For those of you who couldn’t attend my session at IAPP Privacy. Security. Risk. 2022 in Austin in October, I want to highlight some key areas I covered. My session, “How does your privacy compliance program drive innovation and growth?” focused on stories around data discovery and data protection from our partners and customers from Toronto to Sydney, Jakarta to Istanbul, and all points in between

Over the past 24 months, we've seen a fundamental shift in the privacy and data security markets. The pandemic has placed a strain on critical resources required to manage and protect sensitive information, yet privacy management and cybersecurity remain top priorities. As privacy management and global privacy regulations have evolved over this same time, customers have struggled to align privacy with broader business outcomes that support corporate strategies driving top-line growth, and many are looking to gain more from these efforts.

A single-minded focus on privacy policies and management ignores that fact that it’s data that drives the business – privacy compliance doesn’t have to be a trade-off between hoarding data and keeping the bare minimum. Establishing a data handling and management practice that allows an organization to discover and protect data supports data ethics and sustainable practices that build data trust – and improved opportunities for business growth. Data trust practices allow protected data to be securely shared with stakeholders without the risk of exposing sensitive personal information that would violate consumer (data subject) rights or put the corporate reputation and brand at risk.

A core element to establishing data trust is privacy-enhancing technologies. At CyberRes, the Voltage Data Privacy and Protection platform helps organizations put these practices in action across the entire eco-system of structured and unstructured data. The platform is purposefully built to discover, gain insight, protect, monitor and govern data throughout the entire data lifecycle--including legacy data, as well as new data as it is created or consumed by the business.

Discover Stage

Voltage helps organizations discover the value of data by building out and classifying data inventories of high value assets, sensitive data, and intellectual property. This drives privacy compliance, minimizes risk exposure, and contains costs around managing data. These data trust practices improve an organization’s privacy posture and drive greater visibility and insight across the data estate.

Insight Stage

Data discovery can be the gateway into many different business outcomes, including but not limited to privacy. Risk assessments, context aware analytics and categorization help accelerate data-driven initiatives by helping distinguish and prioritizing risky data types during data discovery phases. This analysis drives how organizations can prioritize the collection, handling, and protection of data – and establishes sustainable practices for data in use, aligning discovery and data trust with strategic objectives to monetize data for business growth.

Protect Stage

Voltage data protection is in our DNA – it’s persistent in use, in transit, and at rest.  Targeted data discovery efforts enriched with Voltage’s data protection capabilities ensure sensitive information can be securely shared with the appropriate stakeholders while in use – and in key business applications including cloud data platforms. Voltage data protection ensures the ethical use of data, while enabling high-scale secure analytics and data science in the cloud or on-premises. Voltage delivers de-identification, masking and format-preserved tokenized data, which mitigates the risk of data exposure while assuring privacy compliance.

Additional data protection capabilities have expanded significantly in the Voltage portfolio as well.  Our data discovery capabilities help understand the value of data, which helps with data minimization – identifying what information needs to be kept, what business purpose it supports and how long it needs to be retained. Voltage data protection and retention management help meet global privacy regulations by ensuring that data is minimized and that the business only keeps what is necessary.

Data protection also extends into application development. As organizations expand their own internal application development efforts, test data management is becoming more and more important to promote secure and compliant use of sensitive data. Using live customer data is not sustainable and can put corporate reputation at risk if data is misused or accidently shared during application testing and verification prior to builds being pushed into production. Masking and anonymizing test data is a critical step to secure and compliant application development.

We’ve also seen the impact of off-shoring or near-shoring resources for data-driven, cloud analytics projects. These projects require similar protection to support data sovereignty and privacy. Voltage data protection capabilities can de-identify sensitive data while preserving its referential integrity in data analytics platforms – this allows data to be securely shared with outsourced contractors and data analysts without the fear of live customer data being exposed.

Monitor Stage

Voltage data access monitoring capabilities provide greater visibility around the exposure of data use. Monitoring and understanding how data is used and who has access to it, augment data discovery efforts and zero trust architectures by providing reporting and remediation of data based on permission exposure risks.

Data discovery is an ongoing process that includes new data consumed by the business. As organizations assess the ongoing risk and cost associated with managing sensitive data, organizations are looking for greater visibility into the financial impact of privacy and environmental, social, and governance programs (ESG). Fines and sanctions are one thing, but Voltage can go deeper by being able to visualize the financial impact of a data breach along with data minimization, data center consolidation, sustainability, and green IT efforts. Find out the true cost of data privacy with our Data Privacy Financial Risk Calculator.

Govern Stage

Being able govern and defensibly delete data over its lifecycle is key to support privacy by design, privacy compliance and a data trust framework. Voltage data lifecycle management capabilities tag and enrich metadata, manage data based on its business purpose, and support long-term preservation, and data deletion efforts. This awareness also allows Voltage to support ad hoc information requests for audit, legal and consumer rights requests to make sure responsive data is provided in a timely manner.

A Fusion That Builds Data Trust

Business outcomes driven by privacy-enhancing technologies (discover, insight, protect, monitor, govern) easily align with privacy compliance, IT modernization, sustainability, and broader corporate growth strategies for data monetization. Voltage Fusion privacy-enhancing technologies help build a data trust framework that embeds protection in programs that affect bottom line savings and most importantly, workstreams that drive top-line growth.

Please contact us for more information, we’d love to connect with you regarding your Privacy Compliance initiatives.

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