Data discovery is the crux of most business decisions. Without data discovery, you’ll be running behind competitors, chasing trends, and making uninformed decisions.
And, without data discovery compliance, your business will be in gray waters with regard to data protection regulations. As data discovery becomes more streamlined and businesses start using AI and Big Data scraping technologies, these regulations constantly change.
Captain Compliance is your solution for navigating data discovery compliance through accurate data discovery processes, privacy programs, and internal regulations.
In this guide, we’ll look at what data discovery compliance entails, why it’s crucial for businesses, and the strategic approach Captain Compliance uses to help you achieve compliance.
Key Takeaways
Data discovery compliance is essential to stay updated with regulatory policies and security frameworks.
Captain Compliance’s strategic approach helps ensure data discovery compliance through detailed audits and data frameworks.
You’ll need a solid data framework and an agile data discovery strategy to stay ahead of the changes in data compliance regulations.
Captain Compliance: Your Compliance Ally
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Captain Compliance is a team of data engineers who understand the importance of data compliance. At Captain Compliance, we offer the complete compliance package, from conducting data audits to helping businesses create and implement a reliable compliance framework.
Our goal is to ensure thorough corporate compliance and data transparency so your business can avoid data breaches. And, if you’re dealing with sensitive data, our compliance services ensure your business stays compliant with the GDPR, CCPA, and other regulations.
Our compliance services include:
Cookie Consent Management
Many data protection regulations require businesses to have a transparent cookie policy. However, implementing one can be difficult, especially if your business falls under several regulations.
Our cookie consent services take care of everything from creating a cookie policy to ensuring your cookie consent banners are in line with regulatory requirements.
Compliance With Data Privacy Regulations
Do you collect sensitive consumer data for marketing, analytics, or even operational purposes? If you do (and do so on a large scale), your business probably falls under data privacy regulations such as the following:
GDPR
CPRA
ADPPA
…and others.
At Captain Compliance, we help you stay compliant with these regulations and avoid hefty penalties for non-compliance.
Conducting a Data Privacy Impact Assessment
With the scope at which companies process consumer privacy data, it’s often difficult to know where the risk lies. Let’s say you’re running a medium-sized marketing firm that processes sensitive data for several companies.
You’re likely dealing with millions of data entries and not knowing the risks associated with these can lead to non-compliance. We help businesses avoid such scenarios and streamline their data processing systems with a DPIA.
The Role of Data Discovery Compliance
Staying compliant with data privacy regulations is important, but there have been many cases where businesses don’t know that they’re committing a violation. However, always remember that the cost of non-compliance is 3 times more than the cost of being compliant.
This is why it’s important to know where your business data is collected, how it’s stored and processed, and what insights you can get from the data. This is the data discovery process and it’s the first step to ensuring data compliance.
Think about it. Without knowing where your business data is collected from or how it’s processed, you won’t be able to ensure cookie compliance, financial compliance, or general regulatory compliance.
Navigating the Data Terrain
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The concept of data discovery is pretty straightforward – understand the process of data collection and use data sets to get useful business information. However, there’s a whole process that you’ll have to follow to navigate the data terrain.
This includes understanding the data lifecycle and using data discovery tools to properly map out the data.
Unveiling Your Data Landscape
The first and most important step in data discovery is actually understanding the process. Yes, it may seem simple, but this is where most businesses go wrong.
You’ll first have to compile a list of the data origins before you can process it. Is the data coming from marketing cookies? Or have customers filled in a mandatory sign-up form?
Knowing where the data sets originate allows you to determine whether you are legally allowed to use the data. And only once you clear this step can you move on to the next step of classifying and interpreting the data.
For this, it’s helpful to consider the data life cycle, which usually covers four steps:
Identifying Data
Classifying Data
Data Profiling
Data Analysis
While this process may sound intensive if your business deals with thousands of data sets, it’s pretty straightforward when you implement the right data discovery tools.
Essential Data Discovery Techniques
When dealing with data, it helps to follow certain systems and techniques. The same applies to the data discovery process.
Let’s explore 3 common techniques to streamline data discovery:
Data Profiling and Classification
Data profiling involves creating summaries of data, which you can then use for simpler analysis. It’s also called “data cleansing” and can be helpful in classifying useful data.
Let’s say you’re dealing with multiple data sets from a marketing campaign but need only sensitive consumer data for analysis. By profiling and classifying the data, you can separate the useful data sets for much simpler analysis.
Metadata Management
The data summaries and records gathered from profiling and classification fall under “metadata”. This describes other data sets and includes information on where they were collected from, how they were processed, and where they’re stored.
It’s much easier to get insights from metadata than from data sets directly since the metadata is already filtered.
To manage this metadata, you’ll need separate systems, processes, and policies.
Data Lineage Mapping
Another effective data discovery strategy to use is data lineage mapping. It involves tracking the flow of data from source to destination.
The reason this helps is that you can easily determine which data sets are important during a particular phase of the data lifecycle and analyze them accordingly.
Data lineage mapping also helps track errors in data processing and lays the groundwork for creating a data mapping framework.
The Compliance Challenge
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Data discovery isn’t just about getting valuable business insights anymore. It’s become a crucial part of ensuring data privacy compliance.
Stats show that 71% of countries have data privacy regulations, and many have several, depending on the scale of data collection. It’s clear that the challenge lies in implementing data discovery in a way that generates valuable insights while being in line with data compliance regulations.
For this, most businesses have to follow both privacy regulations and security standards when processing data.
Privacy Regulations
Before implementing any data discovery framework, it helps to explore data privacy regulations. Do you fall under the GDPR, HIPAA, or other regulations?
If you do, the first step is ensuring your data discovery process is in line with these regulatory requirements. Take the GDPR, for example. You’ll need to classify data according to how it’s being collected. Article 14 of the GDPR requires businesses to follow transparency principles with regard to data being collected indirectly.
And it’s not just the GDPR. The CPRA, HIPAA, and other data privacy regulations cover the principles of collecting, storing, and analyzing data – all key steps in the data discovery process.
Security Standards
The other key compliance factor in data discovery is following security standards like ISO 27001, NIST CSF, COBIT, and others.
These standards govern data handling principles and are useful for creating data protection frameworks. Many industries have separate security frameworks, depending on the data risk involved.
In industries where consumer private data is stored more often, the security standards are stricter, and non-compliant businesses face more severe penalties.
Consequences of Non-Compliance
These data privacy regulations and security standards are there for a reason – to protect consumer data from misuse and to prevent misuse. They’re also helpful to ensure your business’s security and protect sensitive business data.
Thus, the penalties for non-compliance are increasing with each new regulation. According to an IBM study, the average cost of a data breach has risen to around $4.5 million in 2023.
Some penalties are stricter than others. For instance, breaching the GDPR regulations can result in a 20 million euro fine or 4% of your company’s annual revenue. That’s aside from the lawsuits and other financial penalties initiated by the victims of data misuse.
However, the biggest penalty businesses face for non-compliance is a reputational hit. Uber’s consumer perception value dropped by 141.3% after a 2016 breach, and many successful companies have taken major reputational losses due to publicized data breaches.
See why it’s 3x less costly to stay compliant?
Data Discovery Compliance as a Protective Shield
The above stats send a clear message – it’s better to invest in data discovery compliance than deal with the reputational and financial risks of non-compliance.
At Captain Compliance, we break this process down into two areas:
Identifying compliance gaps
Proactive risk mitigation
The best way to identify compliance gaps is through a data privacy risk assessment or compliance audit. You’ll need a compliance officer to conduct the audits, especially one who’s familiar with the regulations your business faces.
Once you’ve identified risk areas through data discovery, you can implement steps to mitigate the risk.
Does your business have open-log access? Implement a security framework to restrict log access.
Do you have gaps in your cookie collection? Review your cookie policy and implement the changes immediately to avoid non-compliance.
This process is crucial, but it’s not possible without compliance experts and a thorough data discovery process.
Captain Compliance’s Strategic Approach
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With so much emphasis placed on accurate data discovery, the last thing you want is to overlook gaps and risks in the process. This is where Captain Compliance’s strategic approach comes in.
At Captain Compliance, we ensure thorough corporate compliance through a strategic approach that covers everything from data audits to metadata enhancement and more.
Here’s how our strategic approach to data discovery works:
Initial Compliance Assessment
Our initial compliance assessment involves evaluating your business’s existing data practices. Most businesses have some form of data compliance framework, so we try to build on what’s already available.
This often includes a data privacy assessment and compliance audit to make sure your business follows the basic regulatory requirements.
We then do a risk assessment to identify gaps in your data strategy. Does your data discovery process cover all data sources? Are there any potential areas where you risk non-compliance?
Comprehensive Data Discovery
Once the framework is laid and your data policies are in line with regulatory policies, we initiate the data discovery process. This starts with in-depth data profiling, where we classify data based on their source and potential.
We then do metadata enhancement to turn the profiled data into knowledge that’s useful for business decisions.
Tailored Compliance Roadmap
The final part of our strategy is to develop a tailored compliance roadmap that covers compliance strategies and data governance frameworks.
Data governance involves implementing the frameworks in your business to reduce the risk of human error. Remember, we can implement safety frameworks and create a data governance policy, but you’ll need to train employees to ensure they remain compliant with the new policies.
Preparing for Tomorrow’s Challenges
Data compliance has never changed as rapidly as in the past decade. With emerging trends in data compliance, evolving data privacy regulations, and technological advancements, staying compliant is more complex.
Remember the days when cookie banners used to be non-intrusive and almost invisible? That’s no longer compliant.
Penalties for non-compliance are also changing. Businesses that violate the CPRA and GDPR can expect 6-figure fines or worse. These challenges are forcing businesses to adapt, and without regularly updating your data frameworks, you’ll be left behind.
At Captain Compliance, we believe in agile frameworks and anticipating future challenges. Explore some of our compliance solutions for thorough corporate compliance.
Final Thoughts
With the evolving data compliance landscape, staying ahead of trends is crucial. At Captain Compliance, we implement a strategic approach to data discovery compliance, ensuring your business stays ahead of the trends.
Check out our compliance solutions today!
FAQs
What is Data Discovery in GDPR?
Data discovery in GDPR involves discovering where personal data is stored in your business. It involves identifying what type of personal data is collected, how and where it’s stored, and who has access to the data.
Learn more about our GDPR solutions here.
What Does the Data Discovery Process Involve?
The data discovery process involves exploring data sources, classifying data sets, and extracting meaningful patterns from the data.
Check out our guide to the data discovery process.
What is Data Discovery in Data Governance?
Data discovery helps identify patterns in data as well as important data flows that can help businesses create data governance policies.
Explore the importance of data governance.
What are the Risks of Data Discovery?
The main risks of data discovery are data inconsistencies, duplicate data sets, and unstructured data. With a strategic approach to data discovery, you can mitigate these risks for more consistent results.