Tim Almond

Nine NHS Trusts Lost Patient Data

Hundreds of thousands of adults and children are thought to be affected by the breaches, which emerged as part of a government-wide data security review.

So, chances are that no-one was going to find out without it. Not only irresponsible with the data, but irresponsible when it came to managing the mistake.

The Department of Health says patients have been told and there is no evidence data has fallen into the wrong hands.

Nor is there any evidence that it hasn’t. No-one knows where it is. It could be sat on a landfill dump, in someone’s intray, or could have fallen into the wrong hands.

Reading all these stories, it is simply appalling that discs are being sent around in this way. Data transfer via secure FTP not only saves time and cost, but it also makes sure that the data is more contained. It goes from server A in one secure server room to server B in another secure server room. It never comes out as a DVD that gets picked up with the rest of the post and sent to the wrong place or knocked out of someone’s intray into a bin.

Sending CDs, DVDs or Cartridges (they replaced mag tapes on mainframes) is what people used to do. I can’t even think of a reason to send a DVD now because the speeds are so much higher. Data transfer by physical media is the choice that I don’t want to take and am driven to only when the other options don’t work. And that’s only the case when you’re transferring volumes in the region of 30-40+ GB of data (and hundreds of thousands of names and addresses isn’t going to make that).

Tags: Technology //