Tag Archives: data security
Does Your Encryption Based Data Security Solution Protect You From Insider Threats?
In a May 2012 report just released by the Ponemon Institute, 69 percent of organizations find it difficult to restrict user access to sensitive information in IT and business environments. On top of that 66% say their organizations find it difficult to comply with privacy and data protection regulations. So organizations are finding it hard to keep up with new regulation at the same time they are unable to secure data from internal users. It’s no wonder that in this same report 50% say that data has been compromised or stolen by malicious insiders such as privileged users. (more…)
Do You Know Where Your Existing Database Security Solutions Are Failing?
Recently, Oracle announced that its latest April critical patch update does not address the TNS Poison vulnerability uncovered by a researcher 4 years ago. In addition to this vulnerability from an attacker, organizations face data breaches from internal negligence and insiders. In a May 2012 survey by the Ponemon Institute, 50% say sensitive data contained in databases and applications has been compromised or stolen by malicious insiders such as privileged users. On top of that 68% find it difficult to restrict user access to sensitive information in IT and business environments.
While databases offer basic security features that can be programmed and configured to protect data, it may not be enough and may not scale with your growing organizations. The problem stems from the fact that application development and DBA teams need to have a solid understanding of database vendor specific offerings in order to ensure that the security feature has been properly set up and deployed. If your organization has a number of different databases (Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server) and that number is growing, it can be costly to maintain all the database specific solutions. Many Informatica customers have faced this problem and looked to Informatica to provide a complete, end-to-end solution that addresses database security on an enterprise-wide level.
Come talk to us at Informatica World and hear from our customers about how they’ve used Informatica to minimize the risk of breaches across a number of use cases including:
- Test data management
- Production support in off-shore projects
- Dynamically protecting PII or PHI data for research portals
- Dynamically protecting data in cross-border applications
At Informatica, you can meet us in our sessions on Thursday, May 17, at the Aria in Las Vegas:
10:10 – 11:10 – Ensuring Data Privacy for Warehouses and Applications with Informatica Data Masking in Room Juniper 3
11:20 – 12:20 – Protecting Sensitive Data Using Informatica’s Test Data Management Solution in Room Starvine 12
Also come to the Informatica Data Privacy booth and lab for in depth demonstrations and presentations of our data privacy solutions and customer deployments.
No More Excuses – Healthcare Organizations Need to Mask Their Patient Data
Data breaches in healthcare have increased 32 percent in the past year and have cost the industry an estimated $6.5 billion annually according to the Ponemon Institute. Responsible for these breaches were largely employee handling of data and the increasing use of mobile devices. Forty-one percent of healthcare executive surveyed attributed data breaches related to protected health information (PHI) to employee mistakes. Half of the respondents said their organization does nothing to protect the information contained on mobile devices. “Healthcare data breaches are an epidemic,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute, in an announcement of the study results.
Why are healthcare data breaches becoming more common?
PHI data is in all production and test systems, as well as numerous copies that are created of production systems for test, training and application development purposes. In addition to these production systems, PHI data lives in servers inside and outside of the organization. As more mobile devices are used to access critical patient data, and doctors are using their mobile devices to address medical issues from all over the country (if not the world), more sensitive patient data is exposed. In addition to PHI data such as social security number, a lot of sensitive data that healthcare organizations have is contained in textual notes. So the textual data also needs to be protected. But patient data needs to be protected not only within the hospital or healthcare organization. As patient data is used for clinical trial and research purposes, it is important to protect the data that leaves the organization.
To address these concerns, Informatica has seen organizations move towards an end-to-end, enterprise wide data privacy solution that enables them to:
- Consistently define sensitive data and set data privacy policies
- Identify where sensitive data lives throughout the organization
- Create subsets of production data for testing purposes, greatly reducing costs of managing test data (reducing hardware and software)
- Mask data according to all required PHI rules
- Report / provide audit trail that data has been masked and data is secure
Maintaining many, individual privacy solutions can be both costly and risky. An enterprise wide solution centralizes data privacy management, streamlining development and ongoing maintenance.
For more information on healthcare privacy challenges and how to address them, please join us in our upcoming webinar.
Where Are the Gaps in Your Data Privacy Solution?
It’s hard to miss data privacy in the headlines these days. Banks and insurance companies have not only had their customer information compromised, but they need to keep up with changing privacy regulations (PCI DSS, GLB, EU Data Protection Directive, US Privacy Laws)—or be fined. The impact is staggering—and costly. For example, last year Citigroup had more information compromised from their 200,000 bank cardholders. HSBC faced $5M in fines for inadequate data security.
But personal information is not the only type of data that needs to be protected. We’ve spoken to our customers about the need to protect sensitive information that includes financial information about a client, revenues, purchasing and pricing information. In addition I’ve spoken to organizations that are looking to keep and protect sensitive information across business units (so that one business unit will have restricted access to another business unit’s data). (more…)
Why Making Data “Worthless” Is Useful
The Healthcare industry is facing more challenges today than ever regarding data security as a result of increased Healthcare compliance initiatives. The most vulnerable area for data security is in non-production environments. How can Healthcare IT organizations ensure secure data, while providing non-production environments that meet testing and development needs?
I recently wrote a guest blog for SearchHealthIT. It reviews some of the technologies available to address these challenges, the most effective being Data Masking. Data Masking is a method of replacing sensitive data in test and development environments with contextually accurate benign data that meets the requirements of both test and development teams.
Check out Why Making Data “Worthless” Is Useful: Best practices for ensuring the privacy and security of health care data and let me know your thoughts.
Economic Uncertainty Takes Its Toll on Data Security
A difficult economy creates plenty of fear, uncertainty, and frustration within enterprises. Budgets get slashed, projects get put on hold, and overworked employees get stretched to the limits. Another victim of the recent downturn was data security efforts, a new survey shows. (more…)