Loosing the personal data means still having it!

The French Information Commissioner, CNIL, has created something of a conundrum for your business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Its adjudicated that loosing all your organisation’s data constitutes a breach under the regulations, and that you must notify all data subjects of that breach. This means if you cant do that in the event of a catastrophe, then you could get a big fine on top of all the others costs; and your insurers may not cover that consequence. This arises from a data centre fire that was indeed catastrophic, so bad in fact that everything was lost. Not a good advert for data centres! Beware, this ruling may well influence other countries regulators to follow he same thinking.