Data compliance is essential to the security, integrity, and availability of your business’s data. Unauthorized access to mission-critical information can lead to significant business, reputation, and revenue losses. Luckily, there are dozens of resources available to help you maintain compliance. There are even security technologies available to help you protect your company’s data. Among them is NIST, a government organization that develops standards for a variety of industries.
Transparency is key
Transparency is an important aspect of IT data compliance and should be considered when developing and implementing new IT systems. It is often referred to as a quality issue or non-functional requirement. While software can work well without transparency, it is best to deal with it as part of the requirements specification process.
Transparency is defined as the extent to which information is made available to users. Information can pass through security and privacy constraints, but it still lacks transparency if it is not understandable or actionable. Therefore, transparency regulations must focus on making information more understandable and actionable. Otherwise, disclosures will be of limited de facto value.
Proper documentation is key
Proper documentation is the backbone of any successful project. Not only is it important for maintaining data integrity, it also helps instill confidence in a business. Business contracts, agreements, and other paperwork can tell a story about the company and provide confidence to investors, customers, and other stakeholders. In today’s world, where multinational corporations are subject to global scrutiny, proper documentation and processes are critical.
Documentation should follow the ALCOA principles, which aim to protect data integrity. This sets guidelines for document management and storage and can help reduce the risk of non-compliance. Good documentation practices should be transparent, readable, and easy to trace. It should also include an author’s signature, which verifies his or her identity.
HIPAA regulations
While the OCR has relaxed its HIPAA regulations to some extent, there are still some ambiguities regarding HIPAA compliance. In fact, the OCR recently cited a health care organization that failed to comply with the regulations. This is the 19th enforcement action against health care organizations for failing to comply with HIPAA.
In order to comply with HIPAA regulations, healthcare organizations must maintain the privacy and security of PHI. The regulations have set national standards for breach notification. These rules also outline how covered entities must notify patients about breaches of their PHI.
PCI DSS
As a business, it’s important to protect the sensitive information of your customers and clients. This means safeguarding your business from remote access attacks, malware, and social engineering. PCI compliance is a good first step in ensuring the security of your information. It can also prevent costly data breaches.
The PCI DSS defines six key objectives and twelve specific requirements for securing cardholder data. Among these are the installation of a firewall to control network traffic and prevent unauthorized access. Other requirements include avoiding the use of vendor default passwords. Furthermore, businesses must create unique secure system passwords to protect their sensitive information.
GDPR
When it comes to GDPR compliance, IT departments need to take action to manage vendors and maintain the right level of security. Businesses must understand the data they collect, store, and share with vendors to avoid data breaches. It is important to audit all data to ensure the correct amount of information is being used and stored. It is also essential to manage and refine processes to ensure compliance.
While GDPR is challenging for any organization, wise leaders will look beyond the compliance to identify opportunities to innovate. By identifying opportunities to differentiate themselves from their competitors and create a new culture, companies can take advantage of this opportunity to thrive.
Privacy laws
Companies have to comply with the data privacy laws and regulations to avoid violating the law. They have to follow the principle of data minimization, ensuring that they collect the least amount of data necessary and restricting who has access to their data based on need-to-know basis. It is also imperative that organizations secure their personal data at all times, including when it is transported from one system to another. This can be achieved through the use of secure data communication standards.
Countries around the world have enacted laws requiring service providers to adhere to privacy and data compliance. These laws are designed to protect individual data from leakage, interference, and abuse. Some countries even have a federal law that requires service providers to protect the personal information of their clients. While there are numerous laws and regulations that govern privacy, a few of them are especially relevant to IT data processing.
Immuta’s data access control platform
As data teams move towards domain-driven data architectures, they need a solution that enforces data access policies across a decentralized data mesh. Immuta’s data access control platform can help them with this by automating policies and making them runtime. By automating policies, Immuta’s data access control platform helps organizations stay compliant with data security and regulatory requirements.
Immuta’s data access control platform can be implemented in a variety of ways. For example, Immuta’s discovery and classification capabilities can sift through cloud data to find sensitive data, identify and tag it, and automate policy enforcement across a variety of compute platforms. By automating these tasks, organizations can achieve universal data access control and visibility into sensitive data. The platform also includes policy enforcement and auditing capabilities, which enforce access control policies automatically. The solution’s legal engineers provide support and assistance to help ensure compliance.
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