In a report this week, apparently data lost in the US is going to cost your company more than data lost in other countries. It's not necessarily because the data is worth more, but instead because of the cost of notifying customers and the disclosure as well as possible fines that cost money. The study examined a number of countries, and found the US and Germany data losses cost more than those in France and the UK.

There was also an announcement last week that a pair of companies received large fines last week. One was brokerage firm fined $375,000 for a SQL Injection attack on a database. The other had a DBA breach security in an insider data disclosure that was fined at nearly a million dollars.

There's a good and bad side to this for those working with data. On one hand, it becomes very important to safeguard your reputation, be honest, and be trustworthy by employers. As the cost of data breaches go up, it becomes extremely important that a company can trust their DBAs. That means that if you are somehow involved in any type of activity that casts doubt on your trust, you might find it increasingly hard to get a job.

The good side is that trustworthy, and skilled, DBAs become more and more valuable all the time. That should mean higher salaries in the future.

Steve Jones

Steve's Pick of the Week  - Room 48 - A data center inside a mountain, operated by Iron Mountain, that uses some natural cooling to handle heat. It's an interesting look at one way to recycle those old mines. Thought I wouldn’t want to work there, it seems like a great way to protect archives of information.