time, Margaret Cole, the director of enforcement at the FSA, said: "It is unacceptable that despite increased awareness of data security issues, a firm should be so careless about its systems for protecting customers' personal details. People have a right to expect their details to be kept secure and firms should be committed to treating their customers fairly in all aspects of their business." Right on, Margaret. Right on.

Lesson 11: The ICO needs more powerOf the 277 data breaches the ICO has investigated over the past year, it's taking action against 30 organisations. That's not a lot.

The actions it can take generally consist of sending an angry letter demanding changes to processes, to ensure the guilty body learns to comply with the Data Protection Act. For the most part, this means deleting unnecessary data and encrypting portable media devices which is what the watchdog made Virgin Media do in the wake of a lost disc.

Under the threat of prosecution, most organisations seem to just buy some encryption software and get on with business. Not really much of a deterrent, is it?

Members of the government and the information commissioner himself have all called for stronger powers. Thomas said last year that his limited powers were a "very bizarre situation, unlike virtually all the other data protection authorities around the world and most other regulatory bodies, such as the Financial Services Authority."

Indeed, until the watchdog gains the power to fine like the FSA or data breaches become criminalised, it's going to continue to be little more than a source of good advice often ignored and some nasty letters now and then.

Three local authorities are taking on new address verification software to integrate with a key UK address database and better manage the citizen address data held on their systems.

The London Borough of Brent, Surrey County Council and Manchester City Council announced today they will use QAS Gateway, Experian QAS address verification software, to integrate with the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG).

The NLPG contains over 30 million residential, business and non-mailing addresses and is used extensively by local authorities in England and Wales.

The authorities are looking to reduce the costs associated with managing inaccurate and incorrectly formatted address data across multiple departments.

A 2006 report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research estimated local government could tap efficiency gains of 54.4 million a year by using NLPG data.

By integrating the NLPG with verification software, the authorities will be able to ensure the accuracy of address data entering and already in their systems to prevent duplicate citizen records. And they will be able link addresses/citizens across departments using a unique property reference number (UPRN).

The software also offers Brent, Surrey and Manchester the opportunity to support data sharing and migration projects, as well as to append additional datasets to gain insight into the profiles of the types of people accessing public services.

Chris Waterman, client index project manager at London Borough of Brent, said: "We were keen to use QAS Gateway across Brent council to improve the quality of the address information we hold."

He said improving address quality is an important part of the council's ongoing Client Index project, which is building a single citizen view of those living and working in the borough.

"Introducing QAS software will enable us to exploit the Local Land and Property Gazetteer (a local version of the NLPG) and ensure we capture better quality data, first time," he added.

Some 79 per cent of Brits are concerned about fraud, but they still reveal personal data online, according to a survey of 1,500 UK adults.

A whopping 84 per cent said they revealed highly sensitive information about themselves online. But the survey sponsor (ISC)2 said marketers continue to require people to register such information before they shop online, join a social networking group, or receive regular updates or newsletters.

Of those who revealed their personal data online, 86 per cent said they provide their postcode and 84 per cent their date of birth. Over a third (34 per cent) also reveal their mother's maiden name, 29 per cent are happy to name their place of birth, and 10 per cent give out bank account information.

"People are aware of the dangers of providing personal and highly sensitive data online such as date of birth and mother's maiden name and bank details but they still do," said John Colley, Europe, Middle East and Africa managing director for (ISC)2. "This makes it easy for criminals to find and use their personal data for identity theft and fraud."

The survey also found that when giving personal information online, most people (76 per cent) try to ensure the site they are visiting is secure and will protect their personal information.

Some two-thirds (76 per cent) also said they tick the box asking for their details to remain confidential and 14 per cent seek third party re-assurance that the site is legitimate. While 11 per cent research the site's validity with a relevant industry body.

But Colley added: "Websites should not be forcing or even asking people to submit these personal details about themselves. Consumers that want to shop online or sign up to receive information or join a social network for example, often have no choice if they want to proceed with their transaction. Yet we would never give this information to a shop assistant or someone surveying us in the street. It is time that marketers changed their data collection practices and stop asking people to reveal sensitive data online."

Colley added that companies should realise there are no guarantees that their networks or websites would not be infiltrated by cyber criminals and lose such sensitive data.

It's no secret that the biggest potential loss where technology is concerned isn't the assorted hardware and software, but the data that's created using them.

Whereas a storage solution or network infrastructure can be costly to replace or repair, it is at least fixable to some degree. Lost data? That's the kind of thing that may never be recovered, and could cause the most long-term damage to an organisation, and those that do business with it.

Yet that's been the case for decades, since the days when USB flash sticks were but a glint in a floppy disk's eye. The need to secure and protect data has, though, rarely been more paramount than it is today and that's why business back up strategies are simply vital.

Given the amount of work that's done on or via computers, it's crucial to have good protection in place. Just watch a work colleague who's just lost their mobile phone without any kind of back up in place for proof of just how stressful one single piece of technology failing can be, and multiply that by the size of an entire organisation. It's a crude measure, granted, but arguably not too far off the mark.

Priority

However, even though the vast majority of businesses would concede the need for proper back up strategies and solutions, there are still a sizeable number of firms who simply won't promote it to near the top of their priority list. This is in spite of some quite worrying numbers should data be lost.

Backup Direct estimates that 20MB of lost data can take up to 30 hours to build back up, and when you factor in lost time and opportunity costs, the bill for such a modest loss could run close to 50,000. While the total is likely to be more contained than that for most, there's undoubtedly a financial impact.

Databarracks runs an annual survey on the topics of backing up and recovery, and IT PRO reported on the findings of the most recent, published in August.

In brief, while 91 per cent of respondents felt confident that their back up and security systems were up to the job, when the questions started digging a little deeper, the problems started to mount up.

Strategy

And at the heart of these issues is a regular complaint among IT support technicians, namely that the job is generally only half done.

Because the amount of data businesses have been creating is soaring, and likewise because the associated storage requirements have exponentially grown, backing up has required a greater degree of financial and human investment than ever before. It's clearly no longer enough to run a back up onto a tape, and lock it in the office drawer.

The modern day business all but demands that logs are checked, recovery discs are tested and back ups are regularly taken off site. This, inevitably, takes time.

Short shrift

And it, as Databarracks discovered, is still given surprisingly short shrift. While many users do diligently back up their files, a surprising number of firms aren't going far enough. The survey revealed, for instance, that of those who don't use encryption, or take data off-site, or replicate it, 74 per cent remain confident that their policies are still up to the job.

And it gets worse. Some 67 per cent discovered Databarracks, of those who are content not to check back up logs, or square off someone's time to test recovery disks, still believe that their data is secure. It's arguably the old idea that if something's never happened to you, it never will. After all, how many anti-virus packages are sold to home users after they experience the effects of malware for the first time?

Perhaps the most sobering statistic of all comes from BackUp Direct, who argue that 99 per cent of businesses don't perform a daily back up. Granted, most of those are very small enterprises, but there are obvious knock-ons throughout the economy, with each instance of data loss unlikely to affect just one organisation.

The danger though goes further than that. Given that organisations tend to hold data pertaining to the many other firms that they do business with, the Data Protection Act of 1988 comes into play. It states: "You must safeguard your own or anyone else's data, by appropriate precautions against loss, corruption or unauthorized disclosure."

In short, there aren't just business critical issues here, but legal considerations as well.

Why so lax?

So why are people so lax when it comes to implementing a full, rounded back up strategy? As Peter Groucutt of Databarracks remarks: "Businesses and the regulatory environment in which we all exist demand fast and reliable recovery time objectives for IT systems."

But, like many jobs for overstretched IT departments, the back up rarely makes it to the top of the list, and not often enough with the appropriate resource put behind it. Odd, when you factor in news from Symantec that a third of organisations had to deploy their disaster recovery plans in the past twelve months.

Larger organisations tend to be the better prepared, and as a rule of thumb, the bigger the business, the more tuned in it tends to be. The genuine problem seems to lie in the smaller and medium sized enterprises, where IT support is either outsourced in an effort to manage costs, or technical support headcounts tend to be lower. Particularly in the smaller organisations, siphoning off a proportion of already-stretched time to focus on backing up strategies is rarer than it should be, and yet it's, inevitably, these firms that would suffer the most should a major data loss occur.

Fortunately, a veritable army of back up solutions of increasing sophistication are shouldering more and more work in this area, and given the convenience offered by securing data over a fast Internet connection, there's a degree of automating that can be employed.

Yet that doesn't, ultimately, break the mindset problem that lies at the heart of many IT challenges. Because data loss, as many who have suffered at the hands of data loss can testify, can have a devastating effect on a business, and in some cases deliver a knockout blow. It's very much the problem that's best proactively solved, and that involves proper care and attention before it's too late.

That, however, isn't something that always comfortably tallies with human nature

Corporations around the globe have no formal policy for governing the control, access and use of information, a new study has found.

The Future of Enterprise Information Governance paper, based on an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) survey, revealed that nearly two thirds (62 per cent) of respondents indicated their companies had no formal information governance programme in place.

It concluded this lack of formality was a concerning trend, as it may leave many corporations unprepared for new compliance mandates and put their sensitive information at risk of preventable breaches and inaccuracies.

This was despite the fact that 77 per cent of respondents expect information governance to be important to their company's success through 2011, while 68 per cent also expect the complexity of their company's information governance issues will grow during that same time period.

"Even though the standards for good governance are rising, we find that much of today's focus around corporate governance leaves information out of the discussion," said Frank Hauck, executive vice president of global marketing and customer quality for the survey sponsor, EMC.

Only 43 per cent rated their firms' ability to integrate and share information across departments and necessary third parties as good or very good; 21 per cent said it was poor' or very poor.

Over half (57 per cent) of all respondents also admitted that they do not have a single view of the customer. And a further 40 per cent said their firm did not regularly review and revise information backup and retention policies.

The survey also uncovered some stark differences between the 62 per cent of respondents that had no formal information governance policy and the 38 per cent that did: only 51 per cent of companies with no policy rated their firms' overall ability to protect sensitive data as good' or very good,' compared with 85 per cent for those that do have a formal strategy.

A massive 81 per cent of firms with information governance policies report that "information can be better shared between departments, allowing for better decision-making". And only 57 per cent of companies where such policies were absent rated their company's ability to provide access to critical business information when it is needed as good' or very good'.

Debra D'Agostino, deputy director of the EIU's industry and management research division in the Americas, added: "As firms large and small begin to think more strategically about how information is used and conveyed, creating a standard set of policies and procedures for governing information protection, use and distribution inside and outside the firm will be extremely important."

The survey interviewed 192 senior executives from companies around the world with turnover in the hundreds of millions of dollars to over $1 billion (644 million).

Human error is the biggest threat to IT security, and businesses are still failing to spread awareness of policies to their staff.

This was according to chairman and founder of the Security Awareness Special Interest Group (SASIG) Martin Smith, who was speaking at a keynote at the Gartner IT security summit in London.

Smith was talking about the "hundreds" of data breaches which had occurred and been headline news in recent memory, ever since the Nationwide laptop loss and the high-profile incident when HMRC data was lost on CDs.

He said that many of the incidents were due to human error and that many of them could not have been stopped by technology because as he put it: "the people screwed you in the end." This meant that although IT spending was continually increasing, the situation was getting worse.

Smith claimed many employees were unlikely to have read the staff handbook outlining policies, or even kept their contract or letter of employment, despite information given to new employees being recognised as one of the best ways of raising awareness.

"Awareness is the oil that makes the engine work, and you do not have that oil," Smith said. "You have all this fantastic machinery but none of it really works because there is no oil in the engine."

He said that it was also crucial for businesses to have the input of senior management. "If you do not have that support it is just like pushing porridge uphill," he said. "You are really just wasting your time."

"Senior management aren't very bright, right at the top, at board level. What's more they have very, very short attention spans and not interested in what we [security] do at board level."

Smith said it was necessary for security professionals to grab boardroom attention by pushing the case that businesses with good security would also be the best performing.

Customers don't trust organisations to properly handle their personal data, and believe data breaches should be a offence punishable by law.

Nearly four out of five people surveyed said they thought their personal information is insecure in the hands of the companies who hold that data.

And whopping 89 per cent of more than 1,600 individuals and businesses questioned thought that reckless or repeated data breaches should be a criminal matter and punishable by imprisonment, with four out of five people saying it should be a one strike and you're out' rule when it comes to data loss.

The research, commissioned by security giant Symantec, also revealed that a further 75 per cent are concerned by how much information companies hold online or off about them.

So much so that 93 per cent of people said they would not provide personal details to a company that had past problems with data breaches.

"These statistics are very concerning for businesses, particularly in the current, unstable market condition," said John Brigden, Symantec senior vice president for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). "But almost 60 per cent of companies said it would make it a lot harder to attract new customers once their reputation had been tarnished."

The majority of companies polled (76 per cent) also said they would expect to lose customers if a data loss or breach occurs, with about half of them expecting the losses to be immediate.

Brigden stressed every time that every time someone accesses the internet, to surf, shop or stay in touch with friends, they are giving away our personal information. "Today we all have an enormous digital footprint' whether we realise it or not," he said. "And clearly people are concerned how businesses and government handle that data."

The survey echoes the findings of research also released today by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) on how well consumers manage their own personal data.

The ICO research found 40 per cent of Brits would hand over their sensitive information to a company without knowing if it was trustworthy. By the same token, the Symantec survey discovered 73 per cent of respondents were not checking what happened to their credit card details when the card leaves their sight and 18 per cent were not verifying the security of websites they use.

Like the ICO research, this survey concluded that UK consumers were more interested in price and value than security when it comes to giving out their information.

NHS Connecting for Health has firmly denied reports that it was prepared to sell' patient data to private companies.

The denial came following reports that the government was prepared to give businesses access to a massive database of millions of patients which would include details of diagnoses, operations and prescribed medicines.

It was claimed that this could a potential jackpot for companies who were looking for medical research data or to sell products back to the NHS.

The NHS said that there were very strict controls on the use of patient information and that anybody who wished to use identifiable patient data without consent would have to put their case to an independent body known as the Patient Information Advisory Group (PIAG).

A Connecting for Health spokesperson told The Sunday Telegraph that although data could be in theory used to trace individuals, researchers were more likely to examine records in batches of hundreds or thousands at a time.

Connecting for Health said in a statement: "The NHS has always used patient data for research and planning purposes.

"This data is crucial to run the NHS efficiently, to develop new treatments for serious illnesses, to help develop appropriate public health policies and to inform commissioning decisions."

It also said that the choice of whether the data should stay within the health service or go outside for research was a matter for public consultation, with the website accessible here.

The news comes as the NHS make big decisions on how doctors will be able to access Summary Care Records, as it overhauls much of its IT.

The government's information watchdog today warned consumers to keep a close watch on their own data.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has called on consumers to use their legal rights to manage their personal information - because organisations aren't doing such a great job.

An ICO-sponsored survey of over 2,000 UK adults found the level of awareness around the importance of personal data had grown 95 per cent considered it quite' or very' valuable and more than 70 per cent claimed to routinely shred personal documents.

But it revealed 44 per cent of those questioned by the ICM Research poll had never considered contacting an organisation to find out what information it holds about them. More alarmingly, 40 per cent admitted they would hand over their details to a company without knowing whether it was trustworthy.

David Smith, ICO deputy commissioner, said people need to realise that the more personal data they provide to organisations, the greater the risk was that it would become out-of-date, be held for longer than the Data Protection Act (DPA) stipulates, or fall into the wrong hands.

"The more people that use their rights [under the DPA] to check what information is held about them, the stronger the signal to organisations that the mismanagement of peoples personal details will not be tolerated," Smith said.

Demonstrating the risks when too much personal information is kept by organisations, the ICO said that frequent data breaches should urge people to take the protection of their personal information even more seriously.

With that in mind, the ICO has launched a new online tool to help consumers do their bit to protect and manage their personal information.

Smith said: "Our Personal Information Healthcheck is suitable for everyone, whether they've never before thought about protecting their personal information or could just benefit from a few extra tips and ideas."

The 'healthcheck' is of a list of questions about the storage and management of personal information - like PIN numbers and passports - that is used to score the level of risk a person takes with their data and offer relevant security advice.