The Importance of American Business Information Protection It never rains but it pours, Just as bosses and boards have final

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问题             The Importance of American Business Information Protection
    It never rains but it pours, Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles, and improved their feeble corporation governance, a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity. Left, until now, to odd, low level IT staff to put right, and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking, telecoms and air travel, information protection is now high on the boss’s agenda in businesses of every variety.
    Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—from organizations as diverse as Time Warner, the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California, Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities.
    "Data is becoming an asset which needs to be guarded as much as any other asset," says Haim Mendelson of Stanford University’s business school. "The ability to guard customer data is the key to market value, which the board is responsible for on behalf of shareholders." Indeed, just as there is the concept of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), perhaps it is time for GASP, Generally Accepted Security Practices, suggested Eli Noam of New York’s Columbia Business School. "Setting the proper investment level for security, redundancy , and recovery is a management issue, not a technical one," he says.
    The mystery is that this should come as a surprise to any boss. Surely it should be obvious to the dim most executive that trust, that most valuable of economic assets, is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands.
    The current state affairs may have been encouraged—though not justified—by the lack of legal penalty (in America, but not Europe) for data leakage. Until California recently passed a law, American firms did not have to tell anyone, even the victim, when data went astray. That may change fast; lots of proposed data-security legislation is now doing the rounds in Washington, D. C. Meanwhile, the theft of information about some 40 million credit-card accounts in America, disclosed on June 17th, overshadowed a hugely important decision a day earlier by America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC), that puts corporate America on notice that regulators will act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.
The statement "it never rains but it pours" is used to introduce______.

选项 A、the fierce business competition
B、the feeble boss-board relations
C、the threat from news reports
D、the severity of data leakage

答案D

解析 篇章结构题。本文以谚语开篇引出话题。接着第二句详细解释了这句谚语的言外之意,即在老板和董事会解决了财务和规章问题之后,“数据不安全”问题又在威胁着他们。接下来指出信息保护已经引起了企业老板的高度重视。由此可见,作者引用该谚语是为引出“数据安全”这一话题,故D正确。浏览全文可以发现,这里没有提及商业竞争,没有谈论老板和董事们之间的关系,排除A“激烈的商业竞争”和B“老板和董事会之间脆弱的关系”。C“来自新闻报道的威胁”干扰性较强,虽然在第二句提到,但文章主旨并非新闻报道,而是资料安全问题,排除此项。
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