Regulations on handling personal data place additional responsibilities on organisations, with risk mitigation assisted by secure backup practices — as Kettering Borough Council has found.
The UK council sought to ensure compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with failure to comply risking heavy financial penalties for data breaches or losses levied by the UK’s Information Commissioner Office (ICO).
A spokesperson for the IT team at Kettering Borough Council says that after considering two possible vendors for the purchase of encrypted flash drives to help meet GDPR requirements, the local authority chose datAshur USB drives.
“We found that iStorage seemed to have the best product in the market for what we wanted to achieve,” he says.
“The drives have been easy for the team to learn and use and have met expectations on being a secure solution.”
The Northamptonshire council aims to support some 100,000 residents of the county, with leisure, housing, planning, and business services.
Organisations can keep personal data safe
Comprehensive and effective policy and solutions typically include secure offline backup that can be disconnected from the network, keeping data safe in transit and when stored — such as the datAshur range of flash drives from iStorage.
The vendor’s personal identification number (PIN) enabled and hardware-encrypted data storage and cloud encryption devices aim to store and protect sensitive data to military specifications. Strong encryption is key to privacy and confidentiality, it notes.
“Data rights are human rights,” according to iStorage. “Respect for consumers’ data privacy rights will drive organisations to go the extra mile to ensure data confidentiality.”
In a 2020 survey, around two in every five cloud databases were unencrypted. Yet organisations are under “constant attack” from malicious actors online, notes iStorage.
“Data should preferably be encrypted with a FIPS-certified, randomly generated AES 256-bit encryption key.”
( Image Wikimedia Creative Commons – licensed under CC BY 4.0 )
