It is essential that enterprises have a comprehensive understanding of the various privacy regulations, which they must comply with. Learning the purpose, principles, impact, and the underlying risks of privacy regulations can be cumbersome.

Privacy regulations will touch multiple functions, including marketing, sales, operations, customer service, technology, and third parties, with whom sensitive data such as legal, internal audit, and so on, is shared. Getting all the functions to know what they need to do differently, equipping them with the right tools, and ensuring that they work in a harmonious manner to meet the needs, requires lot of efforts and support.

Sensitive information can reside in applications, employee workstations, third-party applications, archived databases, or with an outsourced service provider. The first step is to understand how data flows inside and outside the enterprise, to better assess information risk profile, classify data, and identify lineage. Establishing visibility into the vast pool of sensitive information can become a critical roadblock, unless planned and executed well.

Requirements such as breach notification and management, data subject rights implementation, audit and traceability of changes to personal data, consent management, privacy by design and default, data minimization, etc., are complex tasks. Additionally, there is a need to build compliance into the SDLC, rather than retrofit onto the application after it has been built. These require significant investments in new systems and processes.

As systems continue to evolve, enterprises will need to continue their investment in privacy operations to stay compliant. Identity and access management, threat hunting and management, incident response testing, workflow testing, breach prevention and neutralization, etc., are some of the activities that will need to continue even after the deadline.