It’s easy to think of security risks as someone else’s problems, but if you have anything to do with contract management, it’s your problem as well.

A recent study by the Ponemon Institute (which researches IT practices) on “The Risk of Regulated Data on Mobile Devices” demonstrated the real risks posed by cloud-based services and mobile devices.

As reported on CRN.com: “…many companies were not taking the necessary steps to safeguard data — including health reports, credit card details and customer accounts, among other private records (emphasis added). As a result, businesses risk costly mobile data breaches. Thousands of records have already been compromised because employers lacked adequate policies and tools, leaving them open to regulatory fines and lawsuits.”

If your company has contracts with federal or state entities, this should be a wake-up call.

Exposure or loss (however inadvertent) of data over unsecured cloud-based apps or services is a real danger. Among the organizations studied by Ponemon:

— 6,000 records were lost or stolen over a two-year period.

— Nearly half of those organizations in the study reported they had to notify regulators of data breaches – leaving them vulnerable to lawsuits.

— Nearly 75 percent of organizations said it was hard to stop employees from accessing regulated data on insecure mobile devices. (!)

As mentioned in an earlier post on data breaches, to prevent exposure or breaches of contract data, a solution such as Contract Assistant goes a long way to ensuring access is only granted to those administrators designated. Controlling access is the first point of any security plan.

But there’s another key advantage to Contract Assistant: it is not a cloud-based solution (it’s client/server based). This may be even more important now that bring-your-own-device (BYOD) access to company data is only increasing over time. The advantage to BYOD is, of course, access anywhere, on any device.

But when control of sensitive data is your aim, knowing that employees may access sensitive contract data “anywhere, anytime” on unsecured devices poses a major risk to your data.

Security and data risks are growing daily – regulatory fines and penalties may increase over time as well for data breaches. A contract management solution like Contract Assistant can go a long way to ensuring your company reduces the very real risks from data breaches.

[For more information on reducing risks of all types to contract data, check out Blueridge Software’s Executive Briefing, Contract Management Software: Reduce Risk While Saving Money]