CoSort Tool Prevents Breaches

MELBOURNE, Fla. -- Innovative Routines International Inc. (IRI), makers of the CoSort (www.cosort.com) data manipulation package for Unix, Linux and Windows, announced that the latest CoSort release (V9) can also encrypt and protect files with private personal information down to the field level. Other tools protect sensitive data by encrypting entire files, databases, disks, or laptops which is often slower, and renders everything else inaccessible. Instead, CoSort can apply different protections to each field as needed: anonymization, encryption, de-identification, filtering, obfuscation, or pseudonymization – rendering data theft futile/profitless. Also unique: CoSort users can employ (and audit) these protections as they manipulate and report from many large files.

CoSort V9 integrates these security functions into its widely-used data transformation and presentation language (called SortCL). Companies and government agencies can use SortCL to protect data at risk (e.g. name, social security, credit card, or phone number) in source files that at rest or in motion. Other field-level protection methods are cumbersome, limited to one encryption library or database, or require standalone processing or expensive ETL software.

With 256-AES data encryption and other protections built into SortCL, CoSort users can simultaneously process and present data from CSV, index, LDIF, sequential, text, XML and other portable files without exposing private information. IRI Sr. Software Engineer Don Punhagen observed that “SortCL can encrypt data quickly, and do it in the same job script and input/output (I/O) stream with large-scale sorting, joining, aggregation, conversion, and reporting tasks.” In addition, SortCL scripts are explicit, easy-to-implement, and fully auditable – “a key benefit for industries with stringent compliance requirements,” he added.

“Data loss and the compromising of personal information is pandemic,” explains industry data expert Gwen Thomas of The Data Governance Institute. “Over the last 28 months, hundreds of documented security breaches have resulted in over 154 million records being compromised. A common theme in these breaches was that sensitive data was not encrypted – not at the file level, and not at the field level.”

Innovative Routines International (IRI) Inc.