We take data security very seriously. We have to.

During the normal course of the financial planning process we process a significant amount of sensitive and confidential data. In the wrong hands this data would be almost priceless. That’s why we have a stringent and robust security policy which is reviewed, amended and updated each year. Not everyone is as protective of the data they hold as we are at Proposito.

An NHS Trust in the south-east of England was given the highest fine yet from the Information Commissioners Office in June 2012. They lost highly sensitive personal data belonging to tens of thousands of patients and staff.

The source of the breach? Hard drives.

These drives were scheduled to be destroyed but ended up for sale on an internet auction site. The drives had not been destroyed. Worse than that: they still contained all the information . Information which included national insurance numbers, home addresses, ward and hospital IDs, and information referring to criminal convictions and suspected offences, all ended up in the public domain.

The NHS Trust was fined £325,000 and is still unable to provide regulators with a full account of how at least 252 of the approximate 1,000 hard drives they were supposed to destroy ended up for sale.

It goes to show that regardless of how robust the technology used to secure data is, things still go wrong.  As bestselling author of ‘Secrets and Lies’ Bruce Schneier wrote “People often represent the weakest link in the security chain and are chronically responsible for the failure of security systems”

At Proposito we not only make sure we have robust systems in place to safeguard data but we ensure that our people are following them too.`