How do you leverage data privacy as a competitive advantage in IT innovation?

Regulations are a reflection of cultural norms and values of society and often act as reference framework to set boundaries on what is considered acceptable behavior in a given culture. By understanding these legal frameworks, companies can gain insights into what is culturally appropriate and expected, helping them align their innovations with societal norms. Taking a principle based approach to privacy can help map the regulatory requirements and provide a guided framework for innovation. For example, GDPR emphasizes on transparency and consent, indicating the need for building a trusted user experience by letting them make informed decisions and providing user control over their data.

In my experience, a lot of organizations are still driven by FUD especially as seen when the deadline to enforce any of these regulations such a GDPR or CCPA loomed near a few years ago. And then after a few high profile companies get penalized for violations then the fear mongering intensifies. Best practice advice that we have been giving to our enterprise clients is to plan ahead, act with agility and get help early enough. This gets all stakeholders educated and aligned on the potential impact to brand dilution for non compliance and when the organization acts with agility and asks for expert help in implementing if internal expertise is lacking, the risks are minimized.

Most regulations can be distilled down to a few key concepts. Finding a good briefing on that, and local experts in the field will save countless hours. A hack is to find a local lawfirm that does this specialty and hire them for a few hours. Talk to the lawyers before you need the lawyers.

Regulations are only the bare minimum you need to consider when putting into place a set of policies to address data privacy in a business. the user experience of dealing with your organisation and the controls you have in place with third party vendors are equally important.

More than 150 countries have data protection laws in place. Although there are major differences, a few common rights are in most laws, and for those building products or services to scale, supporting these rights is a core requirement. For example, the rights for an individual to delete their personal information, to right to view the information a company holds, and often a right to download or transfer the data are common across many laws. Similarly, rights to object to transfer of data to third parties or sale of data, and rights to object to ad targeting and personalization are reflected in laws around the globe. Planning to support these obligations at the earliest possible opportunity will save painful retrofitting later on.

Aligning privacy principles with IT strategy is crucial to making privacy integral to technology development and operations. Baking in privacy concepts from start can ensure you design for better and provides you with a competitive edge over others as you prioritize users by giving them enhanced privacy features. Prioritize a privacy first culture by providing trainings to employees across the organization and encouraging them to think about privacy implications in their daily work as they process personal data. When privacy is ingrained in the company culture, it naturally flows into the right places - IT strategy and operations being one of the many few.

In my experience, The business side of IT strategy for data privacy principles is essential. The increasingly strict and complicated data privacy requirements greatly impact the brand reputation, customer loyalty, and financial performance of a firm. In order to ensure that data privacy principles are ingrained in the company's culture, beliefs, and practices, it is vital that the IT strategy is in line with the entire business strategy and goals. By integrating data privacy principles into their business and IT strategies, companies can obtain a competitive advantage that protects and respects customers' and stakeholders' data rights and preferences while improving their brand image, customer trust, and market position.

I am not a fan of Red-Team companies as they are paid to find flaws and often exaggerate them and scare executives who may not know better. The best way to show transparency is to have structured audits that cover the main areas of intrusion, encryption, transport, storage, destruction and documentation.

While having the capabilities of Privacy Enhancing Technologies(PET) is key desirable ingradient, one must apply them to suit requirement. There would be tradeoffs on performance and CPU cycle costs. So protect data needs to be protected, not everything. Choose or Designs PETs equipped with features that enable application of privacy rules at right granular level.

The IoT is an emerging technology that is expanding quickly. Devices will generate over 70 zettabytes of data within the next few years. With this widespread use, we must seek methods to ensure data privacy by establishing trust between devices. IoT trust solutions include two leading-edge technologies. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) have a unique fingerprint and work on a challenge-response pair to provide data integrity, identity management, and authentication. In addition, researchers are finding that we can use blockchains to provide authentication between IoT devices and any application that requires data integrity as it prevents spoofing. Learn more, by watching my course, Securing the IoT: Privacy

The best proactive examples I often cite is when I first saw PbD (Privacy by Design ) being espoused in an Industry - academia partnership by Prof Ann Cavoukian when she was the Commisssioner for Information & Privacy in Ontario, Canada and Jeff Jonas, ( a serial entrepreneur) then an IBM Fellow used PbD in his presentations evangelizing IBM data management software design on stage at big industry conferences. To me, PbD is non-negotiable design of solutions!

In managing large IT organizations, I have found that the simplest way to maintain security with PII and secure assets is using the zero-trust model. No access unless access is needed and only allowing access to specific parts of the data tree. Using usergroups is a simple way to manage this model. I have also implemented data classification systems like Public, Internal, Private, Limited and Secret. This way we were not mixing data types. And the real secret here is, you cant lose data you don't have. I implemented a data destruction policy where once projects are complete, they are compiled, cleaned and archived while also checked for any data classifications that might require the datastore to be archived in a secure location.

I agree, but let's not downplay the role of the customers and stakeholders. IT professionals can gather feedback and insights from customers and stakeholders to improve their data privacy practices and policies. This helps to understand customer expectations and values regarding data privacy, build trust and transparency, and foster a culture of data privacy awareness. It also provides a competitive advantage by differentiating a company's approach to data privacy and demonstrating a customer-centric focus.

Audit best-practices are a known thing. I researched different audit types from different industries and compared them to our own requirements. It's amazing what I learned and what some industries know that others don't. Things like "data security checklist" will render a pile of results. Tailor it to your needs.

Data privacy challenges will always be challenging within organizations, especially global organizations. I would argue, that Seniors leaders and Executive Board members MUST have policies and procedures in place to address not only members of their prospective organizations, but third-party vendors or partnerships. Moreover, organizations must be aware of the rules and regulations of the particular ( country, state, city, etc) they are conducting business or rules and regulations that pertain to their employee's country of origin.

By sharing your failures and then how you overcame them demonstrates your true superpowers and this is even more relevant in today's world when transparency in data privacy and security practices is essential as it builds trust with your stakeholders and customers.

Great outline for strategic best practices. Key is how strategy is translated thru design. Remedy options today, only amplify costs. Perhaps a well defined root cause journey? It's painful, yet yields profound cost savings with future automation. A plan is required, where you paddle like heck within today's production challenges, while concurrently evolving the remedy. Basic building blocks are: Existing clean validated information about the enity Build of consolidated security framework Design of future state Implementation Plan driven by ISO 9001 It's a journey best driven by entity knowledge. Where the base template above is customized by the entity Risks. Simplicity is the result.

Peer groups and data security law enforcement groups like the FBI Cybercrime Taskforce have been instrumental in seeing what other people are doing, saying, learning and sharing. When you then talk about that publicly, you end up walking the walk too.