NHS Dumfries & Galloway Protects Portable Patient Records with SanDisk Enterprise Secure Mobile Storage Solution

Published by Craig@Context for Context Public Relations Ltd in Health

Based in Scotland, NHS Dumfries & Galloway (www.nhsdg.scot.nhs.uk), is one of the country’s leading health care services providers, promoting healthy living for Dumfries and Galloway’s population. The organization 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.

Challenge
With data loss and theft on the rise in government agencies in the UK, NHS Dumfries & Galloway took on a company-wide initiative to implement one of their most stringent policies for safely storing patient data on PCs, laptops, PDAs and other mobile devices. Their objective was to proactively manage potential security problems before they happened, and secure confidential patient information at both the company headquarters and in 50 field offices across Dumfries and Galloway in South West Scotland.

The organization’s IT department wanted to ensure that its 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, particularly in field offices far from company headquarters.

Solution
Following months of intensive testing and benchmarking comparable software solutions at the customer’s site, Dumfries & Galloway selected SanDisk’s Cruzer® Enterprise USB flash drives and CMC server software.

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.

Result
NHS Dumfries & Galloway have deployed over 1,100 Cruzer® Enterprise USB flash drives with CMC software seats to protect transfers of otherwise unencrypted,
personally identifiable information in electronic format. The flash drives are used throughout the NHS organization, including company headquarters and 50 field offices in
the region. This includes the main hospital, the Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary and leading community hospitals, including its new £13 million Community
Hospital. The master CMC unit was installed at the organization’s central IT department in Dumfries and facilitated drive deployment.

“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.

www.sandisk.com/enterprise