If you ever start to question the importance of data loss prevention, ask yourself what would happen if your company were to suddenly lose all of its data. No more patient records, lab diagnostics, phone numbers, insurance data, payment records – all of it gone forever.
Could your practice survive? Would you ever be able to recover financially?
It’s a scary possibility, even more so when you consider that it’s a real threat to healthcare organizations.
As cyber criminals become more adept at bypassing traditional security measures, it’s all the more important for organizations to maintain a data-centric defense.
Let’s examine a few best practices when considering data loss prevention deployment:
Develop a Deployment Strategy
It’s not enough to invest in data loss prevention tools and products if you don’t also invest in a strategy to make them work in the short and long terms.
Healthcare organizations often become eager to put new security measures in motion without first recognizing how it affects daily operations, user experience, and other facets. As a result, you may experience more “false positives” and unnecessary alerts that waste time and money.
Carefully plotting every aspect of your deployment can ensure a smooth, seamless implementation. Partnering with the right service provider can help to reduce costs, shorten deployment time, and meet all legal objectives as you roll out your product across business units.
Align Your DLP with Business Needs
What content should be part of your data loss prevention strategy?
In general, most organizations prioritize the obvious: insurance information, social security numbers, and protected health information. It gets more complicated when you start considering individual documents.
DLP is largely executed by IT teams, but their understanding of what should be classified as sensitive can be limited. Data owners must also be involved in protecting their documents to ensure privacy and prevent theft or loss.
Mobile Security
As the rise of mobile devices in the workplace continues to increase, so do the number of data security concerns associated with mobile access.
Cloud-based infrastructures are further complicating how organizations monitor for data loss. Where connections were once made through a VPN, they are now mostly bypassing the VPN in lieu of a direct connection.
When considering DPL solutions, healthcare organizations should work with vendors to determine which cloud-based solutions can be supported now and in the future. Data stored in the cloud should be monitored by other controls to fill in any gaps left behind by DLP services.
Data Loss Prevention Is Too Important Not to Prioritize
Data loss prevention should be part of any healthcare IT security strategy, and it’s too critical to your business not to prioritize.
Keep in mind that keeping your data safe requires a process, not just a product. The service provider you choose to protect your data should be chosen based on how well they fit with your overall strategy.
Lifepoint is dedicated to providing healthcare companies with safe, secure data solutions. We take data loss prevention seriously and make it easy for you to integrate our products with your security processes.
Contact us today to learn more about how Lifepoint is helping healthcare companies deliver a safer experience for all.