Following the introduction of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, on May 25 this year, organizations across the globe with customers and suppliers in the European Union have been working to ensure they are compliant, and bringing the subject of data projection to the front of everyone's mind.

It's little surprise that network security and information assurance are key to complying with the GDPR; the regulation includes a requirement for measures to be put in place that will mitigate the risk associated with assuring the availability and integrity of an organization's information in the event of an attack or outage, for example.

Article 32 is concerned with confidentiality, integrity, availability and resilience of processing systems and data, and with the speed at which availability and access to personal data can be restored in the event of downtime resulting for a breach or network outage. Of course, as the information protected by the GDPR and other similar regulations constantly traverses the network, it's important to assure its availability, reliability and responsiveness. Indeed, not only is this important for regulatory compliance, it should be high on the list of priorities for any business.

Given the size and complexity of today's IT networks, however, it can be almost impossible to detect just when and where a security breach or network failure might occur. It's critical, therefore, that businesses have complete visibility over their IT networks, and any applications and services that run on those networks, in order to protect their customers' information, assure uninterrupted service delivery and, of course, comply with the GDPR.

Insight and Intelligence

The volume of data being produced has exploded in recent years and this is only set to continue, with analysts predicting a tenfold increase within the next decade, 60 percent of which will be generated by enterprises.

Much of this will comprise what the GDPR, and other regulations such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA, define as personal data: the personal email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses and credit card information that may be collected and recorded by a business. For compliance purposes, it's important that networking teams are able to understand how this data traverses their organization's networks, the paths it will take and where it will be stored.

Keeping track of this information requires full visibility across the entire network, including data centers, applications and the cloud. To comply with regulatory requirements around the processing of data, as well as for service and security assurance, businesses should consider a smart approach to the way they handle data. Such an approach would involve monitoring all "wire data" information, that is every action and transaction that traverses an organization's service delivery infrastructure, and continuously analyzing it and compressing it into metadata at its source. This "smart data" is normalized, organized, and structured in a service and security contextual fashion in real time. The inherent intelligence of the metadata enables analytics tools to clearly understand application performance, infrastructure complexities, service dependencies and, importantly for GDPR compliance, any threats or anomalies.

Essentially, continuous monitoring of this wire data means that businesses can have access to contextualized data that will provide them with the real-time, actionable insights they need for assurance of effective, resilient and secure infrastructure, crucial for complying with the GDPR, not to mention for much of modern business activity.

More at Stake than Ever

The recent implementation of the GDPR means that any organization that processes the personal data of UK citizens, regardless of where in the world that organization is located, is now within the scope of the law. Much has been written over the past year on the eye-watering financial penalties that could be imposed on any company found to be neglectful in fulfilling its duty to protect the privacy of that data. The privacy and protection of personal data have always been considerations for a business, but with the prospect of facing fines of up to €20 million or four percent of annual turnover, there is more at stake for businesses than ever before.

With robust protection in place, and with visibility, insight and intelligence delivering assurance of complete network availability, businesses across the world breathe a little easier that the reliability of their networks, and of the applications that run on those networks, meet the requirements of the GDPR.