Best Practices for Data Privacy Management

Cisco’s 2022 Data Privacy Benchmark Study reveals how organizations that invest in data privacy management enjoy a variety of positive returns. On average, organizations estimated ROI and benefits at 1.8 times their initial spending. Organizations with highly mature privacy programs also reported higher returns compared to their peers. Let’s take a closer look at the best business strategies for managing data privacy.

Data Privacy Management Strategies

For organizations that regularly invest in data privacy management, Cisco’s report identifies the most common benefits:

• Customer loyalty and trust: 71% of surveyed organizations
• More attractive company: 69%
• Operational efficiency: 68%
• Innovation and agility: 68%
• Security losses mitigation: 68%
• Fewer sales delays: 63%

To reap these benefits and more, organizations need a solid strategy for managing data privacy. Best practices include properly identifying sensitive data, ensuring data storage security, and establishing security safeguards. Let’s look closer at these methods.

Identify Sensitive Data Assets

As more data comes in, protecting sensitive data becomes an even greater challenge. That’s why organizations need to identify personal and sensitive information from other low-risk assets. Sensitive data includes:

• Personally identifiable information (PII) like email, social security numbers, phone numbers, or credit card information
• Genetic and biometric data
• Regulated information
• Private business information
• Confidential and high-risk data files

In order to identify sensitive information, incoming and existing data must be well-organized, accurate, and clean. Solutions such as customer data platforms, which ingest all types of data, can help companies organize and catalog data assets properly.

Create a Data Usage Policy

A data usage policy informs data subjects about how their personal information and activity are collected, stored, used, and shared by an organization. Data usage policies are compulsory under most privacy laws and apply to all employees and data controllers in an organization.

Implement a Cybersecurity Policy

A cybersecurity policy sets standards and limitations on activities that could potentially affect data security. It contains behavioral guidelines, cybersecurity practices (e.g., use of strong passwords and two-factor authentication), and limitations on handling data assets. Organizations should communicate cybersecurity policies clearly to all data controllers and general employees.

Ensure Data Storage Security

Sensitive information must be housed in a secure location, either on-site or in the cloud. While on-premises storage sounds promising, expanding data assets can create silos that compromise efficiency. Cloud data solutions offer centralized and secure storage for sensitive data—keeping organizations both compliant and agile.

Develop a Data Breach Response Plan

A data breach response plan contains steps for handling a data emergency. The plan should define what a data breach incident is, which key personnel to notify, and what immediate steps to take to contain the breach.

Ideally, this kind of data emergency plan should be part of an organization’s existing cybersecurity policy.

Control Access to Sensitive Data

Once sensitive data is identified and securely stored, administrators should control and limit access to high-risk data. Authorized access should align with in-house best practices as well as regulatory requirements. Organizations can use solutions like CDPs to embed transparency and accountability within data management policies.

Monitor User Activity

Monitoring helps organizations spot potential risks quickly, from negligence to suspicious activities, and more. Tracking tools allow companies to observe activity patterns of high-level users with access to high-risk assets.

Use Data Encryption

Encryption is a cybersecurity technique that translates sensitive data into a different code or form. Only authorized staff with the decryption key can access plaintext files. Encryption is commonly used to protect high-risk data during transfers.

Backup Data

Set up secure systems to backup and recover important data in case of malicious attacks, corruption, or unexpected data loss. With a backup and recovery plan in place, organizations can resume normal operations quickly.

Protect Data With Antivirus / Anti-Spyware

Just because sensitive data is stored in a secure location doesn’t mean it’s 100% safe from threats. New viruses and spyware emerge continuously to counter security measures. Ward off unexpected attacks by installing up-to-date antivirus and anti-spyware to preserve data privacy.

In summary, organizations that invest in data privacy management enjoy many benefits, including deep-rooted customer trust, greater operational efficiency, and better overall reputations. To reap these benefits, companies need to have strategies in place for data privacy management. Such practices include identifying and securing sensitive data, managing access and usage, and installing security safeguards, among others.

Protect Data Privacy With Treasure Data

Here at Treasure Data, we take data privacy seriously. Our enterprise customer data platform keeps data secure while delivering the best data privacy solutions for your company’s needs. It’s no secret: we keep data safe for some of the largest companies in the world.

Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud is an integrated suite of cloud-based customer data platform solutions. Treasure Data provides insight by collecting and centralizing customer data, unifying profiles, and analyzing journeys to surface hidden trends in customer behavior.

Use Customer Data Cloud to:

• Collect and centralize customer data from all sources in one powerful platform
• Unify customer profiles using online + offline data
• Keep customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) safe
• Automate workflows for DSARs and privacy requests
• Keep global teams privacy-regulation compliant
• Manage permissions by region, organization, role, and more
• Integrate with authentication services for secure identification
• Create premium audit logs for monitoring activity
• And more

To discover how you can use Treasure Data’s customer data platform to apply data privacy principles, download our white paper today. Want to learn more? Request a demo, call 1.866.899.5386, or contact us for more information.