General Data Protection Regulation (GDRP) is privacy legislation that has been executed to enforce regulations on safety in matters of cloud computing. The legislation is by the EU, which predominantly focuses on protecting the European citizens, and businesses that have cloud centers in European territory.
Although other regions outside EU will benefit from the GDPR legislation, the organizations have to bear more responsibility of proving that indeed, the citizen’s data will be protected. What effect will this GDPR policy have on the security in cloud computing? Here’s a comprehensive look at some of the impacts:
Strengthening Privacy
Ideally, the GDPR mainly focuses on increasing the obligations on organizations to protect user data. The idea behind this is that, when providing products and service to customers, the businesses owners gather personal information from people, for the successful running of their operations. This means that they are entirely liable for the security of that information.
Consequently, the legislation requires that companies take reasonable steps to secure all the data they collect from people. It also grants citizens all the powers over how their personal information is obtained, used and stored. Further, the legislation allows people to demand to see/verify what information businesses have on them, and if need be, ask that it is deleted.
Company accountability
As earlier mentioned, business owners are held wholly liable over the information they collect from people. With such responsibility on their shoulders, it comes without saying that the companies need to be aggressive in taking up cloud computing habits that with further improve the security in the upload and down processes of cloud computing.
Businesses need to train staff so that the security breaches are not due to mismanagement of data and human errors. Further, the company needs to remain transparent with both employees and customers, particularly in disclosing security breaches that always have a direct impact on the company and the customers. Remember, once information has leaked, both the reputation of the business and the customers are on stake, which explains why transparency is key.
Data sovereignty
The more independent data is, the more it is secure. On using cloud services, you cannot claim complete data independence, which is what the GDPR legislations advocates for all data to be stored in the EU or within similar levels of protection. When data is stored under the EU, for example, it becomes subject to European privacy law.
As for other nations, like the US, a privacy shield is used. The privacy shield is what allows individual groups and companies to prove that they will protect data. This approach will also apply to businesses that use public cloud service because they may not be sure where the data is held.
Data control and visibility
Under the GDPR legislation, citizens have a lot of control over the data they provide to businesses. What this means is that when someone requests for their information, even though for deletion, business owners need to give it to them freely, and in a usable format, and that includes the backup files as well. This approach will help to keep the visibility of a businesses’ whole system key to compliance.
Further, the GDRP mandates that data is to be used for the sole purpose it was collected for, and not for other malicious or selfish reasons, unless with consent from the people. For example, if the information was to organize for shipping products, afterwards, the data cannot be used for a case study, unless with the owner’s consent. For this reason, businesses must have clear retention policies that allow them to retain information after usage, particularly for when data requires to be deleted after a particular period.
This also means that businesses must be clear with their cloud service provider on the terms and conditions, to ascertain who owns the data. If, for example, the service provider reserves all rights over the backups on the cloud servers, then your business may violate the data control requirement as per the GDRP.
Privacy by design policy
The GDRP demands that all businesses employ a privacy-by-design strategy, which sees to it that when designing any new cloud application, or system, there is the protection of personal information by default.
Ideally, it implies that businesses should have a readily trained workforce that can secure data repositories on the cloud servers, particularly on public cloud services, among other measures. Before you can consider collecting information from people, as a business owner, you must have your house in order, as pertains data privacy.
Overall the GDPR initiative first protects the citizens from security breaches that could sabotage the privacy of their information, then the businesses second, and by default. Find more on how to backup MySQL by clicking mysql backup service
