20 November 2021

Metadata: Guardians on the Front Lines...

Continuous Continuity (C2) in your particular enterprise is a priority you shall not just focus upon during our U.S. Infrastructure Security Month.

Last week here, we reviewed Ten Steps your organization can practice on a regular basis to enhance your focus on Continuous Continuity and simultaneously your overall Operational Risk Management (ORM).

Let’s circle back to a few vital areas to emphasize as we increase our production and consumption of corporate or organizational “Data”.

Of Metadata. “Data that provides information about other data”.

The details on the creation date, time and application generating these words as they were originally written, is just one small example. What about the actual platform and the browser that was used:

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:94.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/94.0
Screen Resolution: 1680 x 1050 (pixels)
Browser Dimensions: 1005 x 853 (pixels)
Cookie Status: Enabled

You understand that the data you can’t see on your screen and the data you may not even care about, is present, and that the metadata is being collected by some entity somewhere.

The amount of data and the speed of data is now overwhelming our global digital world we live in the year 2021 and beyond. The question remains, So What?

If you are a seasoned General Counsel (GC) today with a Fortune 1000 organization doing business on a global basis, your Blackberry :) must be "buzzing" every few minutes. Just the legal risk alone being encountered will always be a factor of the number of deals, the number of employees and the growing number of countries you are operational.

As a corporate GC of a global enterprise, you have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the enterprise from all adversaries, such as the rogue employee, the government regulator, competitors, digital hackers, nation states and all of the plaintiff class actions.

The Rule of Law in your organization is in your hands. How you transfer the "Talking Points" on ethics, compliance and legal messages to your employees, partners, suppliers and adversaries is ever more critical.

The true effectiveness of your relationship with internal partners such as your CEO, CFO, CSO, CISO and Internal/External First Responder leadership could mean the survival of the company itself.

When was the last time you as a GC took the “Ethics," “Compliance” and "Rule of Law" program directly to your employees in face-to-face sessions?

How might you provide your employees, partners or 3rd-Party suppliers with the first hand opportunity to meet, greet and engage with the General Counsel of your particular enterprise?

By doing this, you are directly engaging with the people on the front lines, to be our "Guardians" for your company and to build trusted relationships with all of them.
Get out There.

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