It's been recently reported that the personal information of some 70 million U.S. military personnel was lost last November.  It's unknown whether the data has been actually breached, but an investigation is under way.

The incident occurred when a defective hard drive, which powered a system that veterans used to request copies of their health records and discharge paper, was returned to the vendor for repair without first destroying the data. To make matters worse, the drive was unencrypted. These are signs of very poor security standards and data-handling policies, which should make all Americans cringe. In addition to basic information such as Social Security and Medicare, the impending Federal healthcare overhaul will place healthcare information in their slippery hands.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that the Federal government has been grappling with lost data. Earlier this year, the Veteran’s Administration paid $20 million to settle a class action lawsuit over a data breach that resulted from a lost laptop containing personal records on more than 25 million veterans. In another case, a hard drive containing data from the Clinton administration including 100,000 Social Security numbers, political records and event logs was lost, and the data has still not been located.

With LeapFILE's virtual file system, all data is safely stored in the cloud, with full end-to-end encryption on the client and server side. IT administrators can have full visibility and control over how data is accessed and who is accessing. And, as these cases with the Federal government have proven, IT capability to remotely wipe data is indispensable. Whether it be a lost laptop or a rogue employee, IT can safely erase all data from any device and then restore that data because it's securely stored in the cloud. (You can watch our recent presentation at DEMO fall '09 demonstrating the remote wipe.)

If the US Government were using LeapFILE, there would be no worry or lawsuits over lost data. Instead, our military heroes would get the peace of mind they deserve. They've placed their lives at stake to protect American liberty and soil; their precious data should be safeguarded as well.