[长难句突破]

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.

主体句式：A new problem threatens to earn them.

结构分析：这个句子的前半部分是一个Just as 引导的状语从句，用来与后面的情况作对比。在后半个句子中，破折号中间的内容是对前文的补充说明，破折号后面则是对这个new problem的具体说明。

Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest 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.

主体句式：It should be obvious to the dimmest executive that...

结构分析：这个句子的复杂成分在于"dimmest executive"后面两个并列的宾语从句，第一个 that引导的宾语从句的主干是trust is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore，其中"that most valuable of economic assets"这个插入结构是用来形容trust的。第二个宾语从句由破折号后面的that引导，句子主干为few things are more likely to destroy trust than... 后面分次"letting"引导的短语用来形容a company。

[全文译文]

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 dimmest 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 of 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.

雨不下则已，下则倾盆。就在老板和董事会最终解决了令人头疼的财务问题和违纪问题、改善了缺乏效率的公司管理之后，又一个新问题（尤其是在美国）将成为令高层们头疼的头条新闻：数据的不安全性。迄今为止，数据保护工作一直由那些临时的低层数据技术人员来承担，并且仅被视为那些数据资源丰富的产业才会考虑的一个方面，比如银行业、电信业以及航空业等，如今，数据保护则成为各行业老板议事日程中头等大事。

今年，几起客户和员工数据的重大泄密事件使得管理人员们匆忙去检查其复杂的数据系统和商业流程，以便寻找潜在的弱点--这些泄密事件发生在像时代华纳、美国国防部合同商国际科学应用公司以及加州大学伯克利分校等不同的机构。

斯坦福大学商学院的海姆•门德尔森认为"数据正在成为一种需要像保护其他财产一样受到保护的财产"。"保护客户数据的能力是市值的关键因素，这是董事会应该为股东利益而承担的责任"。纽约哥伦比亚商学院的埃尼•诺姆暗示道，事实上，正如存在公认会计原则一样，现在或许应该是建立公认安全措施的时候了。他表示"为数据的安全、备份以及恢复确定适当的投资标准是一个管理问题，不是技术问题。"

令人不可思议的是，对老板们来说，这可能是一个意外。然而，即使是最迟钝的管理人员也都清楚，作为最有价值的经济财产，诚信很容易遭受破坏，而要恢复诚信却代价高昂，而且，很少有什么比一个公司让敏感的个人数据落入不法人员之手更可能破坏公司的诚信了。

目前的情况可能与缺乏有关数据泄露的法律处罚（在美国，不是在欧洲）有关，尽管还没有的到证实。在加利福尼亚最近通过了一项法律之前，美国公司不必告知任何人关于数据的泄露情况，甚至包括受害人。这种情况可能很快会得到扭转：如今，许多提议的数据保护立法正在华盛顿特区进行讨论。同时，6月17日有关美国约4000万信用卡账户数据被盗事件的披露，给此前一天美国联邦商务委员会的一个重要决定蒙上阴影，该决定请向全美国的公司发出了警告，如果公司没有实施恰当的数据安全保护措施，那么监管人员就会采取行动。