Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn't that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated -- we knew that already -- it's that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.

Risk management only works when it factors into everyone's thinking. Kerri Grosslight of Wells Fargo lays out steps for getting there. Faced with challenging economic times and heightened legislative and regulatory scrutiny, companies across all industries are increasingly compelled to keep risk management top of mind. Success depends upon customer and shareholder confidence in a company's ethical standards and its ability to make prudent decisions about handling risks. Whether a company's risk management framework is centralized, decentralized, or somewhere in the middle, what's most important are the people in that framework—those who identify and manage risks every day.

As the CTO of a data protection and encryption company, I hear many a tale of woe as other CTOs and CEOs confess to me the stories of how various laptops within their companies have gone astray and the destruction these lost laptops have caused in their wake.  With this in mind, here is one such tale of woe, albeit fictional, that I have heard time and time again.

Where do I begin? If the evidence is to be believed it stems back to, what I assumed to be, a fortuitous meeting in the bar at the Waldorf.