Properly protecting personal data and ensuring privacy is becoming increasingly important for corporations. Yet this can be a difficult task for corporations when you have tens of thousands of privacy-sensitive documents. After all, how do you tackle such a huge task and also ensure a secure organization towards the future? CorporatieGids.nl talked about it with information management consultant Ronald Pronk and record manager Sander Monté of Dunavie.
15,000 documents
Privacy and information security are important issues for Dunavie – responsible for over 8,000 homes in the municipality of Katwijk. “So when we look at masking our data, we didn’t have any major challenges,” Sander begins the conversation. “We already had our DMS ShareWorX in good order because the retention periods are well set up and cleaned up properly. We did have to think carefully about the demarcation of what can be masked because we also capture personnel files and every organization is required to have a copy of an employee’s ID. In addition, we do not want to disrupt important processes by masking data, think of file creation in housing fraud, the allocation of housing to urgents or the accountability allocation that an auditor reviews.”
According to Ronald, the desire to look explicitly at document masking was prompted by new legislation: “In total, some 400,000 documents were processed, with about 15,000 documents containing unwanted data that were masked. This seems like a lot, but the majority of these documents were large tenant files that – at the start of ShareWorX – were scanned in their entirety and where cleaning was minimal at the time.”
Proved technology
Dunavie did the data cleansing by using EntrD’s FileFactory. Sander: “Last summer the large bulk of documents was handled by EntrD. We chose them because of their proven technology. They know Aareon – the supplier of our primary system – and the ShareWorX structure. Where we have outsourced our server, our IT partner Avantage is also in the picture and we want to be at the table with as few parties as possible in this type of project.”
“In addition to the FileFactory, we also purchased the DataFactory. With this we anonymize the data in our test database. This choice also stems from legislation. We deliberately chose to split the work around the Data and FileFactory to keep it clear for employees.”
Communication is key
In addition to the one-time cleansing of the already existing “legacy” data, new data is continuously arriving at Dunavie. “In order to mask this and not mop up with the faucet, we take the ‘car wash,'” Ronald says. “With this, when documents are captured, they are immediately masked 24/7. This prevents us from having to do the same cleaning process again in three years.”
Communication toward the organization is hugely important in this regard, according to Sander. “What we absolutely must avoid is people coming up with workarounds to store sensitive information somewhere else. Think email boxes or SharePoint, for example. So we have to properly explain the importance and operation of the car wash. This fits nicely into our policy of keeping information security and AVG constantly under the spotlight.”
Shifting attention
The data car wash will be operational at Dunavie in a few weeks, concludes Ronald: “After that, we will do an additional cleanup of the documents from the period between the big cleanup and the car wash going live. Fortunately, the biggest work was in cleaning up the old data and the car wash is a matter of setting up and monitoring properly once. We can then shift our attention to setting up the DataFactory, so that we can also use masked data in our test environment that complies with laws and regulations.”
Source: CorporatieGids.nl
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