The Value of Enterprise Privacy

No matter their size, successful enterprises do business around the world in the course of every day operations. With the increasing connectivity afforded by mobile, this is easier than ever: employees can stay in touch via calls, texts, and built-in apps designed to keep information flowing even when someone is on the other side of the globe.

This strong reliance on mobile technologies offers great opportunity to enterprise, but also great risk. Just as it’s vital to ensure that information is readily available throughout a business, it’s equally critical to ensure that the information is safe from prying eyes. With sophisticated eavesdropping techniques being actively used by everyone from rival organizations to governments, enterprise privacy is more challenging – and more important – than ever.

Having seen the fallout from the Sony hack, it’s evident that past security solutions have failed enterprise. And a breach doesn’t simply come with a price tag: the consequences are many and far-reaching, from lost consumer confidence to the damaged trust with employees. In Sony’s case, in addition to bad publicity and theft of intellectual property, the exposure of sensitive, personal information about its employees and associates was among the most injurious aspects of the attack.

Similarly, the recent breach at the United States Office of Personnel Management resulted in the theft of personal information for more than 4.2 million current and past federal employees, and it didn’t stop there; posting in her blog on the country’s Independence Day holiday, OPM Director Katherine Archuleta acknowledged that the scope of a second breach, this one affecting federal background-check data, still has not been defined. OPM is currently providing identity protection services and credit monitoring for those whose information may have been compromised, but more than a month after the first acknowledgement of OPM’s privacy failures, it’s not even clear that all of the victims have been identified.

Working within a global infrastructure that requires constant connection while maintaining the privacy of your organization and its employees is a massive challenge, and one that will only grow with the expansion of mobile services and offerings. Silent Circle’s goal is to meet that challenge. We help our customers enable privacy across their enterprise by combining next generation security and policy – putting privacy first, rather than trying to achieve it through outdated bolt-on approaches. Our products work across mobile platforms and in conjunction with existing solutions, giving businesses flexibility to choose the combination of devices, software and services that works best for them. It’s enterprise privacy, deployed.

Silent Circle exists because the enterprise has been underserved when it comes to privacy. Recent years have seen a growing acknowledgment of the importance of privacy for individuals, and markets have responded with products and solutions designed to address it. But enterprises have largely been left to deal with the problem on their own, cobbling together traditional security products in an almost fully reactive approach. It’s time for the enterprise to put privacy first. And that’s a discussion we’re ready to lead.

– Silent Circle CEO, Bill Conner

See more of the ongoing discussion about the value of privacy on The Guardian.