5 Keys to Being Compliant in the Cloud
By Harold Bell
If you’ve been employed in a formal engagement of some kind, it’s likely that you’re familiar with the idea of regulatory compliance. Remember when you were signing what seemed to be a thousand documents the day you accepted the job? Well within a few of those pages lie specific instructions on how to safeguard sensitive information and protect the privacy of those individuals in the process. This includes guidance on the proper way to store this information, access and share it, as well as the procedure to report a data breach should one ever occur.
For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is regulatory legislation for the healthcare industry that was signed in the 1990’s to protect the privacy of patients. The law is holistic in nature, meaning it enacts protection for patient information regardless if it is stored via hard copy or digitally, and whether or not it is shared. To drive accountability in protecting patient’s medical records and other confidential data, healthcare providers and their partners will be fined heavily for non-compliance. In certain circumstances, criminal charges have also been filed against negligent parties.
Compliance rules can be different if you work in government (FedRAMP), manufacturing (GMP), or real estate (CFPB), and can also be impacted by whether or not you collect payments from cardholders (PCI-DSS). With that said, you can also find yourself on the hook for many compliance regulations if your organization wears multiple hats. And as if the compliance landscape wasn’t already a minefield, technology innovations have added yet one more layer for professionals to account for: the cloud. This means you now have to mitigate risks on devices you own internally, while also addressing the risks of data stored in third party environments. Impossible? No. But the task ahead won’t be easy. You’ll need a lot of discipline and the help of some strategic partners. With that said, we’ve outlined 5 tips to ensuring data compliance in the cloud — just click here to continue reading on the Nutanix Blog.
