How to achieve data privacy in the cloud

To avoid potential legal actions, fines, and business irrelevance, companies, and cloud service providers must abide by specific rules to ensure continued compliance. While these laws may only apply to a particular country or region, it’ll come into effect if you have customers residing over there.

Some of these data privacy laws include the following:

The Turkey Data Protection Law

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI)

New York Cyber Law

The Brazil General Data Protection Law (LGPD)

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

So if you’re conducting business where these laws apply, you better be sure to have systems in place to ensure data security. However, the good news is that there’s considerable overlap between these laws that will help companies ensure compliance with applicable regulations.

If we take CCPA and GDPR, for example, companies will have to take steps to address a wide range of issues, both on-premise and on the cloud. These include items such as cookie consent, data subject access requests, privacy assessments, and much more.

So if you’re conducting business in countries or regions where these data privacy laws apply, you’ll have to establish some strict data privacy protocols to protect both your customers and your business.

Cloud service providers are in a unique position as they are well-placed to play a dual role in data privacy and management. This is because cloud hosting providers (like Artmotion) will help you better understand the purpose and means of processing highly sensitive personal information. They can also process and secure the data on your behalf.

To meet data privacy requirements in a highly distributed network, cloud services providers can help enterprises deploy data encryption protocols that span the whole system. This approach will help organizations achieve centralized control and enhanced data visibility.

It’s much easier to provide consistent data protection and policy enforcement when compliance standards are applied consistently across the entire distributed network and cloud infrastructure. So even if privacy laws only apply to a specific country or region, the cloud will help businesses cross these boundaries seamlessly.

However, merely deploying data protection policies and military-grade encryption isn’t enough. You also have to change your company culture from being reactive to proactive. When you follow this approach, enterprises have a better chance of stopping a potential data breach before it happens.

Attaining total data privacy in the cloud starts with a security audit across the whole organization. This approach will require organizations to rethink their processes and policies. It’ll also provide companies with an opportunity to identify gaps and quickly resolve it. It might also mean that enterprise security training workshops become a regular part of organizational protocols.

Do you want to learn more about achieving data privacy in the cloud? Reach out to our in-house cloud security experts.