"We see more and more organisations, whether they're emergency services, government departments or banks, holding information and accessing it nationally, and in some cases offshoring it, said Mike Simms, Vice President EADS DS.

"Information is shared over the web with a vast number of different IT systems and databases. So it's impossible for anyone to sit in an office and know everywhere that their information is available.

"(In turn) that's leading to changes to the risks of that information being abused or corrupted through negligence, as in the case of the loss of the child benefit database last year, or it could be malicious."

What's striking is the frequency with which negligent loss is taking place. Businesses like EADS DS help people protect their data, and the first step in doing that is having an accurate assessment of the risk. Thinking in terms of a pyramid, the lowest but most common source of threat, are the millions of users, who might lose a data stick, leave a laptop on a train or write their password down.

Next up, Mr Simms explains, are the service providers. "Increasingly with outsourcing there's a need to make sure you're confident that your service provider conducts rigorous processes in how they look after their networks and information."

Higher up the threat scale come amateur hackers, large in number but opportunistic. If they hit a firewall they'll probably move on to somewhere else. At the top of the pyramid more sophisticated hackers operate, often linked to organised crime and foreign intelligence services.

"As you move up to the sophisticated hackers and foreign intelligence services, they may be few in number but they have a lot of resources behind them. The amount of resources required to combat (them) is much greater.

"What we do at EADS DS is make sure we have the appropriate level of response for each one of those threats. There's no point locking down systems so tightly (that it) imposes on the usability of the system if the information there is fairly innocuous."

"What our investigations have shown is that broadly speaking in terms of vulnerability it's not the computer but the network it's running on that's most vulnerable. A lot of what we're focusing on is how you secure information as it's being transported across networks."

Putting all the necessary protection into the computers would make them very expensive, instead EADS DS makes sure the computers can operate on networks that are secure and trusted. That's important because of the different way we work today, using laptops, working away from the office, all done over networks.

"There is a lot of discussion about where you place that protection. Do you place it at the point where the telephone lines leave the building or at the back of each computer? It depends on the level of information you are working with, and whether it is a building you control access to or a building like a hotel, where you do not know who is using the room before or after you."

However good your organisation's information assurance may be, if somebody else hasn't taken adequate steps they're the weak link in the chain and your data is vulnerable. In this network-enabled world, critical information is offered for the use of others with trust in them to safeguard it, we all depend on each other as never before.