Cloud Data Privacy and Security Challenges Part 6: Assessing Data Privacy Technology Needs

Every organization will have an array of existing tools used for on-premises data management, and cloud data modernization opens the opportunity for acquiring new cloud-native tools and adopting the use of cloud services. Individuals are becoming more acutely aware of the systemic demands for ensuring data privacy and managing protection of sensitive information. That creates a need to survey the existing inventory of data management tools used across the cloud landscape and validate that their integrated data access and protection mechanisms appropriately satisfy the data protection directives. 

At the very least, our best practices list implies the need for tools like: 

• Data policy management tools that policy analysts can use to formally define their collection of data policies. 
• Data access control tools that implement role-based access control, attribute-based access control, or a combination of both. 
• Metadata management tools for capturing data definitions and data standards. 
• Data lineage tools that trace the data lifecycles and log the pipelines through which data sets are acquired, ingested, processed, and provisioned. 
• Data catalog tools that capture a variety of facets of data asset metadata characteristics to support management of data sensitivity classifications. 
• Data quality and master data management tools to ensure the fidelity of managed data and ensure the linkability of entity information across a variety of source data sets to support privacy law mandates such as opt-out or the right to deletion. 
• Encryption and masking tools that can be used to de-identify data and prevent exposure even after a firewall breach. 

A combination of these best practices and technology assessment can provide scope for developing a strategy for managing data privacy in the cloud. A comprehensive strategy will enable your organization to engineer data privacy law compliance directly into your cloud data fabric while simultaneously simplifying continuous monitoring for potential violations and ensuring auditability of cloud data processes.