GDPR: What your company needs to know about USB drives

Опубликовано 11 июля 2018, 17:00

Learn more about how Kingston Encrypted USB drives can get your organization closer to GDPR compliance: kingston.com/us/community/arti...

If your business handles personal data for your customers, you’ve likely heard about the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short. Kingston has put together this brief overview of what this might mean for your company, and the role that Kingston’s encrypted USBs can play in ensuring your company’s compliance.

So, what exactly is the GDPR, what does it mean for you and your business, and what do you and your employees need to be aware of? The GDPR is a new regulation intended to strengthen and future-proof data protection and rights for individuals within the European Union. Bear in mind, even if your company isn’t located in the EU, your company is still bound to the law if you process the data of EU residents. The changes in the GDPR are slated to take effect in the middle of 2018. From 2018 onwards, companies should have a set standard of security protocols to protect personal data.

What this regulation means for most businesses is that securing customer data is incredibly important. Under the law, businesses are subject to possible fines of up to 4% of their annual global revenue or roughly $22 million, whichever is greater. The education, health, and financial sectors incur the highest costs for these data breaches, and they are the most targeted.

A recent high profile data breach involved the Queen of England. A single unencrypted USB drive was lost at Heathrow Airport. A man scooped up the drive and plugged it into a computer at a public library and found it contained maps with the location of every CCTV camera in Heathrow airport, and even travel details for the Queen!

From a high-level standpoint, a good roadmap is to take these 5 steps:

1. Make sure that everyone involved understands the new regulation. The slightest slip-up can result in million dollar fines, so everyone on board needs to take this law very seriously.
2. Understand which of your employees use the data and have access to it. As with the incident with the Queen’s security detail, one weak or uninformed link in the chain can lead to catastrophic failure.
3. Implement a strategy for how to secure data on the move. Whether you’re classified as a data controller or a data processor, you’ll need to make sure that the data you’re using is secured while it is transferred.
4. Consider hardware encryption and endpoint-management solutions. Hardware encryption of data is a great way to ensure that data both “in-transit” and “at-rest” is secured. All it takes is one unencrypted USB drive to fall into the wrong hands for your company to be hit with massive fines.
5. Ensure that your employees are educated on the details of the GDPR, so that the best practice data protection policies they implement actually meet or exceed the requirements of the GDPR.
6. Security standards regard data encryption as the best way to protect data. Kingston and IronKey USB drives use the latest in hardware-based encryption, so they can play a big role in helping your company achieve GDPR compliance, as well as and managing threats and reducing risk. They’re 100% compliant encrypted USB storage, very easy-to-use, and designed for quick deployment.

All of the Encrypted USB solutions offered by Kingston feature 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption in XTS mode. The DataTraveler® 2000 features an alphanumeric keypad that locks the drive with a password and is FIPS 197 Certified. The DataTraveler® Vault Privacy 3.0 USB Flash drive provides affordable, business-grade security with Anti-virus/malware and Management models available. Kingston’s IronKey™ D300 USB Flash drive has a zinc casing and tamper-evident epoxy seal with FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certification. Kingston’s IronKey™ S1000 meets the strictest standards to make it the ultimate security encrypted USB drive. It is the only USB drive with on-device Cryptochip Encryption Key management. It detects and responds to physical tampering and provides automatic data protection upon drive removal.

You can get a small, but very important item ticked off your GDPR to-do list by investing in 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption from Kingston. Protect your data today and into the future with Kingston encrypted USB drives.

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