Physical infosec

Sorry for the pause: among other things, I've been busy exploring a new subject for next month's security awareness and training materials.

June's topic is physical information security, something we've covered a number of times previously. Physically protecting computer systems and storage media against threats such as intruders and thieves, fires, floods and power problems is an essential part of information security for all sorts of reasons that we'll soon be elaborating on.

This time around, however, we'll also pick up on protection of another category of tangible information assets, specifically our people.

Workers are definitely assets (otherwise, why would we pay them?) but do they qualify as 'information assets'? I'd argue yes for the reason that we value their brains at least as much as their brawn. Whereas brawn can generally be replaced by machinery, it's much harder to replace a competent person's knowledge, experience, expertise and so forth, advances in robotics and artificial intelligence notwithstanding.

Protecting workers, then, takes us into the realm of health and safety, hence why I'm busy researching at the moment. I'll have more to say on this so tune back to this station soon for the next exciting episode.