As a managed service provider (MSP), you’re likely aware that there are a ton of security regulations and guidelines out there. But which ones should you follow, and how do you stay compliant with them? We’re here to guide you through the labyrinth of data security compliance regulations, frameworks and requirements, and the steps to stay compliant with them and general best practices. Follow along so you can reduce your risk and keep your clients safe.
Understanding Data Security Compliance
First things first, what is data security compliance? It’s the art of adhering to regulatory requirements, industry standards and internal policies that involve data security and privacy. I say “art” because staying out of trouble in this realm is unfortunately not as easy as 1, 2, 3—it all comes down to keeping data safe, as we’ll get into in a bit.
What Are the Most Common Data Security Compliance Standards and Regulations?
The usual suspects here include regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). There are others that are specific to industries and locations like PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) for the finance industry and contractual obligations like following SOC 2 (Service Organization Control 2) for service organizations that handle customer data.
The Importance of Compliance
Why should you care about compliance? Simple: Staying compliant helps protect your clients’ sensitive data, maintain trust with your customers and keep everyone involved out of legal hot water. At the end of the day, it’s doing what you said you were going to.
Not following through on data protection laws and contractual obligations can land your company (and your clients) with hefty fines and other legal troubles. Staying on top of the right standards is crucial for keeping a strong reputation, attracting (and keeping) customers and breaking into new markets.
Steps to Stay Compliant
1. Know Your Regulations and Obligations
Just like you might know your favorite restaurant’s menu inside and out (we’re looking at you, Cheesecake Factory), you need to understand the regulations that apply to your clients’ industries.
Each regulation or framework has specific requirements that dictate how data should be handled, stored and protected. For instance, GDPR focuses on the protection of personal data for EU citizens, requiring businesses to implement stringent data protection measures and obtain explicit consent for data processing. HIPAA, on the other hand, mandates the protection of health information in the healthcare sector, emphasizing the need for secure electronic health records and patient confidentiality. PCI DSS sets standards for securing payment card information, ensuring that businesses handling credit card transactions maintain robust security protocols. Understanding these regulations is crucial for tailoring your data security practices to meet legal requirements and avoid hefty fines.
There’s no shame in engaging outside experts if necessary; better safe than sorry. Pax8 has a Professional Services team readily available to help round out your security expertise—we’re just a call away!
2. Follow a Strong Security Framework
Compliance is nothing without a solid framework. Unfortunately, you can be really compliant with a terrible security plan. Just look at the Death Star; it was constructed according to a plan that had a flaw built right into it, and boom! Bye bye, Death Star.
Choose and enforce comprehensive data security policies tailored to your clients’ specific requirements. A robust security policy framework can serve as the blueprint for your data protection efforts. It should include policies on data classification, access control, encryption, incident response and employee training.
Data classification policies help categorize information based on its sensitivity, ensuring that appropriate security measures are applied. After all, if you don’t know what data you have, how do you know what to protect? That’s key to the next point: establishing access control. These policies define who can access specific data and under what conditions, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access. Meanwhile, encryption policies outline the methods for securing data at rest and in transit, protecting it from interception and theft.
Incident response policies provide guidelines for detecting, reporting and responding to security incidents, ensuring a swift and effective resolution. Employee training programs educate staff on data security best practices, fostering a culture of security awareness and vigilance.
With these policies, governance is key. You can’t assume your kids are taking out the trash without checking on it, or you’ll have bags of garbage piling up in the yard, and no one wants that. The point is, you need to implement a system of accountability for any of these policies to work.
A strong security framework can help you ensure you’re doing all of the above. There are lots of security frameworks to choose from, but we at Pax8 go with the CIS Critical Security Controls. Whereas some frameworks tend to be vague or opaque, the CIS Controls tell you exactly what to do and why. Not only does that make it easier for you as an MSP to implement, it also helps you explain the “how” and the “why” to your clients. That’s why we built it right into the Pax8 Marketplace, which lets you assess which CIS Controls each of your clients aligns with to identify gaps in their cybersecurity — learn more.
3. Conduct Risk Assessments
Threat actors are everywhere, and you need to face them head on. But before you fly into battle, know thy enemy.
Conduct risk assessments to identify potential threats to your data and evaluate the likelihood and impact of these threats. This process includes analyzing your IT infrastructure and assessing the security measures of third-party vendors.
Part of risk assessment is identifying sensitive data assets and prioritizing risk mitigation efforts accordingly. Think about your own organization: How often do you mark information as sensitive? It’s an area we could all improve on.
Thorough risk assessments help you pinpoint weaknesses in your security posture and strengthen up so you can address them. Being proactive in this way helps you prevent data breaches and make sure your clients are prepared to respond to security incidents when they do happen (and they will, that’s just the nature of the game these days).
Pax8 can at least help you out with a roster of vetted third-party vendors in the Pax8 Marketplace.
4. Implement Access Controls and Encryption
Remember Gandalf’s iconic line in The Lord of the Rings? “You shall not pass!” Do the same with your clients’ data. Once you’ve identified sensitive data and applications via risk assessment, limit access based on the principle of least privilege, meaning only authorized individuals can access, modify or transmit sensitive information.
Implementing access controls is an essential part of preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data. Going by the principle of least privilege means granting users the minimum level of access necessary to perform their job functions. This reduces the risk of data breaches caused by insider threats or compromised accounts. Audit trails are also key to establish so that you know not only who is accessing data, but when.
Encryption is also critical to data security. By encrypting data at rest (stored data) and in transit (data being transmitted), you ensure that even if data is intercepted or accessed by unauthorized individuals, it stays unreadable without a decryption key.
Encryption is one of the most important steps of all listed here; if it all ultimately comes down to the “security triad” of confidentiality, availability and integrity, ransomware seeks to eliminate two of the three pillars by taking away data availability so you can’t access it and scrambling its integrity. Then, threat actors extort victims for funds in exchange for not making sensitive data public (thus eliminating confidentiality, the last pillar).
To avoid all of that drama, consider using advanced encryption standards (AES) or public key infrastructure (PKI), commonly used encryption methods that provide robust protection for sensitive information. With PKI, anyone can use a public key to encrypt data, but only those who hold its corresponding private key can decrypt that data. Meanwhile, AES is often seen as the gold standard for data encryption. It uses a symmetric encryption algorithm with key lengths of 128, 192 or 256 bits. AES is widely used by organizations and governments, including the U.S. government and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
5. Regularly Update and Patch Systems
Even the shiniest car needs maintenance. With cybersecurity, that’s done by regularly patching and updating systems. This should include not only operating systems and applications but also firmware and hardware components.
These patches and updates are often designed to square up known vulnerabilities. That’s important because cybercriminals likely know about these vulnerabilities and can try to exploit them in order to gain access to data.
To stop them in their tracks, implement a patch management process that ensures updates are applied promptly and consistently across your IT infrastructure. Prioritize critical patches, automate others with patch management tools and try to keep downtime to a minimum by scheduling patch deployments during planned maintenance windows.
6. Monitor and Audit Your Practices
The thing about regulations (and cybersecurity more broadly) is the entire landscape is always changing. You need to monitor and audit your data security practices to stay up to date.
Following a security framework like the CIS Controls can help, since these are widely agreed upon and regularly updated. Routine audits help identify weaknesses and ensure compliance with current regulations. But you’ll also need to regularly audit both internal and external practices to stay in compliance with whatever regulations your clients need to follow.
The Truth About Compliance
There’s a catch to all of this: It’s not really about compliance as much as keeping data safe. Even when you maintain compliance with the required regulations, an incident may happen, and you have to be ready when it does.
But, you don’t have to do it alone. You can get started with a robust set of vetted security solutions in the Pax8 Marketplace. Upskill your security knowledge with courses through Pax8 Academy. And extend your capabilities by tapping our Professional Services team, who can provide engineer-led implementation of security products and consolidation for your security product portfolio. Security is a tough nut to crack, but we’re here to help!
