Data breaches can be extremely expensive, but the events themselves represent only one part of the total cost of cybercrime and data security. Extenuating factors like customer churn, reputation damage and legal fees can all hurt an organization’s bottom line over the long run. Even so, none of these costs may be the most expensive aspect of cybersecurity.

Data privacy and security compliance guidelines like the European Union’s recent General Data Protection Regulation present stiff financial penalties for violations while requiring considerable investment to completely adhere to every listed requirement. In today’s cybersecurity landscape, compliance costs can be just as expensive as the initial fallout from a data breach.

Event data warehouse solutions are essential to meeting today’s compliance demands, helping businesses land on the right side of data privacy and security regulations.

GDPR Presents New Compliance Challenges

No set of data privacy guidelines has impacted the international business community quite like GDPR. Broadly speaking, GDPR places more controls on how consumer data is collected, stored and managed. Although it only covers data belonging to European residents, any organization that processes this information must comply, even if they operate outside of the EU.

Due to the sweeping changes required to comply with GDPR and the severe penalties for violations, companies across the globe have spent a small fortune getting ready for these regulations. According to a 2017 study jointly published by the IAPP and Ernst-Young, Fortune 500 companies will ultimately spend approximately $7.8 billion to comply with GDPR.

With GDPR now in effect, its harsh penalties are no longer mere hypotheticals, but very real ramifications for organizations that fail to comply.

GDPR is just the tip of the iceberg of data privacy and security regulations. HIPAA, PCI DSS and Sarbanes-Oxley have all presented major compliance demands for businesses across various industries.

Event data warehouse solutions ease compliance concerns

Many data privacy and security regulations are not concerned merely with how such information is stored, but how it’s handled and secured. As such, event data is a very important aspect to compliance, providing more context to data management practices as well as data breach incidents.

To meet compliance demands, companies need to ensure their event data is both time-stamped and tamper-resistant. This creates a documented record of activity in the event of an audit, as well as verifies the authenticity and integrity of all associated data.

Event data warehouse solutions offer the tools needed to safeguard this vital information and support auditing capabilities to demonstrate compliance whenever required. The best and most reliable platforms use a read-only database, so any data loaded onto the system can be viewed, but never altered. Regardless of how many users come and go, you can always rest easy knowing you have a single, conclusive version of the truth. That makes things much easier when it comes time to demonstrate regulatory compliance or respond to an audit request.

An extra benefit to this feature is that companies can save a great deal of processing power that would otherwise be spent on undo logs or rollback logs. It’s a win-win scenario.

By time-stamping every piece of event data, organizations can verify precisely when a particular event occurred and what actions took place. Again, one of the most important aspects of compliance today is showing auditors and regulators that your business has acted in good faith and adhered to stated guidelines as closely as possible. An unaltered event data log with explicit timestamps provides the complete record of activity that regulating bodies are most interested in.

SenSage AP goes beyond what other event data warehouse platforms can offer, providing compliance reporting tools to further assist with data privacy and security regulation efforts. Its ironclad security capabilities ensure that you always strike the most robust cybersecurity posture.

GDPR is the latest data privacy regulation to rock the business world, but it certainly won’t be the last. Be ready for whatever comes down the pike by enlisting the support of a high-quality event data warehouse solution.