Where has my log data gone?

I was recently working with a major hardware vendor discussing solutions and the information security aspects to the support services offered. Having had a very bad experience of hardware support many years ago from another vendor (D***), where corporate data with both financial and public safety issues was sent to another company, I was keen to explore the topic.

The final location of the logs was not a great surprise but the contents were. It does seem that a very small amount of business data is included in the system dumps that are required for fault diagnosis. The replication of this support data to ‘follow the sun’ locations around the globe should also be determined.

This should be considered by those responsible for support and services when selecting solutions as this may effect the business based on the risk appetite that the organisation has.

~ by Simon Hancock on November 24, 2008.