If there’s one thing that makes any organization shudder, it's data compliance. Governments have - quite rightly - imposed arduous regulation over the handling and processing of the sensitive data they gather on their customers. It is now an absolute priority for all businesses to ensure the data that flows through their applications and into their networks is protected properly, not just for moral and ethical reasons, but for financial and practical ones too. Break your customers' trust and your business can enter a tailspin from which it may never recover and, in many people’s opinion, quite rightly so.

Compliance is Necessary

Our personal identifiable information (PII) should be sacrosanct. A middle manager at your bank shouldn’t just be able to leaf through your information without good reason. Usage data gathered from user interactions with software should be anonymised or at least pseudo anonymised, and users want to be able to use apps without worrying that their behavior patterns aren’t being relentlessly sold to third parties (although, sadly, they often are). 

From a business point of view, there has also been a marked change in end-user behavior. Whereas most of us would once happily type in our identifiable info into any old website, we now are a lot more cautious and withdrawn about the information and consent that we are willing to give. Yes, I would like to reject all cookies. Why do you need my phone number exactly? Getting consumers through the sign-up portal is now the biggest rubicon most businesses need their users to cross. Quite frankly, we don’t trust anyone anymore.

The Ever-Increasing Value of Data

And we are quite right not to. Our data is extremely valuable. The data market is thriving, and becoming exponentially larger. Often, the market cap of companies is defined by the breadth and depth of the data at their disposal. How many pitch meetings or investment round tables or B2B meet and greets have you sat and heard the phrase “we’re not a software company, we’re a data company,” or even more gratuitously, “we’re not a product company, we’re a data company.” The phrase “we’re a data company” is by this point practically a bingo card item - and it’s always the easiest square to tick off. Well, if you really are a data company - then you best get compliant fast, or before long you won't be a company at all.

With such value in data comes a lot of threat vectors. Data breaches are now de rigeur. The latest giga-hack purports to have exposed the PII of every American with a social security number - i.e just about everyone in the country. Companies are scrambling to ensure robust protections for their data to try and maintain that trust with the public, protect their own value and, of course, ensure compliance with regulations.

Big Mistakes, Big Fines

Regulations have the ability to hit the bottom line hard. And not just the easy targets too, but the biggest companies in the world. The appalling wild west of data hygiene and abuse of power that were the 00s and early 10s may be over, we’re not “dumb f*cks” anymore, but regulatory bodies are still fining companies daily for their misbehavior. With this much money at stake, people bend the rules. Or they just make almost criminally negligent mistakes that tank their entire businesses.

Against this regulatory and ideological backdrop, ensuring strict data compliance has become a primary concern for not just data companies, but every type of business. And in short, it’s hard. Jurisdictions impose different rules - rules that change, ensuring state of the art encryption and data handling is not cheap. Data must often be handled within precise geographical locales. Data requests must be handled promptly, effectively and within prescribed timeframes. Data must be properly classified, stored and retained - as well as being accessible to various audits to prove compliance. Worst of all is with third party vendors who use your data - you have to ensure they are also compliant and don’t take you and your data for a ride. And you have to make sure everyone in your organization knows how to handle data properly so that Jessica from accounting doesn’t give herself the right to leaf through her nephew’s medical data out of well-intentioned concern.

How DefraDB Makes Compliance Easy

Source Network’s DefraDB provides sacrosanct data management that meets many of these concerns head on, ensuring near-automatic ongoing compliance no matter how complex your compliance needs are and how sensitive and actionable the data you collect is. Moreover, Source Network enshrines total end-user privacy in the bedrock of your application, meaning that users can be assured that their data is safe and thus can trust your application implicitly. 

SourceHub creates decentralized access control policies that make sure data can only ever be accessed by people and applications that have a right to use it. It can ensure that data never leaks across boundaries it isn’t supposed to, legally or geographically. Its granular access controls mean organizations can ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA, even when letting third parties interact with their data. It also means data subject requests are quick and easy to handle - and can even be set up automatically. As for Jessica. Well - she never gets access to the data in the first place - she works in accounting.

As DefraDB is underpinned by the SourceHub blockchain, tamper proof and immutable records that prove said compliance and create transparency and auditability to regulatory bodies and end users alike will always exist. It also means that smart contracts that enforce these compliance rules can be written to interact with DefraDB, ensuring they are unimpeachable. 

Not Just Easier, But Better

Best of all, DefraDB can make data management easy by only making data available to third parties or other applications that you want them to access - rather than giving carte blanche access to datasets or trust, or spending valuable developer time constructing bespoke funnels for partners to access your data. These data minimization practices as standard massively reduce compliance risk and allow many many devices to access the same dataset with each device only ever having access to the data it's supposed to. DefraDB’s modular design and foundational architecture that sits underneath other infrastructure environments means that if regulations change, you can quickly and efficiently ensure your data management changes with it.

Compliance is something we all have to get used to as developers. It’s something we should get used to. Yes for moral and ethical reasons. And yes for practical and financial ones. Using DefraDB to manage data for your application frees you from onerous oversight of your data management and decouples you from the constant fear of data breaches that may be entirely beyond your control. 

By using DefraDB as the data management substrate for your application, network or organization, you can ensure that you remain fully compliant at all times - to the benefit of you, your customers, and the entire ecosystem of online environments that you inhabit. Get it right at source with Source Network, and never worry about compliance again.