Why you need to ensure that your storage solutions are compliant

Data privacy and security are two of the most important aspects of any organisation.

As local and national governments continue to expand their data protection legislation, companies across the world have been made increasingly responsible for protecting, governing and storing their data securely. The EU introduced GDPR in 2018, whilst the US recently passed the ADPPA in 2022.

The UK’s implementation of GDPR, the Data Protection Act, means that anyone responsible for handling personal data has a responsibility to follow the strict “data protection principles”. This means that any data you store has to be:

• used fairly, lawfully and transparently
• used for explicitly specified purposes
• used in a way that is relevant and limited to only what is necessary
• accurate and kept up to date
• kept for no longer than is necessary
• handled in a way that ensures appropriate security, including protection against unlawful or unauthorised processing, access, loss, destruction or damage

Compliance is not a choice, it’s a legal requirement.  Should you be found to be non-compliant you should expect to receive financial penalties. Using GDPR as an example, depending on the severity of your organisation's violation you will receive one of two tiers of fines. The lower, less severe tier involves a maximum penalty of a €10 million fine, or 2% of your total global revenue. For more serious breaches of the GDPR rules, you can expect a maximum penalty of fines that total up to €20 million (around £18 million), or 4% of total annual worldwide turnover.

As a business it is essential that you have clear and accessible insights into your data so that you can make more informed business and legal decisions – not only simply to comply with data protection legislation but also to support your business growth goals of innovation and digital transformation. Records management, electronic discovery, compliance, data storage, data migrations, controlling data growth, managing environment performance, disaster recovery, cost control – the list is endless and as data growth shows no signs of stopping it's essential that you maintain full and transparent control of your environment. 

Data protection legislation and compliance requires companies to gain increased visibility, control, and to have a concrete understanding of how the business is processing, storing and managing personal data. As a result of this, keeping personal information secure is central to the data protection mandate. As such, any data breaches must be notified to the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours.

Even purely on a customer satisfaction basis, protecting your data is critical. 75% of UK adults think that businesses have too much control over their personal data, and if you suffer from an incident that compromises this data it can completely erode any trust that you have built with your customers. Less than a third of consumers think that businesses take their data seriously, and two thirds would stop doing business with an organisation that has compromised their sensitive information in a breach.

There are ways to help ensure that your data storage and protection stays compliant.

1. Understand the legislation

It’s important that you are familiar with any local laws and regulations, and what is expected of you. This is the simplest way towards becoming compliant, as having a good understanding of the specific requirements for how personal data should be collected, stored and processed will help you to abide by the rules and avoid the risk of financial penalties.

2. Stay secure

Making sure that your data is secure and protected is the most obvious step towards being data compliant. By appropriately protecting any sensitive data from unauthorised access and malicious intent, as well as ensuring that you are only sharing data with authorised third parties for use in specified and intended ways, you are helping to make sure that your organisation abides by the strict Data Protection Principles. There are a number of different security measures that you can employ to protect your data, but some examples include encrypting data, secure storage, secure authentication, access controls, and conducting regular security audits.

3. Manage your data

Not only does data protection legislation require that you protect your data, but it also requires you to control your data. It’s vital that you ensure that your records are being kept accurate and up to date. Data minimisation is important here. By ensuring that you can only collect necessary data, you reduce the risk of suffering a data breach or any unintended use of personal information. When done properly data management has knock on benefits for business operations as a whole, enabling the smooth flow of critical data and information between individuals and teams.

4. Be Transparent

Being transparent with your customers is so important. Not only does this help you to remain compliant, but even on a basic level it helps you to build trust with your clients. You must make sure that you always have explicit consent to process and store customer data, as well as exclusively using your data for relevant, specified purposes only. You should always provide individuals with the ability to access and manage how their data is used, including communications opt outs if desired, as well as being quick to notify the relevant entities in the event of a cyber security incident.

Celerity can support you with meeting your compliance challenges.

Celerity’s portfolio of data protection and storage management solutions and services uses the combined power of data mapping and discovery services to deliver secure, safe and agile operations for your enterprise, designed to assist you in working towards compliance.

Our data security and resilience portfolio provides guaranteed levels of protection and continuous access to the valuable data you hold, or that Celerity holds on your behalf. As an ISO:27001 accredited organisation, we are committed and highly experienced in our approach to managing risk to the security of confidential information, ensuring that our data protection services are as secure as it gets!

Robust enough to be used by government defence organisations and with a successful track record in the public sector, we provide strong yet flexible, future proofed solutions for your data protection and management needs. Fully customisable to specific compliance-heavy environments, our data security and resilience services will seamlessly manage your compliance and regulatory challenges, taking the pain away from internal teams whilst reducing workload and costs.

If you think Celerity could help with your compliance, data storage, or other IT solutions issues, then make sure to get in touch with us today to find out how we can solve your business problems with technology.