Note to the IRS: Next Time, Use PC Blades

Since yesterday’s tax filing deadline has come and gone, we can all breathe a sigh of relief about our taxes (right?) … and start worrying about what the IRS is going to do with our personal information. As Eric Sinrod points out in a CNET column today, “It is quite likely that sensitive data for a ’significant number’ of taxpayers has become available for potential identity theft and other fraudulent schemes. Not a pretty picture.”

The IRS, it turns out, tends to lose data the old-fashioned way: by putting it on (occasionally unencrypted) laptops that then disappear. In this regard, they’re much like a lot of credit issuers, retailers, and other private businesses. The difference is that the IRS is a branch of government, and one with access to particularly sensitive information.

As we’ve pointed out, a number of sectors can benefit from centralized computing: financial, healthcare, and manufacturing, for example. But government presents a particularly compelling example. Here’s why.

First off, the government workforce is heavily populated with task-oriented users. This varies from agency to agency, of course, but many areas of government employ a large number of workers for data processing and entry. Dan Kuznetsky observed just last week that these types of activites are well suited to blade-based workstations.

Second, there’s virtually no data more sensitive than what we share with the government. Wouldn’t it make sense to take extra measures to make sure that data is secure? And wouldn’t it make sense to strengthen the first line of defense — the physical location and storage of data? Wouldn’t that suggest keeping data off laptops and mobile devices, and instead in a protected data center?

When private businesses misplace our personal data, we can register our displeasure by not giving them our business anymore. We don’t have that luxury with the government. In turn, they owe it to us to keep our information safe.