These days, most businesses are subject to data protection laws and compliance regulations of one kind or another. Whether you use credit cards or work in an industry like healthcare or finance, with specific rules about the collection, access and safekeeping of personal data, some of those regulations come with significant penalties.
The data protection requirements govern electronic methods of collection in particular, because they are fraught with security gaps that can expose your clients’ information without their knowledge and consent.
How to Demonstrate Compliance
Moreover, these regulations mandate that companies that fall under their jurisdiction must demonstrate compliance. This can spark an annual or semi-annual fire drill of internal inspections, document collection and verification that has everyone stressed.
To help demonstrate you’re compliant with access control requirements, it’s important to clearly document policies and procedures that determine who in your organization should have access to both the apps that contain personal data and the specific types of data itself. It’s also critical to document what kinds of passwords are required and how often those passwords are updated.
Regulatory requirements may also necessitate demonstrating your enforcement of internal password policies. This becomes more critical if there is a privacy breach. Without automatically tracking and logging password use, it’s much more challenging to enforce password policies. Following a breach incident, it’s nearly impossible to show you’ve followed these policies.
A password management solution gives you a full view of the passwords and permissions associated with users in your organization. You can see which accounts they have permission to access, exactly when they sign in to those accounts and changes they make to system credentials.
Everything Under Control
With a password management solution, you can assign permissions and adjust them as people change jobs within your organization and when they leave. You can be sure everyone has access to everything they need to do their jobs, without having access they don’t need, which could introduce security risks.
This kind of window into your password environment means you have a better chance of spotting unusual activity that could be the first sign of a breach. If your record shows an employee logged into an account in the middle of the night from a different country, there’s a good chance his or her account has been compromised. Catching that early can help you act quickly to assess any damage and change affected passwords right away.
Proof at Your Fingertips
Proper password management saves you considerable time and worry if you ever have to produce records to demonstrate you’re compliant with access control requirements of privacy and data security laws or regulations. The required information is readily available so you don’t have to devote hours of staff time to tracking it all down. And, you have a lower chance of being found non-compliant because you missed a step or couldn’t find something.
In the event of a breach, you want to be able to track and audit where your company credentials were last used. They could even be on the Dark Web right now. Reach out to us today and we’ll find out. Our security experts will run a free Dark Web scan that will help you make smarter decisions about your security.