The Complex Landscape of Data Protection Laws

You’re probably reading this because you’re considering whether to adopt a DLP solution for your organization. But what’s the primary objective behind it? To safeguard your data across all the networks and mediums it resides in? To avoid data breaches, and mitigate impact should one occur? Whatever it is, chances are that adherence to compliance probably won’t be your top priority.

If you’re an organization planning to expand internationally, navigating the complex landscape of data protection laws is crucial. Imagine you’re headquartered in India, where the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) already impacts your operations. Now, as you set your sights on European countries like Germany and Switzerland, you’ll immediately face continental laws such as NIS2 and GDPR, with the latter imposing potential fines of up to 20 million euros or 4% of your annual revenue. But that’s not all – each country has its own specific regulations, like Germany’s Telecommunications & Telemedia Data Protection Act (TTDSG) and Switzerland’s New Federal Act on Data Protection (nFADP).

The regulatory maze doesn’t end there. Beyond national laws, you’ll need to consider industry-specific regulations. Healthcare companies must adhere to Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA), publicly owned firms need to follow Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), and e-commerce businesses can’t ignore PCI DSS. This global patchwork of regulations creates a complex challenge for any organization operating across borders, making it essential to stay informed and compliant to avoid potentially devastating consequences.

Exhausting, right? It can get like that while thinking about compliance.

But bear this in mind: more data regulations are being made because customers are getting more concerned about organizations holding their sensitive data.

• 81% of users say potential risks they face from companies collecting their data far outweighs the benefits. (Pew Research Center)
• This fear is justified, because personal customer information (name, email, password) is included in 44% of data breaches. (IBM)
• Therefore, 75% of Americans believe there should be more regulations to protect their privacy. (Pew Research Center)
• So, adherence is beneficial for companies, because organizations with high levels of non-compliance paid 12.6% more on average when breached. (IBM)

Rethinking Compliance

The truth is, non-compliance leads to financial penalties and long-term reputational damage. But here’s the secret to making it work: don’t think of compliance as a challenge. If one of your main goals is to keep your sensitive customer data safe by any means necessary, compliance will go hand-in-hand with this. 

And the key to making all this work is incorporating a fully optimized data loss prevention (DLP) solution. An ideal one has several core capabilities:

• Discovery: Having a general overarching view of your data.
• Classification: Accurately and efficiently categorizing all your data.
• Prioritization: Identifying your most sensitive data and crafting strategies to secure it.
• Monitoring: Constantly checking on all the data interactions your users are having.
• Response: Quick identification and remediation, should a breach occur.
• Compliance: Adhering to all the relevant regulations.

All of these capabilities have a starting point: a policy. At the heart of a great DLP solution is its policies. A policy is a set of conditions that determine how users interact with your data. A properly configured policy can restrict access, block certain actions and, in relevance to this blog, take into consideration factors like country, industry and device to comply with all the data privacy laws you need to follow.

But earlier, policies weren’t popular. They had to be done manually, and become a very time-intensive activity. Additionally, they were hard to translate and apply onto your third party vendors, and that became a real pain point. Research by Cyenthia claims 98% of respondents had at least one third party partner who suffered a breach in the last 2 years.

Thus began a trend. In 2023, 38% of organizations outsourced some or all of their compliance functionality, up from 30% in 2022. And if that’s something you are also planning to do, our Forcepoint DLP solution is the industry standard. For its pre-defined security policies, it has over 1,700+ out-of-the-box classifiers and templates that enable you to adhere to local privacy laws in 150+ regions based on the location you set your policy in. There are pre-defined policies for CCPA, for DPDPA and you can also achieve all aspects for compliance with GDPR using Forcepoint.

Effective automation through AI & ML have stopped making it a time-intensive process, while easy configuration and extension of the policy allow security to be uniform throughout your organization, including for the third parties you decide to work with. 

Building a Compliant DLP Policy: 7 Steps

So how do you successfully build a policy that adheres to a certain regulation? Our DLP does it in 7 succinct steps:

Step 1: Discovery & Classification of Data

Using AI & ML tools, we scour your entire ecosystem and get complete data visibility. Once that is achieved, we classify it all based on sensitivity.

Step 2: Identify the correct policy level

Find the relevant policy level for the company-wide protection measure you are about to implement.

Step 3: Start a policy either from scratch or our pre-defined templates

All our policies have rules to auto-propagate based on the specific local and industry regulations. This is enriched by all the groundwork we have conducted in  these regions and industries.

Step 4: Name the policy and add conditions

Conditions are also called classifiers, and a few examples of our classifiers are file labeling, fingerprinting, patterns & phrases, email details, etc. The DLP policy will trigger once any of these classifiers are met.

Step 5: Fix a resulting action to each classifier

Every time a classifier is met in daily operations, an incident is created. Here is where you attach a specific action to each incident based on its severity, whether it is auditing, blocking, coaching or no action at all. Additionally, incorporating risk-adaptive protection (RAP) in your DLP will help contextualize the actions and provide a more concise response.

Step 6: Identify sources to monitor

Sources include users, networks, business units, domains and custom computers. Additionally, policies can be configured to have different actions based on the location of the user. For example, a response to classifier can be a certain one if the user is on the network, and another one if the user is off it.

Step 7: Determine destinations to monitor

This includes email, endpoint, network, cloud and web – multiple DLPs combined into one efficient whole. You can read more about the types of DLPs here.

And there you have it! In a very short amount of time, you’d have created a policy that completely adheres to its corresponding regulatory requirement. Suddenly, compliance doesn’t seem all that overbearing. Additionally, once you’ve configured a policy, you can apply them everywhere in a few clicks. For example, an endpoint DLP policy can be extended to the cloud in minimal time.

So that’s the secret to dealing with compliance. It starts by not seeing it as a hindrance, but as an initiative to uphold the security & integrity of all your organizational data. Regulatory compliance frameworks safeguard your customers’ privacy and prevent their data from falling into the wrong hands. 

Incorporating a DLP like ours, that perfectly combines data protection with regulatory adherence, is the first step to streamlining compliance for your organization. So, click here to master your DLP compliance.