One of the most emotional, exciting and often intimidating journey in one’s life is the process of starting a family. Couples and singles in the process of seeking reproductive assistance place complete trust in fertility organizations to help grow their families. They want to know that their most critical and personal information is safe from the reach of bad actors.
Egg donor and surrogate search service Donor Concierge recently partnered with us to oversee the data security and privacy integration of its FRTYL platform. The FRTYL platform is a state-of-the-art centralized database that brings a growing repository of surrogates and more than 15,000 egg donors together in one place so they can be matched more quickly with intended parents. The company’s patient-first mission is to create a global software platform that transforms how prospective parents use technology to find third-party fertility options by consolidating services such as sperm donation, embryo adoption, surrogacy, cryobanking, implantation, and pharmaceuticals. FRTYL streamlines every step of the donor matching process, including initial application, acceptance, registration and image uploads, all while reducing the administrative burden that comes with making the right match.
FRTYL’S NEED FOR SECURITY
All of the information being stored, sorted and shared between donors, surrogates, recipients and practitioners is extremely sensitive. And today’s HIPAA regulations impose strict guidelines about how this information can be stored. FRTYL knew that it needed cutting-edge technology that would safeguard their users’ privacy. Security solutions that simply stack software on top of an application only introduce more gaps for a breach of data.
Consider that the cost of cyberattacks last year reached more than 1 trillion dollars, with organizations in the U.S. spending more on cybersecurity than on natural disaster recovery. On top of that, credentialed individuals instigated 58 percent of breaches, making them the leading suspects for insider threats. For FRTYL, the solution had to be bulletproof.
TOKENIZING DATA THROUGH THE CLOUD
Enter ALTR. Through our partnership, FRTYL is the first donor matching service to leverage the powerful data security capabilities of blockchain. We’ve enabled FRTYL to safely store and retrieve data, as well as anonymize it so that it can be used as a trusted resource for parents seeking to build their families. This is done by removing sensitive information from the database, fragmenting and scattering it across nodes in our cloud-based vault called the ALTRchain. All that remains are nondescript tokens that point back to the first piece of the blockchain; there’s literally nothing left to steal from the database. This secure network of nodes makes the data self-describing, quantum-safe and protected from any threat, including those posed by insiders. Since there is no key or map to be stolen like traditional tokenization and encryption methods, FRTYL ensures their customers sensitive data is always safe.
This pioneering approach to protecting FRTYL through tokenization is made possible through Amazon Web Services, the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. Because we utilize the AWS cloud to power our technology, we can guarantee our Data Security as a Service (DSaaS) customers that their information will stay private and protected. While the cloud may be formidable to some, our approach constitutes the cloud a safe place to do business: data is fragmented across storage locations and is unable to be assembled by anyone other than the customer, even those with privileged access to the cloud infrastructure.
We’re helping FRTYL actualize its goal of transforming the way prospective parents use technology to find third-party fertility options. Gail Sexton Anderson, the founder of Donor Concierge and one of the fertility industry’s leading innovators and creative thinkers, told us that our work with FRTYL will give couples and singles “repose that their most precious personal information is protected.”
USING THE CLOUD TO MAKE CLOUD SAFER
With the benefits of the cloud being undeniable, many organizations today feel like they are giving up privacy, control and security for efficiency and scalability. FRTYL is a great example of how our DSaaS approach means you don’t have to sacrifice a thing.