Industry news

UK information managers 'unaware' of security standards

Despite a spate of information security breaches in recent weeks, a large proportion of UK professionals remain unaware of standards such as BS 7799 and ISO 27000, it has been suggested.

A government survey carried out in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) indicated that 79 per cent of information security managers do not know what is contained within the guidelines, according to Computer Weekly.

"The standards contain good guidance on what organisations can do to protect themselves, so [not knowing what is in them] is a missed opportunity," remarked Chris Potter, a partner at PwC.

He went on to speculate that UK firms may not be taking the most efficient approach to security management in their organisations, although he told the publication that awareness and adoption of security standards has seen improvement.

This week saw members of industry group Open Geospatial Consortium approve KML - the technology used by Google in its Google Earth application - as an open standard for the description of geographic data.

Already shared openly and used in other software products, the internet search giant now hopes that the standardisation of KML will help encourage broader use of the map description language among European enterprises.