Privacy compliance is now a requirement for everyone, everywhere. Today, 10M businesses globally are at risk of violating GDPR, CCPA, and other regulatory obligations.
This is because there is a huge privacy void between the legal measures and security software which most businesses rely on when it comes to personal data.
This gives rise to privacy violations that can result in unacceptable brand and financial damage, as well as regulatory fines, with GDPR fines averaging $1.9M.
Such privacy violations today fall between the cracks of existing security and legal measures, and lead to compliance violations and personal data risks.
But what are privacy violations, and how can we detect and respond to them?
There are a lot of measures which need to be implemented and privacy violations which could occur that are not related to security at all.
For example, while identity and access management and encryption can help to counter unauthorized access to personal data and data loss prevention services against (un)intentional data sharing, there are other, privacy-only incidents that require their own prevention measures.
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Taking into account that privacy regulations are not standards but laws, a privacy violation could cost you much more than a security incident.
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Failure to detect and respond to security incidents will affect your business with contracts lost, brand trust corrosion, and overall negative exposure for their operations. In contrast, the situation is compounded if you suffer a privacy incident.
Privacy violations are a double blow of legal violation and loss of brand trust
It even doesn’t really matter if these violations are also security-related or just privacy only. Violation of the law leads to the same security-entailed consequences which are then aggravated by the reaction from government entities. This kind of double blow could turn out to be a death sentence for your business.
The violations in the table above can’t be detected by any security solution. Security solutions are designed to capture unsolicited access and protect the data from intentional threats. But privacy-related incidents can involve authorized access that leads to the illegitimate use of personal information.
Companies need new tools and technologies which provide them with the opportunity to analyze and use personal information without accessing it.
Analyzing data usage in authorized environments is a challenge
It’s undoubtedly easy to choose security solutions that will protect your enterprise against security-related incidents. However, which safeguards you need in place to analyze data in authorized, legitimate workflows is much more opaque.
Security barriers form your first line of defense to secure your business infrastructure and the personal data you store. When your perimeter is secure, you will want to secure the data that you are transmitting inside your perimeter.
However, securing the data gives you insight into what could be going wrong with your legitimate workflows, with the practices that you set up that might not be being followed or have been implemented incorrectly.
So what processes and practices do you need to have in place to get to a stage where you can identify where you run the risk of a privacy violation taking place and take steps to prevent it?
To properly cover the risks of privacy violations taking place, you will need an automated way to keep your view of personal data at rest and in motion updated.
The key is personal data monitoring and analysis
By analyzing traffic and the data that is flowing through your systems you can discover personal data and detect privacy violations. When performed in real time, analysis of structured communication traffic inside your company’s infrastructure gives you actionable intelligence on personal data to spot and prevent privacy violations.
As we can see, privacy has to be embraced by engineering because legal measures alone can’t guarantee compliance. Engineering and security teams in many companies are now joining forces with privacy professionals. But there is still a significant need for purpose-built privacy tools in order to implement continuous and automated privacy-violation detection and remediation.
Soveren analyzes real-time data flows inside the company’s infrastructure to discover personal data and detect privacy risks. Soveren is taking the lead on providing CTOs, CISOs, and Privacy Engineers with simple yet effective solutions to resolve privacy violations by providing actionable intelligence into the personal data used in day-to-day business operations.
