In today’s business world, two things are feared more than any other. One is the position of your rivals. Two is the media. Usually friendly, loyal, and supportive, media is a pleasant creature, but its bite can still draw blood, destroying reputation, customer base, or simply your bottom line. It is also in no doubt that data security is on the lips of everyone concerned with their business and its success.
In these days of austerity measures and debt ceilings being raised in the USA, every element of procurement is being looked at more closely. Government entities are particularly under the microscope. Let’s imagine a scenario:
The media learn that health records of US citizens are being sold on the black market in India. They also learn that US healthcare organizations using Indian BPO’s are subject to HIPAA, (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) yet are not fully compliant. Here come the sharp teeth… ‘Home-grown’ companies in the US begin clamouring for business on the front pages, claiming valuable and personal data is ‘going missing’ on its path to and from the BPO companies. Suddenly just being compliant is not enough. To avoid losing business, companies need to start going the extra mile to ensure they supersede any regulations thrust upon them. They must be able to answer any difficult questions regarding how they are safeguarding third party data with absolute confidence.
We’ve all read the articles, sometimes data does get compromised. It could be a trusted employee inside the organization, it could be a third party company entrusted with access to your network, it could be malicious interception of the data in transit. Whatever the threat, the implications are massive.
Does your organization deal with these kinds of records? Even if it does not, do you have sensitive intellectual property? Or perhaps confidential data entrusted to you by third parties / your clients? How can you ensure that the data is secure, not only when it is at rest, but also when it is in motion? How can you manage the accessibility of the data, both inside, and outside your network? What if the data escapes your network? What then? Do you have the ability to control it even then? If not, why not?
HIPAA empowers the US Department of Health and Human Services to oversee entities implementation of security protocols and enforce them where required. One of the chief concerns is implementing security standards to protect the confidentiality and integrity of individually identifiable health information. In the HIPAA final security rule, it is stated that “Covered entities are encouraged…to consider use of encryption technology for transmitting electronic protected health information [EPHI], particularly over the Internet.”
The Technical Safeguards of the HIPAA Final Security Rule require that “electronically transmitted PHI [patient health information] is not improperly modified without detection until disposed of.” The most obvious method of protecting EPHI is with encryption throughout the data lifecycle. The Department of Health and Human Services notes in a white paper, “The goal of encryption is to protect EPHI from being accessed and viewed by unauthorized users.”
HIPAA is just one sector, but the rules and lessons to be learned are universal. Security matters. If you want to win the big contracts (and keep them), it’s highly likely that you as a company need to do more.
So, what companies should be doing in all sectors and markets, wherever sensitive information is being stored, transmitted, and worked upon, is to look for a solution which allows companies to control their data, who uses it, where they use it, when they use it, and how they use it, all the time. Inside the network, and outside the network. More and more companies have come to realize that Boole Server is the only solution to these complex problems involving data being shared inside and outside the network, and for keeping control of it wherever it goes. Boole server allows you to set access rights for each individual piece of data, share it, control and manage its use. It ensures data loss prevention by encrypting at the file level to such an extent that ‘normal’ functions such as print, copy-paste, save, edit can be blocked completely if you require them to be so for a particular piece of data. Using a 2048-bit military grade encryption, coupled with the real time auditing and policy enforcement functionality for compliance purposes, you can be assured that Boole Server is the only way to securely store and manage your data effectively. Just ask your competitors.
