Firms need to focus more clearly on the basics of information security and business continuity if they are to avoid adding to the long list of high-profile failures in recent months, according to the global head of business continuity, security and governance at BT.
Speaking to IT Week at the Infosecurity Europe show in London today, Ray Stanton argued that firms have either forgotten, or deliberately ignored the fundamentals of people, policy and process, leading to incidents such as the HMRC scandal and the outages suffered during the summer floods last year.
"We're trying to explain to people that the basics are really important and shouldn't be ignored," he explained. "People forget that if you get the basics right, like incident management, then you can deal with other things coming down the line."
He added that firms need to make their processes and policies flexible enough to cope with rapid changes in technology and cirumstance.
BT research released ahead of the event found that a third of employees are unaware their firm has a business continuity plan, while 22 per cent said they thought the loss of a mobile device containing sensitive information would not be a disaster.
