Inefficient data security policies and non-compliant processes can make it easier for malicious hackers and ransomware attackers to become successful in stealing or extorting your data.
In fact, the recent ransomware attacks have transformed from mere stealing to extortion-style attacks. Rather than encrypting or illegally selling the data, they now threaten to release sensitive data unless a ransom amount is paid.
Such malicious attacks are not just financial blows to your company but also make you a defaulter under regulatory guidelines. Ultimately your brand image gets tarnished.
All these reasons make data compliance and information security essential in your data processes. Data privacy compliance should be a core component of your every security strategy.
In this article, we’ll discuss some data compliance best practices that you can incorporate into your regular data processes to achieve necessary compliance for robust security and protection of sensitive data from ransomware evildoers.
6 Best Practices To Achieve Data Compliance
Design And Develop A Compliance Framework
An incident response framework should be followed whenever your team is working and processing valuable data. This framework will explain how to detect vulnerabilities, respond to security threats, and recover from incidents.
Similarly, the compliance framework creates a standardised structure for dealing with all compliance regulations related to your organisation. For example, auditing and assessing internal compliance protocols and privacy controls.
A framework also helps identify and segregate data (personal or sensitive data) using proper IT enterprise solutions that require more strict and intensive security protocols.
Define Documentation Policies For Data Collection
This step is a vital component of designing and developing a framework. There are various reasons that make documentation necessary (what and the why of data collection).
When the data origin is customer-centric (coming directly from the consumer), more stringent and aggressive protocols are required for detailing collection policies.
Clearly Define Data Privacy Policies
Be very clear and precise with your consumers about what data you’re collecting/recording, what you’ll be using them for, what your data-storage policies are, and how long you intend to store them.
Also, prepare a clear guide for customers about how they can request access to their personal data. Or request deleting their data, thus removing their data from your systems.
Stay Informed About The Current Government Policies Impacting Data Compliance
A data operating model based on the principle of “privacy by design” can help you stay informed and modify your gdpr compliance data policies with the constantly evolving regulations.
This implies that you’re developing and integrating privacy into the design and IT operations, infrastructure, and overall business practices—rather than forcefully bolting them randomly.
Encrypt And Mask Sensitive Data
When dealing with sensitive or vulnerable data, you’ll need to anonymise and encrypt them to mask/obscure personally identifiable information. Some popular styles or approaches to cipher data using IT enterprise solutions include encryption, masking, tokenization, anonymisation, hashing, etc.
Standardise And Document Protocols For Informing A Breach
Under GDPR, notifying relevant stakeholders about the data breach is mandatory. Standardisation and documentations protocols make your notification process smooth and streamlined.
Decide a particular person or team who’ll be responsible for notifying the relevant stakeholders (customers, employees, investors, Board of Directors, etc.) and what is the strategy and process for resolving the issue, and what steps are you incorporating in your existing technique to avoid breaches in the future.
Data Compliance Holds The Key To Protection
In the digital era, data is no less valuable than gold. However, when you leverage data for positive business outcomes and gain immense opportunity, you’ll need to be extremely cautious and responsible while processing them.
Embracing data compliance and security is the only solution to protecting data and preventing unfortunate data breach events. Without adequate compliance, you might not get to enjoy any business benefits.
