What if you woke up one morning and found that you had a doppelganger who was enthusiastically running around pretending to be you, spending your hard-earned money and doing who knows what with your identity. It sounds like a nightmare, right? But this is a reality, this happens every day to an untold number of people. Identity theft has become an ever-increasing problem and concern for both you the consumer and organizations that have access to your personal data. Securing your data and keeping it safe has become a priority for many organizations and laws have been written to protect you the consumer.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) became law in 1999 and it requires financial institutions to explain how they share and protect your private information. You know those letters you get in the mail every year from your bank letting you know what they do with your personal information? That’s GLBA in action. Today GLBA applies to more than just financial companies including lenders, tax preparers, courier services, and many others. Non-compliance penalties can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and the possibility of jail time. The health care industry has its own set of regulations such as HIPAA/HITECH. Education has FERPA and the list goes on.
Since our lives now revolve around the use of data from social media, banks, retailers, governments and anything else you can access through the internet, there had to be a way to protect your personal information. In 2012 the European Commission set out plans for data protection reform across Europe. Out of this came the General Data Protection Regulation, best known as GDPR. Under GDPR companies have an obligation that not only is personal data gathered legally, but also that it will be managed and protected from misuse and exploitation. This regulation applies to any organization operating within the European Union and to any organizations outside the Union that offers goods and services to businesses inside the Union. What that means essentially is that just about every international and major company in the world must comply with GDPR. How serious is it to violate GDPR? On July 8th British Airways was fined $228 million for leaking personal data of 500,000 customers. Marriott International was fined $124 million for their violation. Even a taxi company in Denmark was fined $124,500 for a violation of GDPR.
If you own your own company or work in a large organization, there’s a good chance you are affected by one or more of the many regulations out there. You must make sure you are keeping your customers’ data secure and protected. This means that it is kept in secure databases and only those who need to see it have access to it.
What if you had a solution that could help you stay in compliance with all the regulations and allow you to control your data when it needs to leave the security of a hardened database?
No need to worry! Quest Software has a solution called SharePlex that allows you to make sure the correct data gets to the correct eyes. SharePlex is a logical replication solution that has built into it the ability to control how data gets replicated to which location. With SharePlex you can control which rows from a table or which columns from a table get replicated. This granular ability to control your data allows you to replicate only what must be replicated. This is the first of a series of blogs that will go into how to setup SharePlex so that you can take advantage of this feature.
The next blog will discuss SharePlex in more detail and how to set up vertical partitioning, which is the replication of only certain columns in a table. Until then, for more information on SharePlex feel free to visit SharePlex.com
