Massive Australian Data Breaches: How Alex Enables Enterprise Data Privacy
Data is quickly becoming a major tool to deliver excellent services and improve organizational operations. Simultaneously, the forms and amount of data being collected and managed by all manner of organizations are exponentially growing, creating major privacy risks. 30% of Australians have been impacted by data breaches in the past year as in 2022, a number of Australia’s largest companies – including the largest private health insurer – were hit with cyberattacks.
These attacks have resulted in the exposure of sensitive information relating to millions of people, including their private health information, identity and credit details. This information is already being used by criminals to conduct identity theft and fraud. The severity of recent breaches has pushed the government to further strengthen the general trend toward stringent data privacy regulations.
Regulations are intensifying worldwide
The Australian government is fast-tracking fines of up to $50M or 30% of “adjusted” turnover for enterprises that suffer “repeated or serious” breaches. Businesses must understand how to operate under these changing regulatory conditions or face severe fines. In Europe, large enterprises have a greater degree of experience supporting General Data Protection Regulation which best signifies the expansion of privacy laws. The GDPR triggered adaptations to laws around the world, including Australia’s Privacy Act 1988 and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). In addition to the CCPA, there are added regulations specific to different industries, in addition to these general laws. Examples include BCBS 239, which acts to scrutinize risk data aggregation and internal risk reporting practices of banks, and HIPAA, which specifies the standard to which US healthcare organizations must secure private health information. Looking ahead, further US regulations like the California Privacy Rights Act and the Colorado Privacy Act become enforceable in early 2023. With regulatory obligations rising worldwide, ensuring compliance with enterprise scale data privacy is a top priority to future-proof your organization.
Challenges
The first problem enterprises face regarding data privacy is having a poor understanding of their data inventory. It’s impossible to govern data privacy if you only have outdated information about what data is under management and where it is within an increasingly complex technological environment. Manual processes for finding and controlling data inventories must be replaced with automation.
Second, implementing policy is a prolonged process that is costly and drains expert effort. Across the different departments in an enterprise, staff must be able to identify which data assets are CDEs, that only people with the correct authority can access them, and that the data is handled securely. When you lack the proper context for making such judgements, data can be misplaced or mishandled. One example may be that data is held in excess of the regulation-allowed retention periods.
The final major challenge enterprises face is having no way to visualize their application systems and therefore data flows to support reporting to regulators. Manual data lineage operations are extremely inefficient and resource intensive requiring entire teams devoted to uncovering data truths that should be identified and visualized automatically. Maintaining compliance while working efficiently almost certainly requires an automated solution to enterprise-scale Data Privacy with in-built end-to-end lineage.
Unified Privacy Solution
Alex Solutions is a true Enterprise Data Catalog. Alex is equipped with the world’s largest library of metadata Connectors that automatically Catalog and Profile sensitive data across the entire enterprise technology stack. Technology agnostic ingestion enables unification of your system in the one analysis and action platform.
Straight out of the box, all sensitive data like PIII, PHI and PCI can automatically be detected and profiled so that your CIO/CISO can easily implement and monitor policy controls that apply across the whole organization. With ready-made roles and Automated Workflows, teams can define, contextualize and execute processes with role-based accountability and notification alerts. CDEs are highly visible and can be imbued with context so that users can have an idea of why the data element is sensitive without disclosing the sensitive information itself.
Alex also automatically monitors sensitive data via usage and permissions heatmaps to identify and notify you of data at risk of exposure. Data owners are notified of high level risks that arise in realtime, so that remedial actions can be taken swiftly and precisely with Alex’s renowned Data Lineage and Impact Analysis capability. Know Every Data Flow and reveal the lifecycle and relationships of any selected data. Any transformation the data has undergone is expressed through the automated mapping of data flow which is highly valuable in assessments of data quality. These processes enabled by Alex build the privacy protocols of your organization, as policies can be revised and enacted while actively preventing data losses.
Alex Data Lineage is a fully automated, clear visual map of how sensitive data flows through enterprise applications from source to destination. Know every data flow across your entire enterprise including all transformations at the column-level and eliminate the manual investigation often involved in creating a data lineage. Some of the world’s largest companies use Alex Data Lineage directly in their reports to the regulatory authorities.
There is little time for enterprises to address data privacy as cyberattacks and regulatory penalties increase in both frequency and severity. The huge reputational losses following some recent high-profile breaches has everyone wanting to stay out of the headlines. Alex Solutions was built to help you do just that. Read more about Alex for Data Privacy and reach out to us today to discuss accelerating data privacy management in your organization.
