Monday, October 25, 2010

Find databases with protected health information

Find databases with protected health information: "Identity theft and medical fraud are growing problems. They are so big the U.S. government is spending billions of dollars securing its own computer systems and has written thousands of pages of new regulations that you must follow to help protect your customer and employee data. To comply with new regulations and properly secure data, you will need to find personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) in your databases and documents. Both PHI and PII are conceptually easy to understand but very difficult to track in the thousands of relational data stores, files, and spreadsheets that make up a typical organization's IT environment. This article describes some methods to automatically identify and inventory PII, PHI, and other sensitive data with databases and spreadsheets using Java™ technology and the Apache Ant build tool."