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

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Protect Data at Risk at the Field Level

Make Data Safe for Compliance, Outsourcing and Testing

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 disaster 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 Global IDs, Micro Focus APM, Exeros, 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 data in your tables and files.

Solutions:

IRI's new FieldShield software, as well as the the SortCL tool in IRI's CoSort package, now deliver field-level protections for data at rest in database tables and flat files. With these products, you get:

• to choose between and use different encryption, anonymization, pseudonymization, de-identification, or masking functions for each field

• access to, and manipulation of, both the protected and unprotected parts of the table or file

• minimal overhead -- security is just another high-speed field transformation

• integration and efficiency -- data masking in the same job script and I/O pass with other CoSort (SortCL) data transformation and reporting functions

• complete audit trails, in XML format, so you can make compliance validation reports and queries

• protection for data in motion or at rest (for record retention)

• protection for database columns in (pre-CoSorted) tables

Protecting fields in files allows you to:

• keep working with real field values in your database tables or file

• protect only what needs protecting -- sensitive fields -- in files that need to leave and be used outside the database, building, firewall, etc.

• combine data security with sequential file staging and reporting

• augment physical and other logical security measures for data in transit; stolen data that is still safely encrypted renders hacking less dangerous

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.

Click here to listen to The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) interview with IRI VP David Friedland

Understand how CoSort protects data at risk at the field level during large scale data integration.

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

Unique Benefits

Securing sensitive fields with FieldShield or the CoSort 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 tables and popular file formats (.txt, .csv, .xml, .dat, .sam, etc.) can protect data at any point in the information life cycle. Other security schemes, including database-specific encryption, are limited to one type of protection on one device or database.

• Convenience
Protections specified in CoSort job scripts can occur in the same script and I/O pass with data transformations and reports.

• Speed
The resource overhead of these protections, including CPU-intensive encryption, is nominal since only fields are encrypted.

• Realism
Format-preserving encryption of alphanumeric field values like social security and credit card numbers, along with pseudonymization of real names protects sensitive information while maintaining a real appearance. This fools and defeats hackers, and provides safe test data for application development, platform prototyping, and stress-testing.

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

IRI, The CoSort Company