How to keep data safe when it’s out of your hands
By now, all organizations are cognizant of the threat posed by cyber criminals. That’s why enterprises spend lavishly to harden their networks from external attack. At the same time, our interconnected world demands that data flow smoothly from one organization to another—to vendors, customers, partners, and others as needed in the flow of business. Call it a broad dataplex of organizations that must share and collaborate to be in business—a dataplex which, by its very nature, puts one firm’s cybersecurity in the hands of another, perhaps less fastidious, enterprise. Is it any surprise, then, that 49% of firms have had a data breach caused by a third party—just in the last 12 months?[1]
Case in point: the data fiasco that, starting in February 2024, crippled one of the US’s top health insurers: UnitedHealth Group (UHG). Not only has this breach exposed some of the most sensitive personal information individuals have; it’s also hamstrung prescription approvals and remittances to health care providers—freezing healthcare for millions of consumers and locking up the healthcare dataplex. This attack went after Change Healthcare, a UHG company that provides all manner of healthcare information exchange in order to help the larger system collaborate easily and run smoothly and efficiently. In other words, it is one of those third-party companies that helps organizations cooperate, and it put sensitive data at risk for the whole ecosystem. The fallout from this disaster has just begun. Lawsuits. Federal investigations. Patients unable to get care. Doctors going unpaid…and even out of business.
Stopping breaches before they start
It didn’t have to be this way. Xinsere’s maximum security collaboration would have prevented this attack in in the first place by fragmenting and distributing data into an impenetrable fog and only reassembling it to provide authenticated and permissioned users access to the data. For added security, all permissions are registered in an immutable blockchain, which Xinsere uses to enforce rights. It’s like Zero Trust—but for every organization in a particular dataplex.
A solution like Xinsere can benefit every industry. After all, inter-company collaboration is how work gets done today, from big Hollywood movies to drug discovery. Cross-enterprise collaborations keep the financial, insurance, legal, and food chain systems going. Industry specific dataplexes make manufacturing efficient, hospitality hospitable, and underpin transportation. And as UHG’s troubles show, they are a weak spot in our cyber defenses. Fortunately, there’s a solution. Xinsere: Maximum Security Collaboration.
[1] IBM/Ponemon Institute, “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023”