If you think about the manual filing system we discussed using a filing cabinet, an important computing concept is easy to recognize. Some information is more important or more sensitive than the rest. It is usually obvious in real filing cabinet systems, because the top drawer is usually where the most sensitive information is stored, and it is locked.
Few people in an organization have access to that information. For example, credit card or Social Security numbers are information that should be given the highest level of security access to that information is given only to a limited number of people in a company. On the other hand, some information, such as Web pages, newsletters, and product information, is created for everyone to see, even outside a company. In this picture below shows how this kind of information is organized into a hierarchy of information, where the most detailed information is found at the top and the more general, less secure information is located at the bottom.
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| Information Importance |
How much information would you be willing to provide about yourself to a perfect stranger? Country of birth? Sure. State of residence? Why not? But you might have second thoughts about advertising your street address or phone number to a stranger. The collection and proper manipulation of many seemingly unimportant pieces of information, and the effective tracking of them, makes information management on networks so important, just as when you are maintaining a manual filing system.
A single piece of information in a data field, such as your first name, can seem unimportant. However, by combining your first name with other pieces of related information, like your last name, address, age, gender, and phone number (stored in other data fields), the pieces can be put together to create a data record, which can accurately describe something (or someone) that is important like you. Finally, combining similar records (such as records describing all your classmates) creates a file that, because it contains sensitive information from more than one source, is more sensitive than a single record.
Information sharing, therefore, has serious security issues to be considered, and network access to data must be evaluated carefully so that only those who need it can access it.
