Compliance Ain't Easy

I’m sure by now you’ve heard of GDPR and some of the large-scale data breaches that have occurred within it. If you haven’t heard of the GDPR, you’ve been living under a rock, or you’re like me, a United States citizen (it’s amazing how little we know about this oncoming train). If you’re seeing the four letters GDPR strung together for the first time, then you better jump on learning about it right now. Why? Let’s string together more letters — CPPA. That stands for the California Privacy and Protection Act. That’s a law modeled off the GDPR that goes into effect in 2020 (yeah, in nine months).

Compliance Isn’t Always Spelled GDPR

Maybe you’re not in an EU country and you don’t have any person’s data from there. Maybe you think that the CPPA won’t apply to you because you’re not in California and don’t have any person’s data from that state. However, do you collect credit card information? Are you compliant with the PCI rules? That’s the Payment Card Industry, by the way.

Oh yeah, this compliance thing keeps going. Let’s string together more letters that should give you pause.

HIPAA, anyone? The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The one that says if you knowingly release PHI (that’s Protected Health Information), you could be looking at personal jail time. That’s in the US only, but there are similar constraints on information in other countries as well.

It’s possible you’re working for a publicly-traded company in the United States. If so, then you’re subject to SOX compliance. That’s Sarbanes-Oxley, for those who don’t know.

All the Letters!

There are laws based on the GDPR coming from the state of New York, Washington, and others. The GAO, that’s Governmental Accounting Office in the US, has recommended a national-level, GDPR-based law.

In short, whether or not you’re interested in compliance, compliance is interested in you. One or more sets of these letters are going to affect you and how you deal with your data. As a responsible steward of the information you manage, develop, or consume, you need to know and understand how this stuff affects you.

Building New Letters

I think this is especially true when we start to talk about development, especially development in and around data. We all know the best data set for development is the production data set. However, per multiple compliance regimes (and just plain common sense), we can’t really give our production data to our development teams.

Well, I can hear you thinking, now what?

Now what can be defined at my upcoming session at SitC Streamed (SQL in the City Streamed, in case you don’t know those letters either). I’m going to be talking about data compliance in non-production environments on Wednesday, April 3 (we’ll be doing it twice to account for BST, EDT, and the rest). Yeah, I’ll cover why you need to do it, but more importantly, I’ll be covering how to do it — for free.

Compliance ain’t easy. So, swing by SitC, learn to string together a bunch of new letters, and then get your database development and deployment processes into compliance.