Recent years have seen increasing demands on midsize organizations to ensure compliance with changing legal, financial and governance regulations. As a result, they have come under pressure to improve flexibility in a bid to keep their reporting, data security, traceability and quality processes transparent and adapt them whenever necessary. As such, data protection is often viewed as an onerous 'tax' on IT budgets – a necessary evil to keep the regulators at bay. However this paper will argue that the performance, collaboration and governance of a midsize organization can improve immediately if its operations are based on a secure, consolidated and open information infrastructure. This paper will also show that, with the right multi-level data protection against a wide range of threats, it is no longer necessary for midsize organizations to tolerate a little insecurity for the sake of platform consistency. Nor do they need to implement security protocols so rigidly that productivity falls.

Affordable data infrastructure solutions based on open standards that are inherently secure are now available to midsize organizations. Not only are they quick and easy to deploy, use and maintain, they are designed to meet the constraints of limited IT resources and budgets in the face of the current economic downturn.