I thought I should draw your attention to one or two of the latest features on sourcingfocus.com this week – the first full week for our new community. (We've been building the site for some months now and packing it with content. From this week it's your community, so please participate and share your views).

If you click along to our Library section – which, from your feedback, we're going to rename 'Features' – you'll see a number of new pieces by some leading professionals from our industry.

In the piece on legal process outsourcing (LPO), CPA's Rob Stitchbury looks at the importance of this highly specialist function to intellectual-property based businesses. Take a look: it's an erudite and informative read.

I've also commissioned a piece on the challenging and controversial area of outsourcing in the pharmaceuticals market. More than most industries, pharma is dominated by regulation and intense scrutiny (and rightly so) – not to mention the sensitivities inherent in a multibillion-dollar industry at a time when parts of the world are crying out for cheap drugs.

Perhaps most controversial, though, is Jed Mooney's piece on offshore data security – for the simple reason that the implicit message behind his simple, practical and logical best-practice advice is: “do everything the UK government does not”.

If you need proof, here are some examples from Jed's piece:

“No hard media. Data professionals know that the source of nearly all data security lapses is the transfer of information to hard media, such as CD-Roms. State-of-the-art offshore data management providers have no terminals with CD writers – thereby preventing any information being downloaded onto hard media either on purpose or inadvertently. Indeed, laptops are also forbidden ensuring that data stays securely within the confines of the data management centre.

“All data is transmitted online using encryption technologies. The only personnel with the encryption codes are the sender and receiver, i.e. offshore provider and client. This is a very powerful method of ensuring data security, which, when properly firewalled is almost impossible to penetrate. Data transfers of three gigabytes (30 million address records) typically take just a few hours to transmit.

“All transferred data is logged ensuring a permanent record of who has transferred ‘what data’ to ‘whom’ and ‘when’. This ensures complete transparency and accountability.

“All data transfers are acknowledged at the receiving end, i.e. by the client.

"Finally, for ultra-cautious companies, data management can be outsourced offshore yet all data remains in-house and doesn’t even leave the company’s own building."

The conclusion is that if you follow his advice, it won't matter whether the data is transferred five miles from Clerkenwell to Wimbledon, or thousands of miles to the Philippines.

Set against advice that is so eminently sensible and achievable, the government's record of handling our personal data – consider all those stolen laptops and the unencrypted discs lost in internal post – looks like negligence of the most shocking and unprofessional kind.

• Finally a quick comment, if I may, on the depressing and facile tabloid discussions about immigration this week, in the wake of a highly slanted and economically misconceived Lords investigation into the contribution of migrants to the UK economy.

Suddenly we are back in the 1960s and 70s talking about quotas and caps and jobs stolen by overseas workers – a sudden lurch back to Powellite diatribes posited as fact. I think we as an industry should take this opportunity to speak out against this nonsense, as a UK intent on slamming the door against the world can only have a negative impact on the many industries that we touch upon, and which benefit from immigration.

What price can be put on diversity? What price on the extraordinary and unprecedented regeneration of neglected areas of cities such as Leicester, for example? In many cases migrants create new jobs, new sectors, and new opportunities from which we all benefit; in others, they fill roles that simply cannot be filled from the available pools of talent; in most they bring new skills and experiences of the global market.

Of course there are problems in many areas, and within some sections of British society, brought on by skills gaps and the disappearance of traditional labour sectors. Many of these are exacerbated by the funding gap between central and local governments based on inaccurate population statistics.

There has never been a time in our history when we have not been a centre for immigration; and few could seriously claim we are poorer for it. In their heart of hearts, even those who believe that time began in the 1930s know this.

If indulged, short-term anti-immigrant populism never contributes to long-term prosperity, but it is always given credence on the brink of a recession – especially when that downturn is born of easy credit and overspending, not because we have opened our doors to the world.