NHS Dumfries and Galloway secures confidential patient information with SanDisk Enterprise Secure Mobile Storage Solution

(06/04/2009)

NHS Dumfries & Galloway provides healthcare services and promotes healthy living for the area’s population. The organisation employs a staff of 4,500 professionals, and is responsible for nearly 147,000 inhabitants who benefit from services at surrounding community hospitals and clinics.

With data loss and theft on the rise in government agencies in the UK, in 2008 NHS Dumfries & Galloway started an initiative to implement stringent policies for safely storing patient data on PCs, laptops, PDAs and other mobile devices, to proactively manage potential security problems before they happened.

Its IT department wanted to ensure that employees did not have to give up the convenience of carrying data on memory sticks, and sought a solution that would keep patient data password-protected and encrypted, as well as centrally managed and controlled.

NHS Dumfries & Galloway has selected SanDisk’s Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives and CMC server software to secure confidential patient information at both the company headquarters and in 50 field offices across Dumfries and Galloway in South West Scotland.

Following a process of benchmarking solutions, Dumfries & Galloway selected SanDisk’s Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives and CMC server software. The organisation has deployed over 1,100 Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives with SanDisk CMC server software to protect transfers of otherwise unencrypted, personally identifiable information in electronic format.

“I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’ve yet to see a comparable solution that centrally manages the drive’s complete lifecycle the way that SanDisk’s CMC does. Simply put, we know that our data is now safe and secure. SanDisk has changed the way we work,” said Graham Gault, Head of Information Management and Technology for NHS Dumfries & Galloway.

SanDisk’s Cruzer Enterprise secure USB flash drives are specifically designed to meet the unique USB security, compliance and manageability needs of large enterprises, and to help IT professionals more effectively protect mobile data. Rather than relying on users to secure files, the flash drive imposes mandatory access control on all files, storing them in a hardware-encrypted, password-protected partition.

SanDisk’s CMC server software provides lifecycle management tools for Cruzer Enterprise drives, including password recovery and renewal through the network, remote termination of lost drives, central back-up and restore functions, and central usage tracking. This means data can be retrieved when a drive is lost, and IT administrators can provision a replacement flash drive with user files stored on the network.

Related topics:  Data management and data security   Encryption 

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