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Choosing a data privacy vault

Apple, Netflix, Slack, Grubhub, JPMorgan Chase, and Capital One have all set the bar high by implementing data protection independently, knowing it’s the best way to safeguard their customers’ privacy.

However, not every company has the resources or need to build its own data privacy solution internally. Fortunately, there are off-the-shelf data privacy vaults on the market, such as Piiano Vault.

When faced with multiple vault offerings, how do you choose the right one?

Here’s a checklist with seven important considerations:

  1. Usability and integration. You should be able to integrate a data privacy vault with minimal changes to your existing infrastructure. Ensure it supports your cloud provider and architecture style (e.g., serverless, containers, Kubernetes).
  2. Resilience and scalability. Choose a robust, battle-tested solution with real-world deployments. The vault should scale to handle large volumes of data, traffic, and requests per second.
  3. Security functionality. Ensure it includes features such as data encryption, key rotation, rich tokenization types, stringent access controls, data masking, SSO, anti-tampering, and audit logging.
  4. Data management. Look for easy management of customer data, including hierarchical organization of tenants and individuals. Built-in support for PII and financial data types, along with privacy-friendly data lifecycle management, is essential.
  5. Privacy functionality. Verify the use of advanced privacy by design primitives such as traceability, consent management, Data Subject Access Requests (DSAR), the Right to be Forgotten (RTBF), data retention, and localization.
  6. Compliance support. Select a solution that simplifies compliance with applicable privacy laws and regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, CRPA, HIPAA, or PCI DSS. Ask the vendor for their SOC 2 certificate and pentest summary.
  7. Developer experience. Opt for a platform that developers find easy to work with. Look for rich documentation, comprehensive guides, intuitive APIs and SDKs, sample projects on GitHub, and the availability of a free trial or sandboxed version to experiment locally.