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For companies that do business in Europe, the acronym GDRP can evoke both consternation and dollar signs. This is because by this time next year, those enterprises will need to have taken complete stock of all their data assets in order to comply with the new European Union (EU) requirements for the personal protection of data under General Data Protection Regulation.
What a job is it to locate, identify and catalog all the data and data files inside an enterprise—even a small enterprise. It can be an IT manager’s nightmare. But, as one might imagine, there’s an app—or even a toolset—for that.
Unifi Software, which describes itself as the only self-service catalog and prep tool combined in a data-as-a-service platform, on Aug. 22 announced a cloud service that monitors all data assets in real time. It could be just what the doctor ordered for many a company facing this task.
“In just a few short months the world will experience one of the biggest changes to our regulatory landscape in support of data privacy with GDPR,” said Unifi Software CEO Rob Carlson. The aim of GDPR, according to the EU, is to protect citizens privacy from data breaches that are occurring at an astounding rate.
“In our data-driven world it’s arguably one of the biggest challenges facing every global enterprise. Whether a company has just one customer in the EU or thousands, they will be mandated to protect personal data under an expanded jurisdiction. Our goal at Unifi, is to ensure that every business user inside a company has access to data for generating business value, and at the same time to assist the stewards of data compliance and governance.”
Many companies are either unfamiliar with the compliance requirements or the broad potential for breach inside their organization. For any enterprise, the fines for being unprepared are stiff—up to 4 percent of annual global revenue or €20M, whichever is greater.
Unifi Software’s Compliance Data Hub with RegAlert provides real-time monitoring of all data in use. If any user attempts to access data with GDPR attributes, RegAlert immediately blocks the data set from further use and notifies the person of the potential regulatory infringement. The data steward is also notified and they can ascertain, through Unifi, who is trying to access it and then grant them either unconditional or restricted access.
With built-in row and column level security features, data stewards and compliance officers can mask the actual values in fields that fall under the restrictions of use and still let analysts access the data.
For example, if a user at a global online travel site wanted to compare recent activity of a new direct route between a smaller airport in New England and Germany to a connecting route through a major hub, Unifi would give the user a count of people that chose the new route instead of one with a previous connection, but Unifi will not drill down to see their names.
Another advantage of the Unifi Data Hub is the comprehensive data lineage features. Most GDPR breaches are likely to happen from derived data sets rather than source data. Unifi’s lineage capabilities highlight derived data sets that contain GDPR data.
For more information on the Unifi Software Compliance Data Hub, go here.