Data privacy is nothing new. Forty years ago, on January 28, 1981, the first legally binding, international treaty¹ dealing with privacy and data protection was signed. Each year, Data Privacy Day² commemorates this date. It serves as a reminder of the ongoing—and ever-increasing—importance of responsible data management.
In 2021, the message of Data Privacy Day is more relevant than ever. A spectrum of unexpected events has fueled an increased need for effective data governance. With the massive shift to remote work and online learning, combined with rising cyberattacks, protecting data has become a critical challenge for both businesses and consumers.
Data Privacy Best Practices
Spearheaded each year by the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCSA), Data Privacy Day promotes awareness of the importance of privacy. It highlights simple ways to protect personal information and reminds organizations that privacy is good for business.
Own It
This year, the NCSA is encouraging individuals to “Own Your Privacy” by adopting the following practices:
- Think carefully about what personal information you give out through apps and websites.
- Consider what information you share on social media can reveal about you, your colleagues, or loved ones before you post it.
- Check the privacy and security settings on web services and apps and update settings based on your comfort level.
Respect It
In parallel, the NCSA also encourages businesses to “Respect Privacy” by keeping individuals’ personal information safe from unauthorized access and ensuring fair, relevant, and legitimate data collection and processing. The NCSA recommends that businesses:
- Follow reasonable security measures to keep individuals’ personal information safe from inappropriate and unauthorized access.
- Adopt a privacy framework that helps manage risks and creates a culture of privacy throughout the organization.
- Conduct an assessment of data collection practices, including understanding applicable privacy laws and regulations.
- Be open and honest about collecting, using, and sharing consumer information.
- Maintain oversight of partners and vendors on how they collect and use customer data.
Modern Data Protection That Tackles Today’s Challenges
2020 certainly highlighted the data security challenges that organizations face. Yet, it also shined a light on advancements to the technologies that can support them. In 2021 and beyond, safeguarding data against loss, corruption, and increasingly complex security threats will require a comprehensive strategy and the right infrastructure to support it. Businesses will need to address their siloed legacy solutions and level up what they’re doing to mitigate risk.
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Article 5 sets the privacy principle of Integrity and Confidentiality, which states that data must be “processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage, using appropriate technical or organisational measures”.
Pure Storage is committed to providing products and services which help our customers securely store their information using always-on data-at-rest encryption, which is important to protecting privacy and security of data. In addition, you can view Pure’s corporate Privacy Statement for details on how we protect any information which we hold.
At Pure Storage®, we leverage AI and machine learning as part of our Pure1® service to monitor and predict threats to give organizations proactive support and peace of mind.
In addition, Pure helps protect against accidental loss, destruction or damage, via our data backup and recovery solutions to mitigate ransomware attacks. Data protection today is now an exercise in managing recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) for the most critical services in your operational technology stack. Pure offers a truly modern approach to data protection, which includes adopting a security and privacy by design and default principle in our solutions, that helps keep data both secure and highly available, as well as compliant with privacy obligations.
Modern Data Protection
Get the ESG white paper and learn why modern data protection means shifting the focus from simple backup to recovery and data reuse.
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- https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/treaty/108
- https://staysafeonline.org/data-privacy-day/
