Dumfries and Galloway secures USB sticks

NHS Dumfries and Galloway has held a USB stick amnesty for staff and issued 1,100 SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives in return, in order to secure patient information.

Andrew Turner, information infrastructure manager at NHS Dumfries and Galloway, told E-Health Insider: “The trust has held an amnesty so that staff could bring in old USBs containing confidential information, and all of those have now been shredded.

“The distribution of the USBs was quite difficult as we are very dispersed throughout Scotland, so we arranged distribution days where we went to various different locations to give out the new sticks. It is now against policy to use any device other than those supplied by us.”

The organisation has deployed the new USBs with SanDisk CMC Server software to protect otherwise unencrypted, personally identifiable information. The new system will be used at the health board’s headquarters and at 50 field offices across South West Scotland.

Turner said the organisation wanted to make sure that employees could still access information quickly and easily by using USB sticks, but said the old drives were “leaving the doors wide open” for data breaches.

The health board is also planning to roll out AppSense software to tell it who is connecting to what devices and at what PCs, in order to track any misuse of information.

Graham Gault, head of information management and technology, said: “I’ve been in the business a long time and I’ve yet to see a comparable solution. We know that our data is now safe and secure.”

Related article: Scottish NHS gets £1million to secure USB ports

Link: SanDisk