Achieving GDPR compliance through efficient data management

Every piece of data that a company collects or stores comes with legal responsibilities. In highly regulated industries, like healthcare or finance, data compliance regulations stretch even further, requiring companies to implement stringent security and monitoring solutions. 

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the leading data protection frameworks worldwide, with millions of businesses following its compliance regulations to manage personal data. Explore what GDPR is and how data professionals can meet its requirements with the right technologies.

What does GDPR mean, and why does it matter?

The GDPR is a privacy and security framework that any company doing business within the EU or handling EU citizens’ data must follow. 

The GDPR protects eight core rights:

• The right to access
• The right to be informed
• The right to data portability
• The right to be forgotten
• The right to object
• The right to restrict processing
• The right to be notified
• The right to rectification

Given the economic importance of the EU, its standards affect most modern businesses. The GDPR ensures that companies implement the right technical and privacy controls to protect personal data.

While GDPR compliance is mandatory, it comes with several benefits:

• Strengthens customer trust and transparency: When your business follows the GDPR’s strict standards, customers gain confidence in how teams handle their data. The framework’s technical controls and minimum requirements ensure the organization holds data privacy to a high standard, building stronger trust with customers.
• Improves data security and governance practices: Following GDPR standards pushes businesses to boost data security by building strong security postures and better oversight of company data.
• Reduces risk of regulatory penalties: Security aside, the GDPR is a mandatory requirement for the vast majority of businesses. Failing to comply leads to financial penalties and long-term regulatory consequences.

GDPR compliance requirements and principles

The GDPR has several principles that define its main requirements. Here are the broad areas to focus on:

• Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency: Process data legally and in a way that is both transparent and fair to individuals. Be transparent about how you collect, use, and plan to share personal data.
• Purpose limitation: Collect personal data only for specific, legitimate business purposes that you can clearly explain. Don’t collect data that lacks a justified purpose.
• Data minimization: Limit data collection to the minimum possible level required for a task. Only collect personal data when absolutely necessary.
• Accuracy and storage limitation: Keep personal data you store updated and accurate. Additionally, store personal data only for a limited period and make that retention period clear to the individual.
• Integrity and confidentiality: Implement processes that keep data secure through ingestion, transmission, and storage. Take technical steps to protect personal data against potential corruption or ill use.
• Accountability: Build auditable internal processes to demonstrate full compliance with the GDPR.

How to comply with GDPR

Complying with GDPR guidelines is a multi-step process that requires full visibility into data systems. Here’s how to meet GDPR requirements.

Identify and classify personal data

The first step toward fulfilling any data protection requirements is to understand what data you collect and whether or not it’s sensitive. Analyze the data your company ingests, classify it based on sensitivity, and match the sensitivity tags to GDPR standards.

For example, personal data requires the highest level of data protection, so flag all of this data for more stringent safeguards in the system. 

Map data flows across systems

Data is continuously moving between ingestion points, through storage systems, and into analytics platforms within a business. Mapping out this flow helps you apply the right data protection standards at each point in the data lifecycle.

For example, your system may encrypt data in storage, but mapping out the data flow could expose gaps in how it protects information in transit. Clear visibility into data movement lets you apply the right controls at every stage.

Establish lawful bases for processing data

A core pillar of the GDPR is that any business needs a valid legal basis to collect personal data from individuals. Clearly define why your company needs to ingest user information, document that justification, and get explicit consent from customers. Be prepared to demonstrate how each data processing activity meets GDPR standards.

Implement data protection and security controls

Data protection comprises multiple cybersecurity controls, ranging from data tagging and access control to encryption standards and access monitoring. Beyond just GDPR compliance, ensure you have enterprise-grade security solutions to cover the full data lifecycle.

Even when data moves across systems or environments, your organization remains accountable for its protection. Apply consistent security controls wherever the data resides or flows to maintain confidentiality and integrity. Plus, ensure your security posture evolves over time, updating to patch known vulnerabilities and introducing new controls to protect personal data.

What are the best GDPR compliance strategies?

Compliance doesn’t end at establishing security controls to meet the minimum requirements of GDPR. It’s an ongoing process that requires you to continually fulfill new obligations and update systems to provide the highest level of data protection.

Here are a few strategies to use as a GDPR compliance guide:

• Keep systems updated. When using a third-party application, update to the most recent patch whenever it becomes available. Security updates typically patch out known vulnerabilities, improving how secure an application is. By missing these updates, you leave vulnerabilities inside a service, which attackers use to infiltrate the business and exfiltrate data. Regularly review all active systems and ensure they’re running the latest versions.
• Treat every cloud environment like any other system. Even when you store data with a cloud provider, there are security requirements that your company has to independently fulfill. When choosing a cloud provider, review their shared responsibility guidelines to see what they cover and what security steps you’ll need to take.
• Choose tools built for security and compliance. For data ingestion, transformation, or storage, look for platforms that actively prioritize security and compliance. Many baseline compliance requirements depend on the underlying security of the data system, so find tools with robust protections that make it easier to meet GDPR standards. 

Tools and techniques for GDPR compliance

The tools you implement make or break the GDPR compliance of your business. Here’s a list of technology to effectively meet GDPR standards:

• Data discovery and classification tools: These tools identify and categorize personal data across your environment, showing where sensitive information resides and how it’s used. This data visibility lets you correctly apply policies and protections.
• Data protection and encryption tools: These tools secure personal data in transit and at rest through key management and other safeguards, ensuring sensitive data remains private.
• Security and monitoring platforms: Full-scale monitoring platforms offer visibility into activity within your systems, enabling you to spot anomalies and respond to active cybersecurity threats.
• Compliance and governance platforms: Governance platforms make it easier to create and maintain an audit trail for accurate reporting. They centralize governance processes and ensure your organization consistently meets all compliance standards.

How Fivetran supports GDPR compliance

Achieving GDPR compliance across an entire data ecosystem is a challenge, especially when the business is distributed across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Even establishing basic visibility over these systems is difficult without tools that trace data flows.

‍Fivetran solves these issues and helps your business maintain full GDPR compliance by simplifying and standardizing data movement. With automated connectors to over 700 source environments and fully managed ELT pipelines feeding data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery, you’ll have full visibility and control over your data.

By providing automated and scalable pipelines, Fivetran reduces the need for manual data handling and minimizes potential compliance risks. It delivers clean, structured datasets to downstream analytics and governance tools, making policy enforcement simpler. 

Use Fivetran to structure reporting and achieve full compliance with GDPR requirements. Request a demo today. 

FAQ

Which data integration solution supports GDPR and SOC 2 compliance?

Fivetran is the leading data integration solution that supports full GDPR and SOC 2 compliance. With automated data pipelines, AI data integration, and a range of data governance capabilities, Fivetran helps your business manage data responsibly and meet regulatory standards.

What is GDPR in cybersecurity?

GDPR in cybersecurity is a framework that requires businesses to keep personal data safe through technical components and security systems that range from encryption standards to access control.

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