Ensuring Safety of Hotel Guests

1287 Words3 Pages

Ensuring Safety of Hotel Guests

Hotels rely on their IT assets to assist them in performing their daily business activities. Networks connect hotels with centralized application services, corporate Intranets, e-mail systems, the Internet, business partners and other stakeholders. Wireless 802.11 b/g networks in hotel guestrooms are becoming ubiquitous. Data zips back and forth across the enterprise. How safe are these systems and networks? Are they secure from external threats? What about internal threats? What should hoteliers and IT managers be doing to ensure the safety of their operational and guest data? Risks Hoteliers are faced with external and internal threats that can affect the security of their data. Failure to mitigate these risks

can have serious repercussions. External threats, which are not within our control,

include hacker threats, viruses, worms and denial-of-service attacks. Internal factors

that threaten data security include loose (or less stringently followed) employee security policies, less-than-rigid data backup, storage and restoration-testing policies, and insecure networks.

External Factors

External attacks “can pose greater risks to Information Technology (IT) operations than hurricanes, floods, power outages, and the like.”1 The distributed nature of today’s computing environment allows many opportunities for potential wrongdoers to cause havoc.

Are your networks secure from hackers, viruses and worms? Hackers use computers to find weaknesses and backdoor entryways into corporate networks. Once inside, they can plant viruses and worms capable of seeking out confidential data, e.g. addresses in address books

(which can be used to send mass spam mail), stealing sensitive guest and empl...

... middle of paper ...

...is, data-mining, CRM and direct marketing. They will however have to pay close attention to external and internal factors that have the potential to harm their IT infrastructure. They must employ robust risk mitigation strategies that are regularly tested. All security compliance directives must be adhered to and monitored to ensure compliance. These efforts will help ensure the safety of your IT assets.

Bibliography

Gordon, Tedd; vice president; IBM Global Services; Business Continuity and Recovery Services. Disaster Recovery Planning. Toigo, J.W. 2000 Prentice Hall.

Operators Weigh Options as Senate Moves toward New Data Security Rules. January 2006. http://www.prleap.com

http://usa.visa.com/download/business/ accepting_visa/ ops_risk_management/ cisp_PCI_Data_Security_Standard.pdf

Demystifying Compliance. Rasmussen, M. Forrester Research, March 2004.

More about Ensuring Safety of Hotel Guests

Open Document