Mastering Secure Data Movement: Chase’s Path to Innovation and Framework Stability

By: Priti Naik, Senior Lead Architect, Chase

Securely moving data is a critical factor in innovation. The ability to securely and effectively transfer data within an organization’s framework is not just a technical necessity — it’s a game-changer. Our data journey at Chase involves a commitment to driving organizational modernization and leading innovation by successfully implementing a secure and stable data- movement framework that powers customer experiences in digital, servicing and more.

It starts with our vision for the future, where data silos and fragmentation become relics of the past.

The Importance of Securely Moving Data

We envision a future where breaking down these barriers drives innovation, enhances operational efficiency, and supports better decision-making across our organization. Securely transferring data within Chase data has and will continue to transform our operations, enabling us to work smarter and tackle challenges more effectively. For instance, leveraging data to personalize our services has significantly increased customer satisfaction and fueled growth.

Challenges in Data Movement

Our journey has had its challenges:

• Privacy and security: We implemented robust security measures to protect customers’ data, always prioritizing protecting their personal and sensitive information.
• Regulatory compliance: Navigating regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is complex, but our compliance framework ensures we stay ahead of requirements. The process demands constant vigilance and adaptation.
• Interoperability: Integrating diverse systems and data formats pose significant hurdles, especially with legacy systems. Ensuring seamless communication between diverse platforms is essential for effectively moving data.
• Data quality and trust: Ensuring data accuracy, consistency and reliability is critical to building confidence among stakeholders. Poor data quality can undermine decision-making and erode trust in data-driven initiatives.
• Cultural and organizational reluctance: Organizational reluctance to adopt new data movement practices is common. This can be due to established norms, fear of change, or competing interests. Overcoming these barriers is essential to facilitate the free flow of information.
• System compatibility, scalability and performance: Technical challenges like system compatibility, scalability and performance issues are common. Addressing these challenges is crucial to ensure that our data movement framework can support current and future demands.

Strategies for Securely Moving Data

To effectively navigate the complexities of transferring data, Chase developed a comprehensive set of strategies designed to address the multifaceted challenges we face. These strategies not only safeguard data but also enable seamless and efficient information flow across our organization. By focusing on data standardization, governance and real-time synchronization, we ensure our data movement practices are robust, compliant and future-ready. These initiatives empower us to maintain the highest standards of data integrity and security while fostering innovation and collaboration.

Our journey to secure data movement included these key strategies:

Data standardization — Data standardization sets a universal language for our data, ensuring consistency and seamless movement across systems. Our approach includes:

• Standard formats and protocols: We adopt formats like JSON or XML and use common APIs to ensure compatibility across platforms, facilitating smooth data exchanges.
• Data classification and metadata: We implement a data classification system with metadata tagging and maintain a comprehensive data dictionary and glossary to ensure consistent terminology. It’s crucial that all stakeholders have access to and understand these references.
• Data literacy programs: We invest in workshops and training sessions to enhance understanding of the data lifecycle and standardization framework, fostering a culture of data literacy.
• Standardizing tools for data movement: Our tools are standardized and user-friendly, ensuring that all stakeholders can easily access and move data.
• Privacy and security standards: We anonymize or pseudonymize data to protect personal and sensitive information, especially when sharing externally. Data masking techniques are applied based on user roles, and robust encryption protocols like TLS/SSL and algorithms such as SHA-256 and RSA are used to protect data in transit and at rest. Tokenization is employed during customer authentication and authorization, and secure APIs like HTTPS and protocols like SFTP are used for safe data transmission.

By standardizing our data practices, we lay the groundwork to effectively transfer data, ensuring that our data practices are both secure and efficient.

Data governance — Data governance frameworks establish rules to ensure data accuracy, consistency and security. Our framework includes:

• Policies for data management: We establish clear policies to ensure accountability and transparency by defining data ownership and access rights. We mandate the implementation of encryption and access controls to secure sensitive data.
• Compliance and risk management: Continuous monitoring and threat detection help us align with global regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, maintaining trust and security.
• Data quality and security measures: Our governance framework ensures the implementation of data quality and security measures by establishing standards for data quality, enforcing role-based access control, and adopting data minimization techniques to protect sensitive data.
• Data lineage: Data lineage is tracked to monitor the origin and movement of data, ensuring transparency and accountability across systems.
• Monitoring and auditing: We conduct regular audits and compliance checks to ensure adherence to data protection regulations and quality standards.
• Automation and enforcement: Automation allows for continuous monitoring and enforcement of security policies. By integrating continuous integration continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices, we enhance governance efficiency.

These governance practices ensure our data is secure and ready for real-time synchronization, enabling timely and accurate decision-making.

Real-time synchronization — Real-time synchronization is crucial for maintaining data consistency and accuracy across our systems, reducing discrepancies and improving decision-making. Our strategy includes:

• Change data capture (CDC): We utilize CDC to monitor and capture data changes at the source, such as in databases, and immediately push these changes to other systems using tools that enable real-time updates.
• Distributed architecture: By adopting microservices and edge computing we process data closer to its source, ensuring efficient and scalable data processing.
• Data caching and compression: Implementing in-memory caching reduces latency while compression algorithms like gzip minimize data transfer, enhancing overall performance.
• Asynchronous data replication: We employ tools for robust asynchronous data replication and leverage cross-region replication with cloud-native solutions for seamless data flow.
• Multi-cloud integration services: We leverage solutions that facilitate seamless integration across multiple cloud environments. By utilizing cloud-native services, we ensure effective cross-cloud communication.
• Messaging and queuing systems: Messaging systems are used to queue and deliver real-time updates. These systems ensure reliable and ordered message delivery, maintaining data consistency. Our publish-subscribe model allows data changes to be published to a topic, with all subscribing systems receiving updates in real time.
• Monitor and optimize performance: We implement monitoring tools to track synchronization performance, identify bottlenecks, and optimize processes to ensure minimal latency. Our infrastructure is designed to be scalable, with load balancers and auto-scaling groups to handle peak loads and maintain performance.

By ensuring real-time synchronization, we keep our data relevant and accurate, empowering our organization to make informed decisions swiftly and effectively.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies

We measure the effectiveness of our strategies through:

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like data accessibility and security metrics.
• Continuous monitoring tools.
• Feedback loops through surveys and success stories.

Regular evaluation helps refine our strategies and ensures they deliver the desired results.

Key Learnings

We’re shaping the future at Chase through secure and effective data movement by embracing challenges and turning them into opportunities for growth and success. Key learnings and best practices we’ve implemented include:

• Legacy to cloud migration — Migrating data from old systems to the cloud was a critical step in our modernization strategy. By automating data conversion and using cloud-native tools, we ensured a seamless transition with minimal data loss and full compliance.
• Multi-cloud integration — Using multiple cloud providers, we integrated data across platforms by adopting cross-platform standards and conducting regular audits. This approach has enhanced our operational efficiency and reduced the risk of vendor lock-in.
• Third-party integration -Integrating our systems with third-party platforms has been essential for smooth operations. Establishing clear agreements and continuously monitoring synchronization ensures seamless data flow between our internal and external systems.
• Empowerment — We empower our teams with the tools and strategies needed to navigate data transferring complexities.
• Collaboration — Securely moving data drives collaboration across our teams and with our partners, leading to new ideas and solutions.
• Future-proofing — Committing to secure data movement has future-proofed our organization, giving us a significant competitive edge.

Secure data movement is not just a strategy; it’s a transformative approach that has driven our organization’s modernization and innovation. By overcoming challenges and implementing robust strategies, we have positioned ourselves at the forefront of our industry.

To begin assessing your current data movement framework, engage stakeholders early in the process, invest in the right technology to ensure secure and efficient data transferring, and turn insights into real-world action to drive your organization toward greater data security, collaboration and innovation.

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JPMorgan Chase is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including Disability/Veterans

For Informational/Educational Purposes Only: The opinions expressed in this article may differ from other employees and departments of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Opinions and strategies described may not be appropriate for everyone, and are not intended as specific advice/recommendation for any individual. You should carefully consider your needs and objectives before making any decisions, and consult the appropriate professional(s). Outlooks and past performance are not guarantees of future results.

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