These days every time you look at the news, you will see a data breach within the health care industry, or you will hear of an employee (present or former) stealing confidential data for their own gain. For example just this past week, 1 million New Jersey patients’ information had been compromised because a compact disc loaded with unencrypted sensitive patient data had been lost. Another hospital and medical center reported a data breach because an employee may have improperly accessed personal identifying information of a number of patients from the hospital. Even in the retail industry, employees of a famous retail store were arrested for using stolen credit card data from store computers to go on a $400,000 shopping spree.
This is just this past week, and it is evident according to the headlines that this is becoming almost a weekly trend. Is it time as a customer to be worried, that all you are receiving are notifications that your information has been stolen?
In all honesty, that time has passed. It is time to ask those who have your personally identifiable information (PII) what they are doing to keep your information secure. Even further is to ask what happens to the data after it has left the possession of the company if it is lost or stolen. In recent blogs and articles of how to stop these data breaches from occurring, experts continue to say that information being stolen is inevitable. What they do not say is that a company can prevent someone from accessing the information after it has been stolen.
Files containing this data can be protected no matter where they are, inside or outside of your organization. Whether these files are stored on your ECM or on a USB drive or compact disc, there are solutions that can protect this data regardless of where they are. This is not the first thing you hear or read about when headlines of data breaches occur. You will only see how organizations will provide free credit reporting or that they have notified you as soon as they knew of the data breach.
Encrypt your files with data-centric security, and guarantee that your files will always be protected. There is still hope for organizations to avoid these disastrous headlines by protecting their files with persistent security, dynamic permission control and intelligent monitoring.
It is time to face the reality that organizations need to do a better job to protect your information. Insider threats and health care industry data breaches face a very troubling and growing possibility of becoming a weekly trend. For how long? We hope that we won’t have to answer that.
Photo Credit: Viola Renate
