The countdown to May 2018 is on. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is designed to improve personal data protections and increase organizational accountability for data breaches. With potential fines of up to four percent of global revenues or 20 million EUR (whichever is higher), the GDPR certainly has teeth. No matter where your organization is located, if it processes or controls the personal data of EU residents, you need to be ready.

Some of the key provisions of the GDPR require organizations to:

• Implement technical and organizational measures to ensure data security appropriate to the level of risk, including “pseudonymisation and encryption of personal data." (Article 32)
• Have in place "a process for regularly testing, assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of technical and organizational measures for ensuring the security of the processing." (Article 32)
• Communicate “without undue delay” personal data breaches to the subjects of such breaches "when the breach is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms" of these individuals. (Article 34)
• Safeguard against the "unauthorized disclosure of, or access to, personal data." (Article 32)

Vormetric file-based transparent encryption provides the kind of "state of the art" data protection the GDPR specifies. Using Vormetric's encryption, your organization can render private data unintelligible to a cyber-intruder even in the event of a breach, thereby avoiding the breach notification requirement outlined in Article 34. The Article states that notification to the data subject shall not be required if the organization "has implemented appropriate technical and organizational protection measures, and those measures were applied to the personal data affected by the personal data breach, in particular those that render the personal data unintelligible to any person who is not authorized to access it, such as encryption."

In addition to avoiding a costly breach notification process, you can prevent substantial reputational damage resulting from a publicized breach.

Thales e-Security products and solutions help our customers prevent unauthorized access to personal data, thus enabling compliance with Article 32. Specifically, our Vormetric Data Security Platform enables separation of duties between privileged administrators and data owners, and supports two-factor authentication. Our nShield HSMs also help customers set up high-assurance authentication of users and processes attempting to access personal data.

Vormetric’s Security Intelligence produces detailed security event logs that are easy to integrate with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems to produce the kind of security reports necessary for GDPR compliance. These enterprise network security information logs produce an auditable trail of permitted and denied access attempts from users and processes, delivering unprecedented insight into file access activities. These enterprise network security information logs can report unusual or improper data access and accelerate the detection of insider threats, hackers and the presence of advanced persistent threats that defeat perimeter security.