Shift left in data protection

Security and privacy tasks are often left for later or sometimes are completely overlooked. Why? Because most applications can still work well without security. It’s an optional functionality that is often hard to implement, because it’s consuming and requires expertise. However, your customers are not going to like that. Building security as an afterthought isn’t a good practice.

Now, imagine a timeline axis, like in a Gantt chart, mapping out a project from start to finish. In this timeline, the left side is the start of the project. When we say “shift left”, we mean moving crucial tasks to the start of the process.

But what tasks are we talking about? Obviously securing the application. This approach is also known as “security by design”, and it makes security and data protection a priority from the beginning, because they affect how you design your application’s architecture.

In this model, developers are more than just coders. They play a crucial role in ensuring security and privacy from the get-go. They are the new data protectors.

Note

We’re encouraging companies to start shifting left: to focus on security and privacy engineering right from the start. And to help with this, we’ve created Piiano Vault. It’s like a super secure home for all sensitive personal information.

We’ve made it so that sensitive data can be easily protected by the Vault either by tokenizing or encrypting it. We wish to change the mindset: make developers realize that sensitive data must be protected before they store it in any database. Where data access can be carefully monitored and controlled by the security teams, decoupled from the source code.