Maryland Hospital Uses Secure USB Flash Drives, Software To Protect Confidential Data

  • Jul 17, 2008

SanDisk Corp. recently announced that Howard County General Hospital in Columbia, Maryland, has selected SanDisk’s Cruzer Enterprise secure USB flash drives and Central Management & Control (CMC) server software to protect highly confidential medical and organizational data.

Part of the Johns Hopkins Medicine health care system, which includes the prestigious Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Howard County General Hospital (HCGH) is a comprehensive medical center providing services to more than 165,000 people a year, with a staff of 1,700 full-time and part-time employees, as well as more than 800 physicians and other allied health professionals.

HCGH recently purchased SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise drives to provide on request to managers in all departments of the hospital, and subsequently purchased SanDisk CMC software to manage those drives through the hospital’s network.

“Few types of information are more confidential than patient records, making data security a top priority in health care,” said Rick Edwards, senior director and CIO for HCGH. “We selected the SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise drive because security is not an option -- all files are encrypted and password protected. We added SanDisk CMC software so our IT staff can have more control over data stored on USB flash drives, as well as the ability to remotely supervise day-to-day tasks such as password management and backup.”

“We are honored that Howard County General Hospital, a leader in adopting new health care IT solutions, is turning to SanDisk to help make data in use more secure,” said Roy Ramati, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Division at SanDisk. “Looking beyond security, we believe HCGH will appreciate how CMC can increase the IT staff’s visibility into how the drives are used.”

SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise flash drives protect all files stored on the drive with advanced hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption. Users are also required to create a complex password during the set-up process. The combination of encryption and password protection makes it extremely difficult for unauthorized users to access data if the drive is lost or stolen. Cruzer Enterprise is also fast, with read speed of 24 MB per second and write speed of 20 MBps.

SanDisk CMC software provides lifecycle management for Cruzer Enterprise drives, including password recovery and renewal through the network, remote termination of lost drives, central back-up and restore, and central usage tracking. This means data is not lost when a drive is lost, and IT administrators can provision a replacement flash drive with user files stored on the network.

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