Medical Facility Loses a Rock

What a Stolen Flash Drive with 40,000 Patient Records Could Have Looked Like, Had a Kanguru Secure USB Strategy Been In Place

Losing a rock, of course, would not be a big deal, in fact, it’s quite a boring story. However, had the IT administrator of a medical office had a Kanguru Secure USB Strategy in place, the stolen data storage with personal patient information could have been reported as just that – a complete non-issue. But unfortunately for nearly 40,000 patients, the stolen USB device containing their social security numbers, and other sensitive, personal health records was just a regular everyday- household, unsecured drive, leaving their medical history open for all the world to see – which becomes a really big, embarrassing, and costly deal very fast.

It is so important that healthcare facilities and medical organizations working with sensitive information to have a Secure USB Strategy in place to protect their patients, and avoid the embarrassment, loss of trust, and legal action associated with a painful data breach. Though secure, hardware encrypted drives can be a bit more expensive, they are a crucial element to securing a system containing sensitive patient information and complying with HIPAA regulations. The cost is immaterial compared to the exorbitant costs and damages that can and do occur from a data breach. Just consider the painful repercussions of a breach for 40,000 patients as a result of just one stolen flash drive that was not protected:

• Letters sent out to 40,000 patients / clients informing them of the incident
• Offering free credit monitoring for 40,000 patients / clients
• Embarrassment to the organization
• Patients / Clients are angered and lose trust in the organization
• Legal action might be taken
• Hefty fines may be assessed

As a result of many costly breaches like this, some organizations have even gone as far as to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”, by ruling out the use of USB drives altogether. But with the convenience USB devices bring to organizations, it’s much better to develop a secure USB data strategy. With Kanguru Defender, password protected and secure USB drives in place, you could literally “set-it and forget it”, enabling medical organizations to do the work they do best – saving lives, and no longer having to worry about USB security. Here’s what healthcare organizations can do to protect sensitive information on USB devices.

Develop Your Kanguru Secure USB Strategy

A Kanguru Secure USB Strategy is simply a policy that ensures that all USB devices carrying sensitive information are secure and completely accounted for. A Kanguru Secure USB strategy provides all of the essential ingredients for securing an organizations’ data on all of their USB flash drives, hard drives and solid state drives inside and outside of the workplace. With secure USB devices, information can be backed up, copied, stored, and transferred anywhere at any time, in fully password-protected USB drives. The data is completely locked with AES 256-bit hardware encryption, anti-virus protection and other great security benefits.
Case in point: If a medical facility were to lose sensitive patient records that were stored on a Kanguru Defender Secure Hardware Encrypted USB flash drive, the flash drive would become useless to a potential thief who might attempt to gain access (and yes, there are criminals out there looking for opportunities). If multiple attempts are made by entering bad passwords, the device locks up entirely after a pre-determined amount of failed attempts – again rendering the device useless. The drive would simply become, to further the paradigm, a rock or paperweight of no value to any would-be thief.

Additionally, an organization can opt to remotely manage a fleet of USB flash drives, or hard drives anywhere in the world, adding an extra measure of security to HIPAA compliance and data security.

Kanguru Remote Management is an optional feature that further protects sensitive data on secure USB flash drives, hard drives and solid state drives by providing complete remote data wipe and delete capability, password updating, policy updating and much more. Kanguru Secure USB drives can be configured by IT management and then provisioned to staff and personnel for storing, transferring, and backing-up sensitive data. The IT manager can monitor and manage those drives all over the world through either the organization’s self-hosted server, or Kanguru’s secure cloud management interface.

Kanguru Remote Management enables IT managers to:

• Track and manage the organization’s secure USB drives anywhere worldwide
• Push out files to assigned USB drives
  
• Disable/delete lost or stolen devices
  
• Grant specific online & offline permissions
  
• Generate reports
  
• Notify users and roll out policy updates
  
• Schedule password changes
  
• and more...

Organizations must realize that people misplace items, and there are thieves out there salivating to get their hands on sensitive data. Why not have a Kanguru Standard Secure USB Strategy in place, so that if and when these incidents occur, they are simply a non-issue? Any organization can keep close guard of their sensitive data, and be fully compliant with HIPAA, and other medical data security regulations, saving perhaps millions of dollars, terrible embarrassment and legal action, and in the famous words of It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, thieves would only be able to whine sadly, “I got a rock.”

To learn more about how the Kanguru Defender® Series and Remote Management could work for your environment or organization, please feel free to contact us.

Kanguru is a global leader in providing high-quality hardware encrypted secure USB flash drives, hard drives, solid state drives, portable USB storage devices, remote management applications, duplication equipment and more. Kanguru is committed to offering the highest level of quality secure products and services to enterprise, government, healthcare, organizations and consumers world-wide with easy-to-use, certified IT products and data storage. For more information on Kanguru, please visit www.kanguru.com.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Marketing Manager
Kanguru Solutions
marketing@kanguru.com
508.376.4245