The amount of time and effort that goes into creating information assets, not to mention the consequences of getting them trashed, lost, or somehow compromised would seem to warrant some basic efforts in securing them.
Oh well. Let's see what actually happens.
Information assets are stored on file systems. Sharing these assets tends to be important so they are put on some type of network server in a modern file system. Nearly every file system in use today has ways to limit access and modification rights to the files. The Windows NTFS file system has complex access control lists (ACLs) that have some very impressive capabilities.
The sad truth is that these are almost never set correctly. No one has the ability to set these in any mode other than letting pretty much everyone do anything to any file. It is simply too difficult to set the permissions to read only until someone wants to change it, set it to read/write until the update is done, then set it back to read only. Instead, all the permissions are set so anyone can change or delete any of the files at any time. This is like installing an electronic combination door lock with retinal scanning but finding out that is too much of a hassle so you prop the door open with a rock! What could possibly go wrong?
Does anyone else see the disasters waiting to happen? This is the reason why an errant mouse click can corrupt or even destroy the very information the company spent so much time and money creating!
Isn't it a sad state of affairs that the very basic, fundamental, first line of defense for protecting assets isn't done? No wonder people make so many copies of stuff. They can't be sure there is a good copy anywhere!
OK, what about backup? We do backups right? We can restore it can't we? Wait 'til you hear this...
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