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This week on Federal Tech Talk we look at the impact of COVID on federal information technology from a new perspective — reducing risk by understanding where data resides and reducing the attack surface.

Kevin Coppins, president and chief executive officer of Spirion, joins host John Gilroy in the studio. His company has been in business since 2006 assisting a wide range of organizations with data discovery and classification.

During the interview, Coppins suggests starting with an audit of what is valuable, to protect what matters most. Essentially, discover what is sensitive data. From there, one should understand the appropriate methods of classifying this data as well as data life cycle management.

He argues that is the best logical step to be able to comply with the plethora of privacy regulations that federal agencies today. Privacy is of ultimate importance, and a solid grasp on data classification can provide a great foundation.

Working remotely certainly can increase productivity, but it can increase risk as well. Let us say there is a data set that is the target of an attacker. In our work-from-home world, this data set may be sent to several people, with varying levels of security at home. Suddenly, we go from one to several ways to compromise that asset. Some have called this a data leakage problem.

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