Data Privacy Compliance — Challenges and Solutions

Data privacy is a branch of broader information management. It refers to data handling in compliance with data protection laws and regulations. It is a process where organizations must know what data they have, where and how it flows through the organizational system, and how it is used. Setting authorized access permissions, obtaining consent from data subjects when needed, and preserving data integrity are all part of this process.

But the massive increase in the data flow and more and more people using cloud solutions in recent days has given rise to several challenges in this field. Moreover, the ever-changing privacy laws and regulations make it much more complicated for organizations to deal with Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or sensitive data. Most of these challenges have to do with:

• Internal and external policies
• The influx of data, and
• Humans

Implementing Data Privacy Policies

Every organization has some data privacy policy in place but is usually restricted to the IT security or disaster recovery plan and is seldom updated. Therefore, a periodical audit of the policies and their implementation across all organizational departments is necessary to prevent your existing privacy policies from inviting privacy risks. Additionally, all employees must be trained on these policies and cybersecurity hygiene regularly.

Influx of Data

With cloud data management costs decreasing, the global data volume has grown exponentially, reaching tens of zettabytes. This has caused organizations to drown in their own data and necessitated the need for urgent data management. A single system to handle millions of files from multiple data sources is required to remediate this issue.

Visibility Into Your Data

Another major challenge is data visibility as sensitive information is scattered across the organizational system, hidden in emails and files, posing serious privacy risks. Finding all PII in billions of emails and files is hard enough for tools designed to remediate PII, let alone doing it manually. Hence, to remediate this issue, you need an in-place file management system that can search through all the files for all sorts of PII and flag them.

Overabundance of devices

Similarly, the increased number of devices due to the growth in remote work and usage of personal devices has increased the overall data security risks. Since reducing the number of devices is not an option, a solution that can work with billions of emails and files must be brought in.

Human Errors

According to the UK’s ICO, Minor human errors, such as attaching the wrong file to an email or sending it to the wrong recipient, are the most common causes of data breaches and fines for the organizations. Understanding the core causes of human errors will assist you in planning and training your employees and help mitigate security risks.

Maintenance Costs

Using top-class privacy compliance solutions can be costly. However, it is a fair deal compared to fines, going up to $50 million in some cases, and the reputational damage a data breach brings. Therefore, investing in a quality data privacy compliance solution is wise if you do not wish to pay those millions of dollars as fines.