Every business needs a reliable data privacy strategy. While most professionals today understand that, it’s not always easy to recognize what these policies should entail. One of the most important but often challenging aspects is to align your security framework with emerging compliance requirements.
Why Compliance Matters
IT compliance is easy to overlook because the regulatory landscape is rapidly evolving. As a result, you may not realize that you fall under new data privacy laws until it’s too late. Even if such oversight is understandable, failure to comply could result in fines or a loss of trust among your customers.
It’s not enough to assume you’ll never fall victim to an attack. Over 80% of companies today have experienced at least one data breach. Such incidents are too common for you to risk noncompliance. You’ll need to prove you did what laws expect of you to protect sensitive information should you fall under attack to minimize the damage.
How to Ensure Compliance in Your Data Privacy Strategy
Given these concerns, you must review your data protection practices to ensure they meet applicable regulatory standards. Here are a few steps to help in that regard.
Review Relevant IT Compliance Codes
The first step is to understand what codes you fall under. Start by looking up federal regulations for your type of business, then move down to state and local levels for more specific guidance.
Remember to review laws in areas where you have customers or data centers, too, even if you lack a physical presence in these locations. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for example, applies to U.S. companies if they collect data on EU citizens.
Maximize Transparency
Whatever regulations you fall under, your data privacy strategy should include measures to maximize transparency. You’ll need to know what information you have, how you store it, who and what can access it and why you keep it to comply with most privacy laws. That’s only possible with a complete picture of your network.
You may already have this level of visibility. For those who don’t, a data audit or network mapping solution may be necessary. Remember that these considerations can change frequently, so such analysis should happen at least annually.
Perform a Risk Assessment
Once you’ve achieved transparency, you should assess your risk level. This entails comparing applicable regulations and threats to your current data protection practices to uncover any areas of noncompliance or vulnerabilities.
Some codes — like the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) — require annual compliance assessments, but these tests are a good idea even when not mandatory. Hiring a third-party penetration tester or using automated vulnerability scanning software will help you notice and fill security gaps before they jeopardize your data.
Employ Privacy Management Best Practices
You’ll need to perform these first three steps regularly to keep up with changing regulations. While such frequently shifting requirements may seem overwhelming, you can anticipate future needs by employing some privacy management best practices.
Only collect the information you need to operate effectively. While holding back on data collection may seem counterintuitive as a business, it minimizes your risk exposure. Similarly, it’s best to anonymize data wherever possible. Removing identifiers is a key part of many privacy regulations, so it’s good to get ahead of the curve.
Other steps to consider include:
Restricting access controls according to the least privilege principle.
Using automated breach detection tools.
Requiring user consent to gather any information.
Giving customers the option to request deletion of their data.
Data Privacy Tools to Help
Updating your data privacy strategy along these lines can be complicated. However, it’s much easier when you take advantage of newer tools. Proactive threat monitoring solutions are crucial, as they continually update to detect new vulnerabilities, helping you stay on top of changing risks.
Automated network discovery and mapping software is also helpful. This technology streamlines the process of ensuring transparency so you know what may fall under different regulations. AI penetration testing tools fall under the same umbrella.
Advanced firewalls, data encryption algorithms, automated compliance platforms, cloud computing and intrusion detection systems are all helpful, too. Such solutions will let you act faster and reduce compliance workloads to stay safe despite an evolving environment.
Emerging Compliance Requirements Deserve Attention
PremCom understands the need for ongoing compliance assurance in your data privacy strategy. Explore our wide selection of services and tools today to reduce your IT workload and ensure you protect your data as the law requires.
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