How To Overcome The Roadblocks In Your Data Privacy And Compliance Journey

Data privacy and compliance standards such as data ownership and managerial access are important issues for both government organizations and businesses that use cloud services. You need to be sure you’re acquiring the right tools to safeguard your network, whether you’re a CIO or a security administrator for an enterprise.

Apart from the upfront costs, the operational difficulty of integrating new goods into your existing network can be daunting.

It’s challenging to ensure your clients’ privacy while also complying with local data privacy and compliance rules. It takes time away from your business operations while your team needs to figure out how data privacy rules vary by country. And the cost of getting it wrong is high: EU fines can be as high as 4% of a company’s worldwide turnover, not to forget the incalculable cost of losing customers’ loyalty.

Many firms deploy extra security solutions such as internal firewalls, next-generation perimeter firewalls, UTM, IDS, IPS, and so on to increase security and fulfill higher regulatory requirements. While each security solution has its own set of benefits, from the perspective of an organization, your entire cybersecurity infrastructure becomes operations-heavy, making your network susceptible to human mistakes that could lead to internal or external assaults.

Rather than creating additional security tools, choose the proper security solutions to streamline your data privacy and compliance journey. Recent advancements in security technology have enabled you to set up a security architecture that allows you to monitor, protect, and expand your data center without adding any new hardware or increasing your operational costs.

Step 1: Begin with a centralized view

Security requires visibility at the system and activity levels, especially when many devices contact your servers from different places. You can control all of your systems and terminals at the hypervisor layer with software-defined security products. Users can then leverage flow data between servers for forensics, monitoring, and dashboarding to give granular visibility and threat avoidance.

You can better assess a user’s risk posture by understanding how they access essential applications and company assets. One of the most crucial advantages of total visibility is making educated policy judgments based on multi-dimensional information from several resources.

Step 2: Adopt Micro-Segmentation

Data privacy and compliance were primarily concerned with erecting perimeter walls to keep external threats from infiltrating systems for a long time. The primary purpose was to safeguard North-South contacts. Organizations eventually learned that most attacks and leaks occurred due to domestic attacks and advanced persistent threats (APT). It was partly due to a lack of monitoring and segmentation of East-West (server to server) traffic, accounting for over 75% of network activity.

To address this issue, cybersecurity teams began implementing VLAN/ACLs and internal firewalls. Maintaining ACLs and changing hundreds of firewall rules is an operational headache in a dynamic business context, even while these safeguards minimize internal risks. Updating security rules is difficult and time-consuming due to resource movement across departments/geographies and personnel attrition.

Micro-segmentation appears as a more feasible and effective security solution in this scenario. Micro-segmentation allows you to divide network environments down to the host level, preventing data cross-contamination and key application usage.

You can impose particular security policies for data privacy and compliance once your network splits according to your security requirements. As a result, a zero-trust communication system with high visibility and control gets created.

Step 3: Cut hardware costs

Until recently, they established an enterprise security solution that necessitated installing a mix of hardware, such as firewalls, routers, and switches. Large network security businesses pushed these hardware-based solutions, which not only cost a lot of money but also tied you to them.

Any change or upgrade would have required purchasing additional hardware (together with associated software) from the same vendor or engaging consultants to install modifications to match your business demands. As a result, vendor dependence, operational costs, and network complexity have increased.

A paradigm change in security technology has occurred, moving away from hardware-based security and toward a software-defined fabric that streamlines data privacy and compliance. As previously stated, software-defined security offers numerous benefits in terms of securing vital assets and simplifying processes. Platform-agnostic and interface with your existing security architecture, a complete software-defined network monitoring system is essential.

• Step 4: Verify for compliance conformity

Most industries now have regulatory standards in place that make compliance desirable or necessary for businesses. PCI-DSS 4.0 and HIPAA are examples of regulatory measures that offer particular recommendations that firms in their respective industry must follow. These recommendations are in place to aid in achieving network security goals and the mitigation of potential threats.

Given the complexity of cyberattacks and regulatory bodies’ increased emphasis on data protection, achieving 100 percent compliance during audits can be difficult, demanding, and costly. As a result, it makes sense to install data privacy and compliance solutions that can quickly adapt to your specific business needs.

Bottom line

As the complexity of modern data center systems grows, cybersecurity firms are beginning to offer a broader choice of security technologies. Most businesses now work in complex network settings with on-premise servers, private clouds, and hybrid clouds. Adding another layer of protection across many network segments adds to the confusion.

Innovative security models like software-defined security can help you simplify your cybersecurity by allowing you to gain increased visibility, granular separation, and security policy implementation with just a few keystrokes.

Automating data privacy and compliance across every segmentation (and micro-segment) of your data center would also help you avoid setup errors and time-consuming human labor.