What We Need to Do for a Successful Compliance & Cloud Governance
Apart from a great number of pop-ups disrupting your online experience, what The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has brought us is the long-needed focus on online privacy and security issues. This most comprehensive regulation implemented so far has been established for the sake of providing a higher level of control over user data, not to legal entities, but to those who actually needed it — the users. The regulation came to force in May 2018, obliging companies and institutions to do what they should have done in the first place — to apply common privacy and security standards and provide transparency in how they handle vulnerable data of users within and outside European Union.
Despite the complex procedures and compliance issues that had to be addressed to make the regulation implementation successful, this sparked a similar initiative across the Atlantic as well, in the form of the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. The Act has been widely criticized as hasty and superficial, compared to GDPR that was a product of years of planning and preparation. Nevertheless, it again raised important questions regarding the ethical and operational aspects of data protection and cloud governance.
Complying with the GDPR principles naturally imposes the need for advanced software solutions that will turn a set of archiving, security and data control tools into a stable system.
Given the fact that most businesses lack the needed education and understanding of these processes, what are the most important aspects that need to be concerned for a well-planned and careful GDPR implementation?
Extensive Read: Six months of GDPR: What we’ve learned about compliance, and what you should be doing about it
Group working
Automation
One of the most important aspects of cloud governance certainly puts privacy in the locus of a successful business organization. Privacy by Design asks for establishing necessary measures to provide privacy protection at every step of all business processes, including software and product development, IT systems, internal projects etc. On the other hand, Privacy by Default ensures that, upon launching a product or service, the strictest privacy settings are applied by default, without any manual settings done by the user. Thus, the intention of new privacy portals is to map all data sources effectively and provide visibility and control to the end user.
Business remodeling
As GDPR prevents sharing more user data than needed, it makes selling data extremely difficult as it asks for documentation that states a company’s right and valid reason to manipulate the data in such a way (hopefully, preventing another Cambridge Analytica scandal). This drastically influences the existing business models so we might witness the growing number of freemium business models in the future.
Protection and motivation
Pop-up windows are annoying, but they are the least complex thing to face within GDPR implementation. The whole process asks for substantial business changes that impact everyone in the business ecosystem, both employees and users. Therefore, the argumentation for it has to be clearly explained, and both team and customers need to be protected and motivated to take their part in the process, for their own sake. Security and data protection measures need to become an integral part of your business and all business processes. And everyone needs to be onboard to make it happen.
IAM, CIAM, who am I?
Identity & Access Management (IAM) and Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) deal with security issues, both from inside and outside. IAM tackles with authentication policies and employees’ credentials to prevent security breaches or compromised data within the system. While CIAM aims to facilitate the personalization of user experience, log in and account management functions, providing a higher level of control to the users. The crucial thing to regard when opting for a certain IAM or CIAM tool is the balance between the optimal level of security and the efficient user experience.
Transparency
Apart from the transparency in data usage and security measures applied, businesses are now obliged to inform their users about any occurring breaches and system breakdowns, as well as crisis management steps taken in the process. This might seem like a road to losing customers and revenue, however, in the long run, this actually creates a greater level of trust and prevents losing money on fines predicted by the law.
