In your daily work, you will often need to consider the balance between safeguarding organizational data and ensuring privacy. It is crucial to understand the data’s nature, both in its entirety and fragments, and to categorize it appropriately when addressing these requirements.

Imagine this headline: “Data Breach at Main Memorial Hospital!” A published article reveals that a stolen laptop contains sensitive patient data, including social security numbers and insurance information, in plain text.

For your initial post, consider this question: As a practitioner, would you tackle this issue from a security perspective (using encryption to protect the data) or a privacy perspective (preventing the data from leaving the network in the first place)? Justify your choice.

When responding to your peers, highlight a cost or benefit associated with the chosen approach.

When looking at this headline/situation specifically, I find that focusing on the privacy of the issue is the main concern. While it is a security risk to store this kind of information in plain text, the network should be set up in a fashion that this oversight would be a minimal concern. In this case, however, the security of the network as a whole no longer matters as the information has left the safeguard of the network itself. No matter how the network is set up, nothing can prevent this data from now being accessed by someone it shouldn’t be. Ensuring that this information cannot be downloaded or accessed from anywhere but the designated hospital network and only by specific individuals may be partly a security issue, but overall the fact that this information left the demarc is the main issue and one that can no longer be fixed in this scenario.