Identify, Review and Remediate PII with Compliance

 

Understanding the importance of identifying, reviewing, and remediating PII and the practices best for it


It is reassuring that certain things remain the same year after year in a world of uncertainty and change, such as customer personally identifiable information (PII) – the most commonly exposed category of data with the highest cost per record. However, this does not have to be the case, as the report also shows that organizations using technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and automated orchestration were the most successful in reducing data breach expenses. Some steps in doing so are to understand your industry-specific regulations, build policies, identify, de-duplicate, and defensibly delete or remediate the consumer PII from the enterprise database.


Know the Compliance Regulations

Due to the growing data privacy concerns, governments and regulatory bodies have enacted several industry-specific compliance regulations to regulate how you acquire, manage, store, use, and transfer sensitive information depending on your business location and where or who your consumers are. The following are some of the most frequent compliance requirements:

  • Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

  • California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

  • Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 17a-4


Risk Assessment

After understanding which compliance regulation applies to your company, perform a risk assessment of your internal data privacy security procedures before a hacker does. You must identify the types of PII your organization has and security concerns, vulnerabilities to an attack, risk management approaches, control mechanisms, and defensive capabilities. 


Build or Update Policy

The next step would be to build or update your PII privacy policy around the idea that no PII should be kept in the company database unless it has business value. And in that case, the PII should be encrypted using best-in-class industry technology and resources.


Identify and Index PII

Various firms hold different PII types, such as credit card information held by a financial firm and healthcare data held by insurance companies. As a result, it is critical to figure out what kind of PII your organization has, why it is there, and where it is kept to be referenced later during the eDiscovery, flagging, and deletion or deletion remediation stages. This can be done using in-place file analysis management solutions.


De-duplicate PII

De-duplication is a way to get rid of all that redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data uncovered with the help of file analysis systems. This move will significantly lower the amount of your whole content collection and your PII footprint, making it much easier to maintain.


Defensibly Delete PII

While you may feel that saving as much data as possible is preferable, PII may represent a data privacy security risk if left unchecked. As a result, you must remove the PII of customers who have stopped doing business with you, workers who have left the company per the industry-specific regulations. Additionally, PII discovered on idle devices or in abandoned accounts, and people who have requested that their personal information be destroyed should also be defensibly deleted.


Classify PII as Sensitive

Not every PII is sensitive to the same degree. Email lists, for example, must still be secured, but their level of secrecy is far lower than that of client records, including credit card details. You may get a feel of what your security program needs by categorizing data according to confidentiality and the effect if their privacy is breached.


Automate Remediation

The first four stages of managing your PII footprint will help you achieve compliance in the short term. The best way to ensure privacy compliance is to regularly review and modify your internal policies and perform file analytics audits. File analytics processes can be scheduled to run every night or outside of business hours, reducing operational downtime. This takes no additional effort because you already know where all your PII is stored.


To summarize, data is the new superpower, and with it comes PII, which may make or break your business. As a result, you must actively identify, review, and remediate PII per industry-specific regulations. Reach out to an expert here to learn more about accomplishing it with ease.

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