By now you would’ve seen press around changes to the Privacy Act of 1988 requiring all Australian operated entities to report all breaches of personal data to their constituents. Whilst in concept the transparency between yourselves and your customers will help to breed more trust, it poses key questions around how you manage, access, report on and store your personal data?

If you’re like most organisations, you probably have an exponentially growing size of data you are holding on. You probably have multiple sites where you store this data and have some sort of software (or not) to help you manage and retain this. You’re also probably investing in lots of different applications which have different types of data held on their platform (SaaS/PaaS) and/or the types of files you keep.

With the new regulations in place, the question is simple – are you confident that you are across all data workloads that your organisation is holding, storing and accumulating and have a clear action plan to communicate these changes to your constituents.

Vintek recently held a Non-For-Profit Roundtable to discuss key changes in legislation and the impact it will have on organisations. (You can read a report in our recent blog post: Notifiable Data Breaches Scheme for Non-For-Profits Key points)

Knowing where your data is, what types of files you are storing and where you are storing these workloads are incredibly important if you are to calculate the potential risk of being compromised. If you aren’t already across this, this step should not just help you with compliance regulations but also potentially result in efficiency savings through reduced storage and infrastructure costs.

Managing your data is the next step as you need to set up policies and processes to know that your organisation is regularly backing up and archiving key pieces of information as required. It’s also knowing that you have wider visibility over your entire data workload capabilities and can accurately forecast and make decisions around your data protection strategy.

Protecting your data is the final piece through a combination of automated, policy driven software that helps you aggregate and orchestrate data flows across your organisation, resulting in the consolidation and/or accurate distribution of data workloads where you want it. It also involves ensuring your security infrastructure is on point to prevent the actual compromise from occurring.

Vintek (in partnership with Veeam and Fortinet) are working with organisations to ensure your constituents continue to trust your business through the delivery of comprehensive and innovative solutions.