How to Automate Data Privacy and Compliance in 2023

In 2023, the world of Data Privacy should be familiar to enterprises, but many challenges remain. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR) is now fully enforced, with companies around the globe scrambling to meet their new obligations under the law. Additionally, California has passed a data privacy law called CCPA that requires businesses operating in California to implement specific processes and procedures related to collecting, using and sharing personal information. While these laws are not exactly identical in their requirements, they share many similarities and both companies must comply with them or risk steep fines from regulators. What it takes to get compliant and stay that way is a multifaceted challenge that still requires an enormous amount of manual effort. Hence, one of the overarching challenges for enterprises regarding data privacy and compliance in 2023 is boosting the level of automation applied to these now critical processes.

Data Privacy Compliance: What is Required?

The past few years have seen a rise in data privacy regulations and consumer awareness. In the United States, the European Union, and other countries, we’ve seen new laws that require companies to be transparent about how they collect and use customer information. As a result, organizations are scrambling to adopt strategies that protect their sensitive data without breaking compliance requirements or hindering business operations.

However, achieving effective data privacy can be difficult because it requires:

• A deep understanding of your company’s current processes

• Continuous monitoring of your systems for anomalies

• The ability to identify potential issues before they become problems

• A repeatable, sustainable process to report results both internally and to regulators

The State of Data Privacy in 2023

As a data privacy professional in 2023, you’ll need to be familiar with the following key regulations:

• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is Europe’s most critical data privacy regulation, and it has implications for companies all over the world. As of May 25th, 2020—the day before enforcement began—companies began preparing themselves for compliance. Many organizations were not ready on time and had little choice but to wait until after May 25th before they could start preparing their systems fully; however, those who did meet their GDPR obligations will be rewarded by having access to more European consumers than ever before.

• The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is important for enterprises operating in North America because it might serve as a model for other states or even countries looking at how they want to regulate personal data collection practices within their borders. Since California is so influential with regards to technology innovation trends, there are many reasons why this law should not be overlooked when planning your compliance strategy going forward into 2023.

• BCBS 239 is a mandatory data regulation for Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) aiming to boost their risk data aggregation and risk reporting capabilities, so that banks are more aware of financial risks. CPG 235 imposes guidelines on financial institutions regarding how to manage data during its end-to-end data lifecycle, aiming to bolster data risk management. Crucially, CPG 235 regulations apply to all enterprise data – not merely financial information – at every stage of its lifecycle within a given enterprise (from ingestion to ejection).

How to Automate Data Privacy and Compliance

As a leader in data privacy compliance automation, Alex has helped companies across multiple industries achieve their compliance goals with new data privacy regulations such as CPG 235 and CCPA. By deploying automation across various compliance processes, Alex can effectively reduce the time required for manual tasks by substantial amounts.

Alex is a unified data workspace for the enterprise that helps companies implement and audit compliance with new data privacy regulatory requirements at scale. Based on a single, simple and social Augmented Data Catalog for the entire organization, data privacy policies can be configured and operationalized as automated workflows in Alex, allowing teams to collaborate on making policy reality. Privacy policy is hard to enforce. But with Alex, data privacy policies can be configured as automated workflows that allow teams to collaborate on making policy reality in Alex. Processes can be defined and contextualized in the integrated Business Glossary and exercised with role-based accountability, allowing users who are authorized to make changes without having access to underlying technologies or systems – freeing up resources so they can focus on getting things done instead of worrying about security holes and process gaps. 

Alex Automated Data Lineage visualizes your data flows and shows you exactly who has access to what, which they can use how, where and when. Track modifications of sensitive data assets over their entire life cycles across all applications. With automated, clear visual maps of how sensitive data flows through your applications starting with the sources and ending with the destinations—even when there are hundreds of hops along the way—manual investigation can be replaced with real-time impact analysis. 

As part of our comprehensive approach, we monitor the usage permissions and access information of your sensitive data including PII, PCI and PHI; our dashboardable heatmaps identify exposure risks at an organization-wide level while alerts trigger data owners and teams to take remedial actions by configuring access controls revising policies rapidly (or other risk mitigation measures), stopping breaches before they happen.

Alex is the best Data Privacy partner for your business

Alex is the leading platform for securing sensitive data, reporting privacy compliance and empowering data-driven cultures. Built for enterprise scale, Alex provides a unified framework for security and governance that enables rapid change, accelerated adoption and centralized reporting. With its deep integration with most enterprise applications, Alex makes compliance a part of everyday business operations and enables self-managed data governance. By applying automation across the data privacy and compliance process, Alex has delivered proven results to large organizations that are serious about protecting their most valuable asset: information.

We help enterprise scale customers achieve compliance with new data privacy regulations with reduced time to compliance and lower investment required to maintain compliance with automation, as well as time spent manually auditing and assessing risk by automating your data privacy program across on-premise and cloud environments.

Our solutions meet the stringent requirements of companies in industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and government. Our strategy includes:

• Unifying and standardizing data governance, privacy policies, business definitions, rules and processes

• Automating day-to-day processes like risk assessment and audit preparation so your team can devote more time to high value tasks like addressing gaps in your data protection policies or undertaking strategic initiatives that improve efficiencies or drive growth

• Enhancing awareness of privacy risks through easy access to key information via our easy-to-use dashboard interface, integrated business glossary including compliance policies and Automated Data Lineage

• Enabling users across departments to collaborate on data privacy initiatives without requiring extensive system integrations

If you want to stay up-to-date and comply with the ever-changing laws regarding data privacy in 2023 and beyond, then it is vital that you automate large parts of your compliance processes. Doing so will save a lot of time and money, as well as help ensure your compliance with current laws and regulations. For more information on how Alex Solutions can enhance your data privacy and compliance operations with automation in 2023, request a free personalized demo:

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