I Made My Excuses and Left

No more excuses:

The same swing can be seen with other laws. Twenty-five percent of large companies are not compliant with California’s security breach notification law but only 14 percent of midsize companies are not compliant. Midsize companies are less compliant when it comes to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA (27 percent of midsize companies are noncompliant versus 21 percent of large companies).

The reason, as usual, is money. Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliance is more complicated and expensive than, for example, GLBA compliance. But the mid-market’s excuse that it doesn’t have the money to comply may be becoming obsolete. According to Mark Lobel, a PricewaterhouseCoopers advisory partner specializing in security, the price is dropping for technologies that help companies comply with security and privacy laws. With affordable tools coming onto the market that can sniff out the data you need to protect, excuses from mid-market CIOs that it’s too expensive to comply with Sox and other laws will no longer work, Lobel asserts.