Regulatory Compliance and Data Protection in Agile Environment

Today’s business world is paced faster than ever, and the expectations for business owners and managers are significantly higher, especially in highly regulated industries. Organizations today face constant challenges in gathering, managing, and protecting their customer’s sensitive information. We live in an evolving world of data protection regulations such as the GDPR or the CCPA, among others, which have made compliance a prerequisite for business operations across all industry sectors. 

Simply put, businesses must use the best practices to maintain regulatory compliance in agile environments, both to maintain their brand’s image and to avoid hefty penalties from said regulations. Penalties by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for instance, can go up to 20 million euros or up to 4% of the organization’s total global turnover, whichever is higher.

It is not easy to navigate such a complex environment these days, which is why in this post, we will teach you how to adopt agile practices for data protection compliance. 

Defining agile data protection compliance

What exactly does ‘agile data protection compliance’ mean? It means that you are expected to establish an iterative, flexible network that allows your team and organization to:

• Adapt to the ever-changing regulations
• Improve your organization’s privacy program
• Respond to or prevent any breaches of data
• Leverage data to identify gaps in compliance
• Continuously iterate to ensure compliance

The majority of organizations do the bare minimum – they conduct periodic assessments or hire a small team to handle growing data and take care of compliance. This is far from enough. When it comes to data protection in an agile environment, regulatory compliance requires quite a widespread system that addresses the full lifecycle of compliance.

This is especially important in highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals. These organizations are bound by the strictest standards that govern their data handling, operations, and even the interactions they make with their customers. The regulations are specifically designed to protect the interests and rights of the users and ensure fair practices, and failing to comply with them can result in legal penalties, loss of customer trust, and irreparable reputational damage. 

How to protect user data and remain compliant in an agile environment

To help you find a methodology to protect user data and remain compliant in such an environment, we created a list of steps you should follow:

1. Create a compliance checklist

Depending on where they operate, the demographics of their customers, and the nature of the business, organizations often need to comply with more than one regulation. For instance, if your organization operates in California, you need to make sure it complies with the CCPA. However, if your customer database includes people in Europe, you must also comply with the GDPR.

Since regulations are changing too often, this can be hard to keep track of, which is why the first step to take is to create a checklist. A CCPA website checklist will help your team protect the user data and ensure you are not subjected to major penalties or reputational damage.

2. Invest in the right set of tools

Regulations are often extensive and demanding – and they change very often, so they have become hard to keep track of. If you need to comply with different regulations, this can become impossible. Thankfully, there are tools like consent management platforms to streamline the request, storage, and usage of user content. 

To remain compliant, you also need to test for data breaches or attempts at a data breach. There are many penetration testing types you can perform and, with the use of an automated tool, your organization can get non-stop protection that no quantity of employees could ever handle manually.

3. Build a data protection compliance team

Tools can be of great use to you, but none of it will work without a good team in place. If you want your organization to remain compliant in an agile environment, you need a dedicated team of experts who know how important this is – as well as how to achieve it. 

The data protection compliance team usually combines people with different skills and backgrounds, including IT, security, legal, and compliance. A proper system requires the collective experience of different people who follow the same guidelines and work together to protect your organization. 

To do all this, the team should have access to all the tools and resources they need, including data protection technologies as we discussed, but also data storage and management tools, legal guidance, and more. 

4. Define compliance goals and identify compliance gaps

Compliance is reliant on data. You need information on how data needs to be stored and used, how it is processed, who processes it, and even information on what your team should avoid when tackling it. 

It all starts with research. If you want your team to be on the same page, you need them to align with the organizational expectations. That being said, the next move is:

• Define the scope of your organization’s data protection efforts
• Identify any relevant regulations you must follow
• Set your organization’s expectations for compliance
• Find any compliance gaps and solutions to address them

Let’s say you gathered all this information. What do you do with it?

Use all the data you gathered to create detailed guidelines for your team to follow. Keep it flexible – they should be able to tweak the strategies as regulations change to keep your organization compliant. 

5. Monitor compliance

Compliance is a work in progress. You can’t just make one book of guidelines, hire some people to handle data, and toss it aside. Regulations change every day. The penalties get higher all the time, and the risks grow continuously. Criminals always seem to find new ways to collect and misuse user data, and guess who will be at fault if your customers’ sensitive information is not protected?

It will be your organization, of course!

Every organization is at risk of data breaches, no matter the size. However, it is no secret that organizations in highly regulated industries are most at risk. Ergo, the strictest regulations that they must follow. 

Unfortunately, no matter how well your strategy is implemented or how hard your team tries, breaches and problems can still happen. That being said, the fifth and most important step in our list is monitoring. You need to implement a systematic approach to test compliance in your organization.

For starters, you should define key performance indicators for your compliance initiatives and keep conducting tests to evaluate their effectiveness. By gathering feedback, you can monitor the outcomes of your strategies and inform future decisions. 

6. Iterate and optimize

The last step in our list is to act on the data you found while monitoring compliance. Based on all the information you gathered from your compliance tests, you need to iterate on the initiatives and optimize their effectiveness. 

A successful compliance process is continuously worked on and refined. This means that you will often update policies and procedures for your team, gather feedback from your stakeholders, report on compliance metrics, and find new ways to re-train your team. 

Challenges of maintaining regulatory compliance

Regulatory compliance is now necessary for business success, but this doesn’t make it any easier. It does come with certain challenges. 

For starters, your methodology should prioritize adaptability and flexibility. Regulations keep changing and the tactics to breach data are getting more creative every day. This means that whatever worked yesterday in keeping sensitive data secure in your company might not work tomorrow. 

Next, your methodology will require speedy delivery, which can often clash with the rather rigid nature of most regulatory requirements. It can be tough to ensure that every compliance standard is met at every step of the organization’s work. 

As we mentioned, an organization may be subject to more than one – or two regulations. Keeping track of everything can be very challenging, too.

Finally, data protection demands continuous monitoring and improvement. It requires frequent testing, an eloquent team dedicated precisely to this, and the right set of tools to streamline the processes.

How compliant is YOUR organization right now?

The number of organizations that implement detailed regulatory compliance policies and procedures is growing, especially in highly regulated sectors. The business environment is agile these days, so adopting a fierce approach to data protection compliance is a must if you want to retain your good reputation and avoid legal and financial problems. Not only that, but a proper system will give you a competitive edge in an industry where the majority of organizations still do the bare minimum to protect user data. If you haven’t done this already, the time to start is today!