Security personnel are increasingly having to think about the location of their data in a world where data is becoming ever-more distributed. That and the concerns that organizations have about governmental and private surveillance are yet another burden these overworked folks need to shoulder. Data security looks fundamentally different to how it looked in the past. There truly are no hard parameters for data: it exists within organizational premises, in the cloud, on all manner of social media, on mobile devices of every flavor and, increasingly as we move towards the Internet of Things, on distributed sensors.

A 2014 survey of CISOs revealed data location is a huge concern. But the key question to ask is how much of the concern is related to security personnel’s hyper-sensitivity about risk, and how much is actually a reflection of a more risky environment? And this question speaks to what I believe will be the future of information security:  context.  For the purposes of this assignment, I classify context as location, time, type of device, type of user.

Requirements

1. How can user context be used to more effectively control data?  Provide specific examples.
2. Identify at least three companies that have software that manages user context.