A Comprehensive Guide to Emerging Technologies in Data Protection

June 21, 2024
A Comprehensive Guide to Emerging Technologies in Data Protection

Our mission is to make data protection easy for people: easy to understand and easy to read about. We do that through our blog posts, making it easy for the end-user to understand personal data protection.

With the cyber threat landscape evolving in sophistication and complexity, putting more focus on data protection now stands as a strategic imperative. 

However, the increasing volume of data generated and transmitted daily has made data protection even more challenging. Organisations striving to drive digitisation now find it challenging to reap the benefits of data while upholding its integrity.

Addressing these challenges while adhering to data privacy regulations requires constant vigilance and adaptability.

Future-focused businesses now lean towards emerging and advanced technologies in the data protection landscape to secure mission-critical information.

In this article, we’ll dig deeper into the merging technologies in data protection. 

What is Data Protection

Data protection means implementing stringent security measures to ensure no customer data is compromised, breached, or exfiltrated by scammers. 

How protected your data is can be measured through the CIA triad – a guiding model devised to control how businesses handle customer data when it’s collected, stored, retained, processed, or in transit. CIA in the data triad means:

  • Confidentiality: Confidentiality refers to locking out unauthorised access to sensitive personal information.
  • Integrity: Integrity means the collected data is complete, unbiased, and not tempered by any unauthorised user.
  • Availability: Availability means data is accessible to authorised users whenever needed

 A thorough data protection strategy includes protocols and security control measures that thwart security loopholes in these critical data components.

Importance of Data Protection

It’s a Law

The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights counts data protection as a fundamental right of the citizens. Part of the law, data protection can impact the other basic rights – such as freedom of speech – of the citizens. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enforced in May 2018, mandates EEA businesses dealing with personal data to comply with specific data processing practices detailed in the Regulation. Failing to comply with these standards can lead to long-term and serious repercussions – fines up to 20 million euros or 4% of a company’s yearly turnover, whichever is higher.

Helps Build Trust

With digital technologies fast taking centre stage, people are getting increasingly aware of how their personal information is handled by companies. Mismanagement of this data can significantly damage a company’s reputation, shifting the paradigm to much lower customer retention and enrolment rates. On the other hand, organisations that exhibit compliance with data protection laws enforcing stringent protection measures can build trust among customers. 

Prevents Cyberattack

Implementing robust data protection measures shields customers as well as business data against cyberattacks. According to a study, 60% of small businesses facing cyberattacks go out of business. 

Saves Time and Money

Dealing with a cyberattack can be highly expensive for a business.

Case in point: In 2023, the average cost of a cyberattack has soared to a staggering USD 4.45 million – a jump of 2.3% since 2022, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023. 

Even worse, failing to effectively deal with security holes leading to cyberattacks can cause businesses to face hefty fines, penalties, or even jail. 

Complying with data protection regulations, such as GDPR is key to dodging cybercrime. 

Data Protection Standards by Industry

Data security standards vary based on the industry dealing with it and the location of the business. However, some common principles and regulations apply with each regulation to secure personal data. Some industry-specific data protection standards are:

  • Healthcare Industry: In the USA, any healthcare institute must adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to ensure patients’ personal information is securely handled and never misused. In the EU, the healthcare industry is regulated by a range of laws, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ePrivacy Directive, Medical Device Regulation (MDR) and In Vitro Diagnostic Medical Devices Regulation (IVDR), etc. 
  • Financial Industry: Financial institutions in the USA are mandated to take proactive measures to ensure the financial data privacy of consumers following the standards detailed in the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Besides GDPR, financial institutions across the EU are mandated to comply with sector-specific regulations. Some of these regulations are Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), Directive (EU) 2015/2366 on Payment Services in the Internal Market (PSD2), Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD), etc.
  • Retail Industry: Retailers dealing with card payments are obliged to adhere to Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standards. According to this standard, retailers must augment their security landscape to ensure the stored customer details are secured, and encrypted in transmission on public networks. It also mandates retailers to strengthen their network.

Key Technologies in Data Protection

Technology plays a pivotal role in protecting data privacy. Some key technologies companies cash in on include:

  • Encryption: With encryption, data (plaintext) is encoded and transformed into a form, such as a ciphertext, that can only be decoded by authorised users. No unauthorised users can read it even if it’s intercepted.
  • Firewalls: A firewall is a network security system that filters within, into, or out of a private network based on predefined rules.
  • Authentication: Multi-factor authentication (MFA), biometric identity verification, etc., are widely used to verify a user’s identity, thus locking out imposters. 
  • An intrusion detection system monitors a network for any intrusion or malicious activities and takes automated preventive measures to lock out unauthorised access. 
  • Data Loss Prevention (DLP): DLP is the process of implementing a defined set of rules, strategies, and technologies that help track down and prevent data breaches, exfiltration, or misuse of sensitive data. 
  • Anti-malware Software: Anti-malware software is widely used to scan, track down, and remove malicious software from a network system that, if injected and exploited successfully, could lead to data breaches or data exfiltration. 

Emerging Technologies in Data Protection

AI and Machine Learning

AI-powered privacy-enhancing systems, such as federated learning and differential privacy, hold immense potential to revolutionise the data protection landscape. Cashing in on these technologies enables companies to process data efficiently while also upholding individual data privacy. Federal learning – a sub-field of machine learning – is a decentralised approach to developing and validating advanced AI models from a diverse set of data without compromising data privacy. On the other hand, decentralised privacy is a rigorous statistical framework that intentionally injects noise into the output of a query or computation. The aim is to enable accurate data analysis while ensuring no sensitive information about individual data points in a dataset is compromised.

Even though AI and ML show immense potential to protect data, they pose significant privacy threats. For example, scammers, by deploying advanced AI algorithms, can accurately predict user behaviour or preferences that can be used for invasive surveillance, data manipulation, and discrimination. 

Blockchain and Decentralised Technologies

Blockchain is a decentralised, distributed ledger technology that implements cryptographic keys while storing data. This temper-proof and immutable nature of blockchain helps lock out unauthorised access, thus limiting the risk of data exfiltration or misuse. 

Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)

Another emerging technology fast gaining momentum in the data protection landscape is the Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA). It’s a security framework that eliminates implicit trust within an organisation’s network. It enables continuous monitoring, verification, and validation of all devices, users, and applications requesting access to a network’s resources. 

Biometric Identity Verification

Passwords and legacy MFA services are fast becoming obsolete due to their inflating costs, and security issues. 

Instead, biometric identity verification and authentication methods, such as fingerprint verification, iris scan, facial recognition, etc., have emerged as a more secure and convenient way of user authentication. It ensures high-end data protection, ensuring minimum tradeoffs between data protection and customer satisfaction.

In addition, biometric authentication processes keep bad actors a long way off from being able to impersonate your customers. 

On top of this, by pairing with MFA, biometrics can constantly augment customers’ personal data security across all devices and channels.

However, due to its immutable nature, biometric identities, if compromised in some way, cannot be changed. Compromise to this data can also lead to identity theft. 

Strategies to Deal With Data Protection Threats

  • Invest in emerging Technologies: Even though all technologies have their own shortcomings, cashing in on these advancements ensures you are ahead of the curve. Make sure you implement advanced technologies and security measures to protect data against malicious use.
  • Cultivate a culture of continuous improvement: Encourage feedback, learn from previous incidents, and update and refine your security posture to ensure your mission-critical data is always protected and out of reach of scammers. 
  • Stay abreast of regulatory changes and evolving threats: Make sure you follow data processing practices that align with the latest data protection regulations of your country. For that, seek guidance from solicitors, and seek legal consultation on compliance standards and security protocols.

In short, companies should maintain a balance between technological advancements and human efforts to make sure they can make the most out of the latest innovations. 

Thomas Lambert
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