With the dawn of the GDPR era just weeks away, impacted organizations around the world are scrambling to determine the tools they need to achieve compliance and dodge massive fines. As a developer of incident response solutions, we’ve been digging into GDPR to see how we can help. We’ve determined that incident response platforms (IRPs) like D3 can be invaluable for GDPR compliance, while minimizing the inconvenience of meeting the strict requirements. We recently published a solution guide that lays out 10 of the ways that an IRP can support GDPR compliance. Check out our resources page to see the piece in its entirety.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at one aspect of GDPR compliance: the 72-hour deadline for breach reporting. Data breaches can be massively complex incidents, which often take organizations months to make sense of. This is a luxury they no longer have under GDPR. An IRP can be an essential tool for expediting this process and meeting the deadline. Here are a few reasons why.
Context is Key
Reporting a breach within 72 hours requires organizations to very quickly detect, resolve, and understand the extent of an incident. An IRP can support this need by automatically gathering contextual information, thereby saving valuable hours of analysts’ time. This is often achieved through integrations with other systems, such as SIEM and threat intelligence platforms, or through analysis of historical incident data. This not only saves time during the investigation, but it also can be used to eliminate likely false positives and prioritize real threats, such as possible breaches. When analysts are able to leverage contextual data to identify and focus on significant incidents, meeting compliance deadlines becomes much more feasible.
Repeatable is Faster than Ad Hoc
Without an IRP, teams are left figuring out their process from scratch every time an incident occurs, which is less than ideal. IRPs provide playbooks that guide the entire team through processes modeled on industry best practices, and that can be refined over time based on past successes. Customizing playbooks specifically to GDPR requirements will reduce the possibility of violations stemming from human error in the rush to remediate an incident. An IRP like D3 also makes reporting an easily repeatable process, with pre-built templates for common reports. Having repeatable procedures in place isn’t just valuable for incidents like data breaches; it will also streamline day-to-day incident management, giving teams more time to dedicate to incidents that pose significant risk.
Siloes are Slow
A common problem that slows down response teams is that their security data is spread across numerous incompatible systems, or recorded manually in spreadsheets and documents. Gathering all this data takes much more time than GDPR allows. An IRP can act as a centralized hub for security data, including historical records of incidents and the data generated throughout the response process. This facilitates collaboration between team members and makes it easy to loop in groups like Legal, HR, and senior management. With everything of importance passing through a single system, the data required for a breach notification can be easily assembled.
Read the Solution Guide
The 72-hour breach notification timeline will require major procedural overhauls for most security and compliance teams, but it is not impossible with the right systems and processes in place. Unfortunately, this is just one of the many aspects of GDPR compliance. Time is running out to prepare your organization for GDPR, and any tool that can help you avoid potential fines is a wise investment. For a more comprehensive selection of IRP features that can help you meet your compliance requirements, we hope you’ll read our GDPR Solution Guide.
