Secure sensitive data while simplifying compliance

For healthcare organizations, data is literally the lifeblood of your operations. Whether you are dealing with patients’ protected health information (PHI), clinical research data, or billing and insurance details, your data must be as secure as possible while still being readily accessible to authorized users and third parties.

The proliferation of privacy regulations that specifically address healthcare data are often accompanied by mandatory reporting of data breaches and associated fines for failure to protect sensitive information.

In highly regulated industries, an average of 24% of data breach costs were accrued more than two years after the breach occurred

With the average cost of a data breach exceeding $4M, direct financial losses alone can be catastrophic for many companies. High-profile “mega-breaches” that expose millions of sensitive data records can drive these costs up to hundreds of millions of dollars, but even the victims of smaller ones can face harsh compliance penalties. Massive reputation damage after a public breach disclosure only adds insult to injury. Everybody agrees, but clearly, whatever organizations are doing today to protect themselves from data breaches is not working, as evidenced by a growing number and scale of reported data breaches.

Data-centric security is an alternative approach towards information protection that has emerged as a direct response to the increasingly obvious failure of traditional measures focusing on protecting IT infrastructures. Deceptively simple in theory, it promises to drastically improve security and compliance when dealing with sensitive data but requires a careful strategic approach to translate into a practical architecture.

Download this white paper to learn how the layered security approach combined with unified visibility and analytics help make data-centric security a reality.

Compliance is not security – but compliance mandates provide a solid foundation for good data protection.

Regulatory and industry compliance are major drivers of security investment for healthcare organizations. While compliance is certainly not security, compliance can provide a solid foundation for an information security program. After all, many of the data protection and privacy mandates are intended to protect consumers by ensuring proper security controls are implemented.

Security requirements are found within a broad set of regulations and mandates, including HIPAA, HITECH, and PCI. Healthcare organizations require automated, continuous compliance across ever-changing regulations and a dynamic IT environment. Imperva provides industry cyber security leading solutions that help healthcare organizations streamline data store audits and compliance.