Managing the ever-increasing growth of personal identifiable information (PII) at large organizations and government agencies continues to post difficult challenges, private sector and government officials said this week.
Bill Tolson, Vice President of Global Compliance and eDiscovery at Archive360, illustrated at an August 10 event organized by GovLoop the pace of data growth in recent years, and how organizations are forced to deal with it.
“It used to be that 15 years ago, the average employee might come across with emails and things like five to 15 megabits worth of data per day,” Tolson said.
“Ten years ago it was 20 megabytes per day, now its 100 megabytes per day,” he said. “I think just organizations in general, as well as users, managing that information growth has been most crucial,” said Tolson.
Another closely related issue for government agencies and large organizations to deal with regarding PII management has been the growing number of applications and devices that have access to personal data.
Nicole Willis, Chief Technology Officer in the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, talked about the challenges she faces at HHS
“A lot of things that we’re struggling with as a government organization is just the sheer volume of applications and devices that are accessing data, and we’re continuing to evolve and use more and more different types of data points to identify people and information,” said Willis.
“We’re using more data on different devices and with more protected health information or personal health information,” Willis continued. “This also includes [not only] your demographic information, but your medical history, tests and laboratory resorts, results and insurance information and the other data that health care professionals use to provide and plan out your care.”
