Are you ready to comply with GDPR? The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into effect May 25, 2018, and businesses and organizations that don’t take action now could face huge fines or be forced to shut down entirely. Follow these five steps to get your business in compliance with GDPR now so you can continue to operate without fear of legal action in the future.
5 Security Controls You Need to Know
1- Anonymize Personal Information
Anonymizing personal information is the process of removing personally identifiable information from data sets so that individuals can no longer be identified. This is important for GDPR compliance because it ensures that individuals’ privacy is protected. There are a few different ways to anonymize data, including de-identification, encryption, and tokenization. De-identification means eliminating all possible attributes that would identify an individual. One example is using algorithms to replace identifying information with other identifiers, such as random numbers or characters. Encryption refers to scrambling data in such a way that only authorized people have access to them (i.e., those who have been given permission). Tokenization means replacing identifying details with unique codes, tokens or passwords and then encrypting them.
2- Protect Sensitive Data in Transit and at Rest
To protect data in transit, you should encrypt all communication between your organization and data recipients using TLS. You can also require data recipients to authenticate themselves before they can access your organization’s data. To protect data at rest, you should encrypt all stored data using industry-standard encryption algorithms. You can also use access control measures to restrict who can access stored data. For example, the Unix chmod command lets you set file permissions to limit what certain users or groups of users can do with a file. For example, setting the permissions on an account management table to 600 will limit that table’s access to only those with read permission (i.e., not able to modify).
3- Encrypt Sensitive Data
As a best practice, you should encrypt all confidential and sensitive data, both in transit and at rest. This includes any data that could potentially identify an individual, such as names, addresses, birthdates, social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, etc. By encrypting this data, you make it unreadable and unusable if it falls into the wrong hands. There are many encryption methods to choose from, but generally speaking they can be broken down into three categories: symmetric key encryption (e.g., AES), asymmetric key encryption (e.g., RSA), or hashing algorithms (e.g., SHA-256). The type of encryption you use will depend on your situation and needs; however, there are some general guidelines that apply across the board.
4- Track Access Rights
One of the most important data security measures you can take is to track access rights. Doing so will help you keep tabs on who has access to what data, and when they accessed it. This is crucial for ensuring that only authorized individuals have access to sensitive information. If a person leaves the company or if their role changes, be sure to revoke their access privileges promptly.
5- Manage Incident Response Processes
Responding to data incidents can be complex and costly. To help you manage these processes, we’ve compiled a list of five security controls you need to have in place.
1. Establish an incident response team.
2. Create a data classification system.
3. Implement access control measures.
4. encrypt all data-in-transit and at rest.
5. Educate employees on security best practices
Conclusion
The article has told you about 5 security controls yu need to comply with GDPR. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new EU data protection law that came into effect on May 25, 2018. The GDPR replaces the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive. It strengthens EU data protection rules by giving individuals more control over their personal data, and establishing new rights for individuals. Organizations must comply with the GDPR in order to be able to process and store personal data of European Union citizens. Failure to comply with the GDPR could result in fines up to €20 million or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher.
