Best Practices Writing Assignment

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The Least Privilege Principle in Contemporary HR

Nancy Pier

Human Resource Management

The Least Privilege Principle in Contemporary HR

There is a recent trend in contemporary business where enterprises seem to have achieved a collaboration with information technology aimed at improving business efficiency and consequently result in sustainable success. This development has however come with the liability of protecting key identifiable information of each party in a business organization (Dhillon et al., 2017). As it is, governments have put it as a legal obligation for organizations to protect the information of their people as they work towards protecting sensitive information related to business. In the United States alone in 2018, there were 65 successful litigations by employees towards the employer for exposing their information to malicious parties leading to closure of 80% of these businesses due to hefty legal fees (Cockcroft, 2020). Previous studies have attributed secure employee and business information to 45% success in business based on more motivated employees, confidentiality of business information of the firms and favorable reputation by clients (Porter et al., 2019).

The current situation points to the necessity in the application of the least privilege principle based on the numerous success stories upon its application. There is evidence that the implementation of this principle in the homeland department of security led to 78% reduction of loss of crucial information for the department, 71 % reduction of witness and whistle blower information leakage and efficient classification of information an aspect that aids investigative efficiency in the departments (Hammad et al., 2019). Experts aver that cloud computing, is not enough to protect important information and point to role based access, the foundation of the least privilege principle, as the next reliable pillar for workplace and business safety. This subject is particularly vital in human resource management practice as the department is the custodian of employee information and is tasked with capacitating employees.

Interestingly, under the period of the boom in internet technologies and their application in business processes, there has been cases of insider trading where businesses have lost huge investment money and their operating reputations. A study on the effects of employee data insecurity, in Texas, indicated that last year, 2019, 28% of employees reached by the survey reported at least one case of bullying as unauthorized parties accessed their key identifiable information (Sennewald & Baillie, 2020). The study further indicated that this kind of data insecurity results in insecure and unproductive employees. The application of the least privilege principle, therefore, could lead to business success, employee sense of security and business efficiency in meeting customer needs. This study will therefore look into the value of least privilege principle in employee management and personal information security.

References

Cockcroft, S. (2020). Securing the commercial Internet: Lessons learned in developing a postgraduate course in information security management. Journal of Information Systems Education, 13(3), 7.

Dhillon, G., Syed, R., & de Sá-Soares, F. (2017). Information security concerns in IT outsourcing: Identifying (in) congruence between clients and vendors. Information & Management, 54(4), 452-464.

Hammad, M., Bagheri, H., & Malek, S. (2019). DelDroid: An automated approach for determination and enforcement of least-privilege architecture in android. Journal of Systems and Software, 149, 83-100.

Porter, M. E., & Kramer, M. R. (2019). Creating shared value. In Managing sustainable business (pp. 323-346). Springer, Dordrecht.

Sennewald, C. A., & Baillie, C. (2020). Effective security management. Butterworth-Heinemann.