Business continuity is an important issue for management. However, the impact of losing a personal data store or information systems is not often considered to be a business continuity issue. Some examples of business issues resulting from weak governance of personal computer personal data stores and information systems follow:
- A catastrophic hard drive failure causes the loss of years of accumulated e-mail, memos, notes and proposals, resulting in months of confusion among customers due to broken commitments.
- A stolen laptop computer places proprietary client data in the hands of unknown parties, jeopardizing a valued relationship and opening the company to legal action.
- Data extracted from several sources on mainframe systems is incomplete and not synchronized, causing a collections team to ignore high-risk accounts, resulting in a bad-debt bubble to burst weeks downstream.
- An employee's resignation places his personal computer into the hands of a supervisor who reassigns the machine without removing files, causing the loss of months of sales leads, proposals, and contract details.
- A work group shares files over the corporate intranet, where they are copied by a disgruntled employee and e-mailed to the press, resulting in significant internal conflict and public embarrassment.
- An employee whose machine is not equipped with updated virus detection software introduces an infected document onto the machines of the entire sales force, resulting in costly down time for sales and technical staff to inoculate and disinfect machines.
- An employee tele-commutes to work using a broadband (cable modem) service, which lays the machine open to hacking without knowing the implications, resulting in lost files.
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