Customer Success Story
Government Employees Health Association
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Problem: |
Information Lifecycle Security (ILS) for HIPAA-Related Data |
GEHA is the third-largest national health insurance plan serving federal employees and retirees, as well as their families. With over 225,000 health plan members, GEHA provides health insurance to over 407,000 people around the world, and their growing preferred provider organization (PPO) network is one of the largest in the nation.
Peter Lang’s task at GEHA is of the utmost importance and highest-visibility: mitigate HIPAA-related security risks for file and email information. Well aware that over 100 firms reported security violations in 2005 that exposed the private information of 56 million people, and that fines approaching $15M were levied against some of those companies, Peter turned to leading systems integrator Atria Data Systems for a solution. The requirement was simple yet daunting: scan hundreds of thousands of targeted files in the User directory and discover HIPAA-related security information, such as social security numbers, and allow for automated actions including classification tagging, storage migration or file deletion based on policies.
“The challenge was finding a complete, integrated, affordable solution for data classification and management that included ILS,” says Mitchell Moody, Atria Data Systems’ vice president of sales and marketing. “We could have stitched together five or six disparate solutions, but then we’d have huge problems with compatibility, scalability and affordability. Even then we would not be able to deliver all of the functionality required by the customer.”
Atria recommended Abrevity’s FileData Classifier software and optional ILS module for GEHA. The software was installed on a Windows 2003 server in about three minutes. Setting up the initial scan of more than 500,000 files on the “U” drive took another three minutes. Peter then implemented a quick Boolean query to narrow the discovery and extraction scope down to 200,000 files. The complete process, from installation to setup to discovery and extraction took less than one day.
“Our management staff was amazed,” says Peter Lang. “In a short amount of time, Abrevity’s software discovered and extracted over ten-thousand social security numbers from hundreds of thousands of files and emails. I was then able to add our own custom metadata tags to those files, such as ePHI Security Data, by simply dragging and dropping the listed files to pre-defined tag icons. I can set automated policy actions, such as deleting or moving files to secure storage platforms, by dragging and dropping files to those action icons, and output a spreadsheet report for management. The software also lets me set automated scanning, extraction, tagging, reporting and migration policies to ensure we have ongoing security data monitoring and management.”
All other information classification and management (ICM) solutions are built on relational database and/or enterprise search technologies, which have proven inadequate for enterprise customer requirements. Abrevity’s SLICEbase technology completely addresses these needs by allowing orders of magnitude better scalability to billions of records, flexibility for on-the-fly schema changes, file versioning and genealogy migration tracking with stubbing, distributed “parallel” deployment including multi-threaded scanning and indexing—all at a much lower cost than comparable solutions.
Abrevity’s FileData Classifier application rides on top of its SLICEbase engine and an optional ILS module offers advanced pattern recognition, “target-based” data mining, and heuristic proximity searching and metadata extraction for security, HIPAA and other custom information.
“Abrevity’s FileData Classifier definitely offers the best bang for the buck,” says Mitchell Moody. “Their solution is comparable and in some cases superior to solutions costing three to ten times as much. But as far as ease of implementation and use, no other solution even comes close. Almost every customer we talk to has data management, compliance or security issues. Whether customers have one terabyte or several petabytes, Abrevity offers the best first step into content-based data classification and management at the lowest price on the market.”