Don’t compromise on security when having people work from home
Tom White
Chief Product Officer,  AI Data Innovations

Tech companies around the world are risking being hit with multi-billion dollar privacy compliance fines.  When the Coronavirus pandemic hit, it sent employees home to work, with an uncertain timeframe for their return.   In our industry, this has also meant the closing of data delivery centers. As a result, companies that work with sensitive data must face a difficult choice: stop working with that data for however long the conditions last; or, work on it anyway by compromising on security and risking huge penalties.

However, there is now a third option that means you do not have to stop working with sensitive data or compromise its security.

AI Data Innovations has developed a solution that provides both physical and digital security to home offices, allowing people to work from home without compromising on security. We call our solution the AIDI Secured Home Office.

Long before COVID-19 complicated compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other local privacy laws, AIDI developed a solution for companies with limited access to large delivery centers.  Since secure data centers were often in the U.S., China, and India, we identified the need for companies collecting data in smaller countries such as Belgium, Laos, Turkey, and Peru. These countries have become important targets for data collection strategies, but they don’t currently have good mechanisms for working with sensitive data within their borders.

To address the pandemic and the need for secure data in the smallest environments, we modified this larger solution, adapting it for a single door. With Secured Home Office, our customers can now create a GDPR-compliant workspace for any client, working from anywhere in the world. It’s a simple, convenient solution that can prevent employees from being laid off and keeps your data collection running smoothly and without risk.

If your company has been using a third-party to process sensitive data, with Secured Home Office, you can continue to do that, but Secured Home Office is not limited to only third-party scenarios. If you have secure processes for your own teams, such as your financial department, Secured Home Office can help you maintain business continuity while your employees are working from home. Secured Home Office enables for private home hosting of these critical processes—a business continuity solutions that really doesn’t exist without our product.

Best of all, Secured Home Office can be set up in a couple of hours.

Included in the Secured Home Office bundle:

1. Cameras for outside the room to monitor access to the secure room. The camera automatically detects if the door has opened.
2. Cameras for inside the room to monitor if there is only one person in the room and if the person who came into the room is the proper person. These cameras also can detect if a person picks up a cell phone or other unauthorized device, and will send an alert.
3. A badge scanner for outside the room as well as biometric security such as fingerprint, retinal scan, and/or facial recognition options for the device to control who enters the room.
4. In combination with the cameras and the badge scanner, we include centralized human monitoring at a separate location.  If there is some sort of event, our people are alerted and determine if a security breach has occurred. Then, we inform our clients directly with information about what exactly occurred.  Our team would then make recommendations.
5. The AIDI Lock Box – this device turns the computer into a secure workstation, employing restrictions on printing, screen saving, saving to the hard drive, and other unauthorized activities. Everything is connected to our security system so if there is a security breach, such as an unauthorized badge-in, the computer screen is automatically locked.
6. We’ve included signage for posting outside the Secured Home Office about the restricted office space, detailing the security rules and informing what and who is allowed into the space.
7. The software package includes chain of custody of the data, allowing the tracking of a security leak.  Another use case might be if you wanted to do data auditing – look to see how data is flowing and whether proper regulations are being met (e.g. data deleted when finished being worked on)  This info could be used as part of your defense in the event of a regulatory review.

                                          

We are, obviously, very excited to be the first company to bring the innovative Secured Home Office to the market place.

Perhaps the most innovative piece of the product is the chain of custody software that tracks the location of the data at all times: when it was encrypted and downloaded to a machine; whose machine it was downloaded to; how long it was on that machine; when it was viewed; and any other events that happened during that time. This software helps tremendously in determining where a data leak originated, and how the event occurred. It is very much like an evidential chain of custody of the data: from the point where it was downloaded and encrypted to the point where it was deleted at the end.

We are looking at two potential models for the product:

1. Service Model.  If our clients want us to handle their sensitive data for them: annotation, moderation, transcription – we already perform all those services.  Secure Home Office enables our customers to continue their secure data work in a groundbreaking, unique way and solves many of their biggest security and privacy problems.

2. Licensing Model.  Clients looking to make their company more pandemic-proof can license the technology by subscribing to our product, use it for their own employees, and manage it themselves.

The fact we must all face is the world has changed for the foreseeable future in ways we don’t yet fully understand. Even though our solution is not coronavirus-specific, this pandemic has brought the issues of security and privacy compliance to the forefront. Moving forward in a changing world, Secure Home Office is an innovation that solves privacy law compliance problems in both the near and long terms.

Secured Home Office is available now. We will be rolling out our launch over the next few weeks including online demos.

Whatever the future of secure workspace holds, we offer Secured Home Office as a path forward.

Please contact us for more information.