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This week’s cyber security debate is about data protection, with continual debates between intelligence and government agencies on how to deal with encrypted communications. Both Michael Hayden, former NSA chief, and Jimmy Weeks, CEO of Wikipedia, were in the spotlight commenting on the topic for this week’s focus on National Cyber Security Awareness Month.

Industries at risk
Heavily regulated industries have a higher per capita data breach cost and require data security measures as compulsory components of their security strategy. The top industries identified for 2014 were health, pharmaceuticals and financial services1.

The Ponemon Institute report statistics have come to life with the Anthem, Inc. data breach announcement in February 2015. The data breach included 80 million customers and employees of the Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurance provider.   In this case, Anthem medical IDs and Social Security numbers were not encrypted in the database. The depletion of Anthem’s cyber-insurance coverage and additional costs are significant compared to the costs of implementing a secure data encryption solution.

What to consider?
When selecting a technology partner for secure printing, there are different application areas to protect data with encryption. Here are four areas to consider:

  • Encrypted Communication – securing communications from workstations, servers and network-connected printers with encryption.
  • Encrypted Credentials – storing user PIN codes hashed in databases and secured single sign-on authentication for MFPs to access native MFP and advanced workflow capabilities.
  • Encrypted Storage – keeping documents encrypted at rest to ensure administrators cannot view RAW print job data.
  • Encrypted Printing – sending documents encrypted from the computing device to the print server and then to the printer.

What solutions are available?
FollowMe by Ringdale is trusted by global leaders in banking, health and government organizations to prevent data interception and to protect sensitive customer, employee and organizational information. Organizations choose the FollowMe solution as it takes government grade encryption into account at all levels, meaning encryption is the core of all communications, authentication, storage and printing.

For further information on FollowMe by Ringdale visit www.followme.ringdale.com

1 Ponemon Institute, ‘ 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study: United States’, September 2015