Finding protected health information to encrypt is a challenge. Firms may decide to encrypt their entire document managment system. Although this is an extreme approach, it would comply with the HIPAA Omnibus Rule. The only downside is a potential performance hit. HP Autonomy says that the encryption and decryption processes add about 25 percent overhead to file system performance. If a standard unencrypted document takes four seconds to open, it will take approximately five seconds to open that same file after you encrypt it.
If your firm uses wide-area network (WAN) acceleration devices and a centralized DMS with an encrypted file store, the WAN acceleration can be a performance bottleneck for remote offices. The bottleneck occurs because the WAN device doesn’t have access to the encryption and decryption processes. You can try to sidestep the bottleneck and share encryption keys with the WAN accelerator, but there is a danger. A decrypted document with protected health information may remain in cache on the WAN device, resulting in unencrypted data at rest.
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