With the emergence of data privacy laws in the USA and European Union, companies are facing an uphill battle. The Data Subject Access Request’s legal framework poses strict rules on processing and responding to requests. Failing to respond to a DSAR can mean serious financial penalties.
Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, and its US equivalent, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), non-compliance fines can be as high as 20 million Euros or 4% of annual global organization revenue. Under CCPA, noncompliance is not directly sanctioned, but it keeps the door open for violations and lawsuits.
Despite such large fines, according to Egress, only 30% of business respondents are in regulatory compliance, and only another 27% plan to do it in 2020. A recent ZyLAB survey points out that for 45.4% of those implementing the DSAR solution, the biggest challenge is to remain compliant in the future.
In this text, we will cover the DSAR compliance topic and propose several off-the-shelf technologies that can provide a reliable, scalable and most importantly, cost effective DSAR solution.
The greatest DSAR compliance challenge
We live in a time of corporate data explosion. Digitally connected, we are creating a digital trail wherever we go, whatever we do. Our civilization’s digital footprint doubles every 18 months.
With the introduction of DSAR, from an undisputed source of wealth and business value, data is now a regulation problem that requires fundamental changes in organizational behavior.
GDPR and CCPA create a whole set of new obligations that organizations can’t ignore.
- Citizens can use “Right of Access” (GDPR) or “Right to Know” (CCPA) to request if an organization possess some personal data about them.
- Citizens can use “Right to be forgotten” (GDPR) or “Right to Delete” (CCPA) to demand deletion of all their personal data that the organization possesses. Data controllers are obligated to do it “without undue delay,” which means in a one-month time frame.
- Organizations should follow specific data management regulations such as:
- Strict cybersecurity requirements (mandatory data encryption, data security measures, report of breaches, etc.);
- Data processing rules;
- Redact or pseudonymize (all sensitive information when there is no regulatory need to collect, possess, manage or use it.
- Gain user consent prior to collection - All data breaches must be reported, and all subjects whose data has been breached must be informed. Organizations have 72 hours from discovery to notify authorities and must keep all records about it. Also, data subjects must be notified “withoutundue delay” when breaches have affected their unencrypted personal data. The CCPA adopts the individual cause of action or class action versus organizations that fail to adopt reasonable security practices to prevent data breaches.
- All third-party integrations must be in regulatory compliance, and the organization should be able to demonstrate that.
As we see, regulatory compliance is not an option. It is an obligation.
From the perspective of DSAR, organizations need to have a scalable system to get these requests, process them quickly and respond on time. However, with a growing data footprint stored in disconnected data sources like emails, chat systems and physical correspondence, searching for each requestor’s data is a daunting challenge. Luckily, there are advanced search solutions that can handle this kind of workload.
ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery: The silver bullet on the data train?
In its core, eDiscovery is the collection, processing and indexing of disparate content so that it can be thoroughly reviewed and redacted. Heavily used in the legal sector, eDiscovery enables organizations to scour large sources of data for Personally Identifiable Information (PII)—lightning fast.
When an organization receives a DSAR, the challenge lies in tracking all data sources for specific details, usually personally identifiable information and other data about the requestor and the data holder. These requests can be simple to process, but as organizations grow, so does the complexity of these requests.
In two examples, organizations have reported staggering costs of processing complex SAR requests. The first is from Nursing and Midwifery Council in the UK. A single, heavily-redacted DSAR costed about $315,000 in processing costs and legal fees. In another case, Oxford University faced a $150,000 cost in order to respond to a single SAR request due to the University needing to process over half a million emails in order to respond to the requestor, Dr. Cécile Deer.
Without a software solution that can process digital data and find personally identifiable information of the requestor (all while masking other individuals’ PII), responding to SAR requests can be extremely expensive for organizations.
Therefore, an eDiscovery solution like ZyLAB ONE is good as a silver bullet for DSAR challenges. The process of finding any document in various locations, fast and on scale is essential for a reliable DSAR solution. Without using eDiscovery, any DSAR solution would struggle with the search functionality, which is essential for timely DSAR processing.
eDiscovery is responsible for:
- Locating and processing all relevant data across all repositories, e-mails, etc.
- Redacting all personally identifiable information related to other individuals mentioned in the same content.
- Collecting information directly from the relevant organization’s sources with true data integrity.
- De-duplicating the information. With any DSAR search, the portion of duplicate documents can be up to 80%. Deduplication eliminates a huge portion of work, therefore speeding up the DSAR response time.
- Automatically unpacking containers of files and making every component searchable.
- Enriching non-searchable data such as scans, images, media files or unsearchable PDFs, so that all information can be searched and used.
- Analyzing, classifying and organizing information for a quick and comprehensive review.
- Using auto-redaction to anonymize or pseudonymize personal and confidential information. This is crucial for data transfer outside of the EU. While anonymization is a more robust solution, after redaction the data subject is no longer identifiable. With pseudonymization, data can no longer be attributed to a data subject. Additional information used to identify is kept separate and subject to technical and organizational security measures. Only when the identifiers are reunited with the core data will it be safeguarded like any other personal data. Otherwise, a non-attribution must be provided.
- Automatically converting all electronic file formats to one standard format before redactions.
- Detailed tracking and reporting provide a complete audit trail to prove requested personal data erasure.
These are the key features to solve the GDPR/CCPA bottleneck for finding any document across all locations in the organization. It’s important to note that not all eDiscovery solutions have all these features incorporated.
ZyLAB ONE’s AI-powered eDiscovery combines advanced search, text-mining, auto-classification, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. Using these procedures, ZyLAB ONE can cull information from archives to ascertain what information can be destroyed without harming the business, historical or legal need for that data.
ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery can scale out and manage search over large clusters of machines. Both indexing and searching can be distributed over as many machines as desired, and indexes can be centralized or distributed for better performance or robustness needs.
This results in almost unlimited scalability of the search engine. Depending on the hardware, ZyLAB can index multiple terabytes of data in a matter of just a few hours. At the same time, it maintains the ability to search faster than any other product for large queries containing positional operators, Boolean, quorum search, wildcards and fuzzy matching (also at the beginning of words), complex regular expressions, parsing and tokenization flexibility.
Support functions like index checksums, monitoring index status tools, the environment status tool and the current running status help in the control and maintenance.
Having a powerful eDiscovery component alone, however, isn’t enough for a solid DSAR solution. Organizations need to marry this search feature with a system that can capture DSAR requests, use workflows and automation to process these request at-scale.
DSAR Management with the ArkCase Case Management Platform
One of the hallmarks of DSAR requests management, other than being data-intensive, is that it has a relatively fixed workflow:
- It all starts with a public portal where people can fill out a DSAR request.
- Next, there is a mandatory identity verification to confirm that the requester is the data subject. Then, the request is queued for processing.
- The processing has a fixed workflow of finding the data, deduplication, redaction, review and delivery.
- The data subject can respond with a deletion request that the company can respond with proof of deletion beyond recovery.
- Lastly, the entire process from submission to closure should be auditable, meaning that at every stage of the workflow, log entries are recorded and stored securely.
Software solutions that are pre-configured with workflows and forms are also heavily used in medical and legal practices. These case management solutions enable organizations to automate repetitive tasks, streamline workflows, leverage collaboration and use the cloud for global yet secure access.
One of our favorite case management platforms is ArkCase. It is a modern, open-source case management platform that accelerates case processing time. Thanks to its flexibility, ArkCase offers many off-the-shelf solutions such as data privacy management,FOIA requests management, compliant management, correspondence management, legal case management, etc.
ArkCase is a robust platform that comes with a personalized dashboard, document management capabilities, collaboration, rules engine, configurable and pre-configured workflows, advanced search, reporting, calendaring, task management, multimedia search and is fully auditable. It is an open-source solution that is field-tested, cost-effective and future proof.
DSAR Solution integrates the following technologies:
- Content/Records Management System
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- Analytics
- Correspondence Management
- Modern eDiscovery
With these integrations, the ArkCase DSAR Solution claims a processing time savings of 60%. Without the DSAR Solution, the cost of manually processing privacy requests is $1,400 per request.
With flexible licensing and pricing, ArkCase DSAR can be an excellent way to achieve full CCPA and GDPR compliance without breaking the budget.
Wrap-Up: The combined benefits of ZyLAB ONE and ArkCase
As a result of legal frameworks such as GDPR and CCPA, companies are facing an ever-growing amount of data disclosure requests governed by DSAR. Companies that gather and store large volume of user data will find it difficult to respond to these requests on time, even if all their data is digitally stored.
Finding all personally identifiable information related to the requestor, while redacting all other PII from other individuals mentioned in the requested documents, is a daunting task that cannot be solved with increasing the workforce alone. Therefore, organizations turn to scalable technologies like ZyLAB ONE and ArkCase. ZyLAB ONE provides a reliable and fast eDiscovery search, while ArkCase enables people to work optimally, one case at a time.
ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery has the most scalable and flexible architecture on the market. ZyLAB ONE easily handles large data volumes. The total system capacity can be scaled upby assigning as many virtual machines as needed to increase the computing capacity. As a SaaS-based eDiscovery solution, it is suitable for thin-client and remote work use, but it can also be implemented on-premise or hybrid.
ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery provides seamless integration for an efficient process without interruption. A flexible architecture “follows the wave of data” through the eDiscovery system during a project. Thanks to this flexible architecture, ZyLAB ONE provides a future-proof solution for processing large amounts of data, ensuring reliable eDiscovery functionality.
ArkCase is a FedRAMP Moderate open source platform with a proven track record. As a cloud DSAR solution, it is suitable for thin-client use and remote work use, but it can also be implemented on-premise or hybrid. Federated Search is implemented as an information retrieval technology that allows the simultaneous search of multiple searchable resources.
Combined, the two provide a scalable DSAR solution that provides an organized, central location where all data is standardized and where all your Production Readiness Review (PRR) processes begin and end. A platform that gives control over data access, document review, redaction and the ability to request status at any point in time. All actions are documented and traceable preventing any possible litigation.
If you’re interested in finding out more details about how Armedia can help as a Solutions Integrator and solve your Data Privacy Management needs, contact us for a no-obligation consultation.
