Auditable Field-Level Privacy Protections for Data in Motion and Data at Rest

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Protect Data in Motion at the Field Level

Make Data Safe for Compliance and Outsourcing

Challenges:

Breeches of personal privacy -- of customer, employee, patient, student, and military records -- continue to occur at an alarming rate. You must prevent the data disasters posted at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in order to avoid lawsuits, fines, and bad will. You must also comply with government and industry privacy rules.

Unfortunately, you cannot eliminate sensitive data. Instead, you have to discover it (through data governance efforts and modeling tools from Exeros, Global IDs, Micro Focus APM, etc.) and then, prevent its exposure.

If you use a database, file, or disk encryption solution, you may be applying protections too broadly, or in the wrong place (i.e. data at rest, in only one database) and slowing down your on-line operations. This is especially true in high data volumes. Separate encryption tools, hardware and steps require additional cost, complexity and time, and cut off access to non-sensitive data too..

Moreover, with current methods you may not get:
• an audit trail detailing how you managed risk - forcing a costly validation exercise
• a separation of encryption and key management (should either be compromised)
• the ability to simultaneous invoke other protection methods on other fields
• the ability to simultaneously transform and report on this and other data in the file.

Solutions:

CoSort's SortCL tool (for Unix, Linux and Windows), now delivers field-level protections for data in files - so you do get:
• encryption, anonymization, pseudonymization, de-identification, masking, etc. -- as needed for each field
• access to, and manipulation of, both the protected and unprotected parts of the file
• minimal overhead -- security is just another high-speed field transformation
• integrated protection -- data masking in the same job script and I/O pass with other SortCL data transformation and reporting functions
• complete audit trails, in XML format, for compliance validation reports and queries
• protection for files in motion or at rest (for record retention)
• protection for database columns in (pre-CoSorted) tables

Protecting data in motion (fields in files) is better because you:
• need to keep working with real field values in the database
• can protect only what needs protecting -- sensitive fields -- in files that need to leave and be used outside the database, building, firewall, etc.
• can combine data security with data manipulation and reporting

With CoSort's SortCL tool, you can implement one or more protection functions across different fields, AND run these protections simultaneously with data processing and presentation activities (in the same job script and I/O pass). In other words, you can protect only the fields that need protection, and you can do that at the same time you're staging and integrating large files, and sending data to reports, web pages, databases, or BI tools. You can be protected without adding complexity to your systems.

So, rather than crippling your systems and budgets with slow, complex, or access-limiting protections, consider what CoSort's integrated, selective protections can do for you, and the people who still need access to the rest of the data.

Case Studies

1-800-333-SORT
1-321-777-8889

Unique Benefits

Securing sensitive fields with CoSort's SortCL tool gives you what platform-specific, encryption-only tools cannot:

• Choice
Select the protection method, library or key that fits each field and user security level:
1.256-bit AES or your own encryption library
2. Anonymization (expression logic, etc.)
3. De-identification via
pseudonymization, etc.
4. Filtering (redaction)
5. Randomized data

• Precision
Field-level means truly targeted security, and not losing access to an entire file, database, disk or laptop. Non-sensitive data is still available for processing and distribution.

• Portability
Securing data in files (.txt, .csv, .xml, .dat, .sam, etc.) can protect data at any point in the information life cycle. Other security schemes, including database encryption, are limited to one type of protection on one device or database.

• Convenience
Protections specified in SortCL job scripts occur in the same script and I/O pass with data transforms across, and reports into, many files and formats simultaneously.

• Speed
The resource overhead of these protections, including CPU-intensive encryption, is nominal when run in SortCL.

• Auditability
Use SortCL's Java GUI to approve protections before they are run. Afterwards, XML audit logs contain the full SortCL script and job environment details, allowing queries and reports that verify the who, what, when and how of the protections.

CoSort (IRI, Inc.)