Help Your Customers Tackle Regulatory Requirements for Data Management

Modern consumers have more options than ever when it comes to selecting whom to conduct business with. While people may have once been confined to the options in their geographical vicinity, advancements in eCommerce and rapid order fulfillment mean that your customers are competing on a much larger scale to win business.

To differentiate themselves in the marketplace, organizations of all sizes are increasingly relying on technology, applications and collection of consumer data that will allow them to tailor their offerings to specific audiences. These customized experiences help organizations stand out among the competition and create positive interactions that facilitate customer loyalty and retention.

While this all seems positive, the collection and use of consumer data across various solutions and platforms can have drastic unintended consequences for your customers should a data breach occur, including fines and loss of consumer trust. To protect consumer privacy, regulating bodies from various industries and governments have created rules and guidelines regarding how this data can be stored and collected. Noncompliance with these regulations can subject your customers to heavy penalties and fines.

With this in mind, partners and MSSPs must have the tools and expertise needed to support customers who aim to secure business-critical data in accordance with various regulations.

Data Management and Security Requirements

The growing number of data management regulations that your customers must contend with derives from the trend of consumer empowerment over the past several years. Consumers want more say over who can collect their data and how it can be used, to avoid instances of fraud and other consequences of data breaches.

This has resulted in the creation of rules such as GDPR, PCI DSS, California Consumer Privacy Act, HIPAA, FISMA and more. Not all of these regulations will apply to all of your customers, based on where they conduct business and their industry. However, for others, several of these regulations will apply. Partners will need to help customers sort through which regulations are applicable and how to meet compliance for several disparate standards.

One of the main challenges your customers will encounter when tackling regulatory requirements for data management is getting visibility into how data is used and where it is stored. Many organizations are leveraging tools and applications to communicate with consumers, while others are adopting hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

This increases the chances that data is being stored in multiple places or that duplicate data may exist across the network. This network complexity adds risk due to lack of visibility into where data is stored, the level of security in place across each of these locations, and who has access to this data. Generally, a security best practice when it comes to compliance is to limit data access to only those who require it to perform their jobs.

How Partners Can Help Customers Meet Regulatory Requirements

There are a host of ways that partners can help their customers ensure compliance with regulatory standards. Partners should consider the following strategies as they work to bring their customers into compliance:

Cyber Threat Assessment: Partners and MSSPs can offer guidance on which regulations apply, and where customers will need to fortify their defenses in order to achieve compliance. An effective way to do this is to conduct a cyber threat assessment. For example, with the Cyber Threat Assessment Program, Fortinet Partners can deploy a FortiGate Firewall to monitor the customer network for a few days. The threat assessment will then reveal where security gaps exist in the network. By cross-referencing this information with compliance standards, partners can establish a clear roadmap for which security controls must be deployed to meet data management needs without increasing network complexity.