We’ve heard of data breaches by insiders but not in the way of printing errors. Although between the two kinds of insider threats, malicious and by accident, this is considered by accident, this can be a big headache for organizations. Whether it is leaving printouts of sensitive data on the printer unattended after printing or printing errors due to human error, this can all lead to data breaches.
In a recent article, a health care organization had to alert 4,000 patients that their personal data had been exposed due to a printing error. What should have been a fairly easy printing job mistakenly put one unique patient’s information on one side and another patients on the back page, which should have been a notice to explain new rules regarding a certain type of medicine. Unfortunately, mistakes occur, and when that employee mistypes or prints the wrong document, a major data breach can occur.
However, with the right policies and print security solutions in place these types of data breaches can be avoided. Although training on policies can help, it always comes down to protecting the data itself, as human error continues to happen. Providing a secure print environment within the organization can be provide with the best solutions.
The average employee prints about a couple of tens of thousands pages per year and in some cases a quarter of them are printouts that an employee did not intend to print. With the right protective measures and even cost cutting features, you can have an effective yet secure print management solution.
When using such solution as Fasoo ePrint, which can detect sensitive information in a document, provides a predefined policy that can block printing as well as control and trace printed documents on your existing printer, it extends the security area and provides stronger protection for sensitive data maintained by organizations such as hospitals. This solution can also detect sensitive information from files that are going to be printed and either block or request that approval from senior level managers prior to printing the document. In this situation, this feature would’ve been a great to stop the data breach from happening.
By following the privacy regulations that require this kind of personal information to be properly controlled and secured, protect the data of this information with secure print solutions provided by Fasoo.
Photo Credit by: Mary-Lynn
