Compliance with laws such as HIPAA (for health care information) and standards
such as PCI (for the payment card industry) require not only de-identifying
(or encrypting) personal information, but verifying
that you de-identified (or encrypted) it. The United States Congress will
likely continue to strentghen data privacy laws for retailers and financial institutions
to prevent breaches of privacy and identity theft.
Solutions:
For detection control, you can review the field-level protections specified in
CoSort’s self-documenting,
human-readable SortCL job scripts at any point.
For proof, you can log all jobs to a query-ready
XML audit file. The audit trail contains the job script, which shows
the protection technique(s) applied to each field in each file processed.
The log also contains other job metadata, like the:
• encryption or other protection libraries used
• encryption keys or de-ID codes
• input and output files
• user who ran the job
• job start and end times
• number of records processed
For prevention control, you can use CoSort’s Java GUI for SortCL to
validate a developer’s protections for output fields prior to execution.
For example, to mask the SSN field in the payroll feed, a developer can modify the file’s output
field attributes in a SortCL script with a few clicks. This modification can be one of many available in SortCL:
• field-level encryption
• anonymization and pseudonymization
• de-identification and re-identification
• removing sensitive fields from the output file
As a compliance officer, you can see the protection(s) through the GUI or text editor. Once approved, the job can be saved or run on the local or any remote SortCL server.
After execution, the job script can be isolated and protected for re-use in production.