At one time, compliance was an afterthought when architecting an IT environment. Companies in certain industries implemented measures to support compliance alongside their existing infrastructure. Organizations often viewed regulatory compliance as an annoyance that could impede performance optimization.
The world’s digital transformation has changed the volume and type of sensitive data that many companies must handle securely. The rights of individuals to have some control over how their personal information is collected, stored, and used have given rise to multiple sets of regulations that a business must follow. The focus on maintaining compliance has changed how decision-makers structure their IT infrastructure.
Who Needs to Worry About Compliance?
Most modern companies have to consider regulatory data protection compliance to some degree. A wide variety of data privacy and security regulations may be in scope for virtually any business. The following common regulatory standards may impact an organization based on its industry or customer base.
- HIPAA: Companies in the U.S. health care sector must comply with the regulations established by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to protect the privacy and security of sensitive patient health data.
- PCI DSS: Businesses that handle credit card payments must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard to protect cardholder data. Organizations must implement a secure cardholder data environment separate from the rest of the IT infrastructure to achieve and maintain compliance.
- GDPR: Companies serving customers in the European Union (EU) must meet the standards defined in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
- CCPA: Businesses with California customers that meet certain financial guidelines are subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act.
Organizations may have additional compliance requirements depending on where they operate and their industry. Companies may process diverse information assets, which forces them to comply with multiple sets of regulations. Different jurisdictions may have conflicting requirements, further complicating compliance efforts.
Businesses that fail to maintain compliance risk legal action, financial fines, loss of customer confidence, and long-term reputational damage. Organizations that take these risks seriously consider compliance a major factor when architecting or re-architecting their IT infrastructure.
How Does Compliance Affect Your IT Environment?
Companies that must comply with regulatory standards have two choices. They can try to maintain compliance by retrofitting an IT environment that was not designed to handle the strict data-processing security measures required for effective compliance. This approach can lead to compliance gaps that put sensitive data and the organization at risk.
A better method for ensuring compliance is to build an IT infrastructure with the specific features and capabilities required to meet all regulatory requirements. The following are essential factors that a company’s IT environment must address.
Data residency laws
Many countries and jurisdictions have data residency laws that require certain types of data to remain within specific geographic boundaries. Companies can be hit with substantial fines by moving data to unapproved locations. For example, Meta was fined 1.2 billion euros for violating GDPR rules by transferring EU citizens’ data to be processed in its U.S. data centers.
Businesses must develop new strategies to meet data privacy laws while maintaining operational efficiency. They must build multi-regional architectures capable of handling discrepancies in data residency laws across jurisdictions. While companies may have stored data in ways that minimize latency and cost, they now must respect legal boundaries or face non-compliance penalties.
Identity and access control
A foundational requirement of most data privacy and security regulations is controlling who has access to sensitive or personal information. Companies must implement processes that provide granular and auditable control over who accesses specific data assets. Auditors require organizations to demonstrate the proper controls are in place when investigating a data breach or confirming compliance.
Many organizations are implementing a zero-trust architecture that allows access to sensitive data only to a select subset of their employees. Zero-trust, combined with the principle of least privilege, provides enhanced protection for sensitive and regulated data resources. The data should be accessible only to trusted individuals with a business justification for accessing or using it.
Logs and audit trails to demonstrate compliance
Companies must be prepared to prove compliance to auditors. The ability to demonstrate compliance is as important as achieving and maintaining it. An organization that fails to demonstrate its compliance processes will incur additional penalties in the wake of a data breach.
Businesses must track access using immutable logs to verify that only authorized personnel have accessed regulated data for specific purposes. It is much more efficient to build these features into the architecture rather than adding them after the environment is built. The same processes used to demonstrate compliance will also enhance the company’s ability to address all types of security issues.
Encryption and key management
Data encryption is a foundational element of many regulatory standards. Organizations must encrypt sensitive data at rest and in transit to protect it from unauthorized use. Companies suffering data breaches involving unencrypted regulated information have committed a serious compliance violation and are in line for significant fines or penalties.
Encryption requires effective, secure key management to ensure that only authorized personnel can decrypt the data. Companies should invest in key management systems that give them control of encryption keys. In cloud environments, only the customer, not the provider, should have access to the keys.
VAST Can Optimize Your Infrastructure to Support Compliance
VAST’s technical teams can help your business optimize its infrastructure to address compliance concerns in multiple ways. We can assist in architecting a new environment, migrating to a cloud infrastructure, or closing gaps in existing systems.
- Our Discovery and Assessment service identifies the critical systems and sensitive data assets that require special handling to maintain compliance during the transition to the cloud.
- VAST’s Data Center Transformation service will identify modern techniques to ensure effective compliance while supporting operational efficiency.
- Our modern IT Solutions leverage our experience and industry partnerships to create an IT environment aligned with your business and compliance requirements.
Contact VAST and learn how we can help you reshape your IT infrastructure to meet compliance requirements while promoting business objectives.
