How does a CDP ensure data privacy?

Private — Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash

For a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to reach its full potential, your business must confidently and securely ingest data into the platform.

With tighter data regulations and growing privacy concerns, a CDP must implement robust measures to safeguard your business data.

In this article, let's look at the essential security measures for a CDP.

Data Encryption

Data encryption transforms data into a cryptic form, making it readable only to those with a secret key.

Generally, a CDP has two types of data: data at rest and data in transit.

Data at rest refers to data stored in the CDP. It may include sensitive user information, such as emails or the products users have purchased on your e-commerce site.

To protect this information, a CDP should offer options to encrypt your business data based on your security needs. A common encryption algorithm is the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

Moreover, a CDP should not use the same encryption key for all data. It reduces the risk of a widespread data leak if one key is compromised.

On the other hand, data can move between a CDP and other systems, typically over the Internet. A CDP should enforce encryption protocols like HTTPS to secure data during transmission over the network.

Data Hashing

Have you ever wondered whether Facebook or Instagram engineers have access to your passwords? As it turns out, they don't. Even if they had access, they wouldn't know your actual password!

This is because of a technique called hashing. Hashing is similar to encryption, but the difference is that the result of hashing is irreversible.

With encryption, there is always a risk that attackers could obtain the secret key and decrypt your data. Hashing eliminates this risk by making the data incomprehensible and irreversible.

Choosing between encryption and hashing depends on your specific needs. If you don't need to read the data, hashing is often preferred for its simplicity and added security.

Identity Access Management (IAM)

As your team grows, more people will require access to valuable company resources such as a CDP. The higher the number of employees, the greater the risk of security breaches and data leaks.

To solve this problem, a CDP should provide Identity Access Management (IAM).

An IAM is a suite of policies and tools to control and manage the people with access to a CDP and the actions they can perform.

As the name suggests, IAM has two parts: identity and access management.

Identity Management

Identity management checks the identity of your employees, verifying if each employee is who they claim to be. It is similar to how you log into your social media accounts!

The process of checking an identity is known as authentication. The most common authentication involves checking login information like username and password.

For added security, a CDP can implement multi-factor authentication (MFA).

In addition to a password, MFA requires users to confirm their identity with an extra verification method. Typically, it involves sending a one-time password (OTP) to a phone number or email.

Access Management

After identity verification, an IAM checks if a user can access selected resources. This process is known as authorization.

It is best practice for an IAM to ensure employees have minimum permissions to perform their work. It is known as the principle of least privilege.

IAM can grant varying levels of authorization based on factors like job titles, teams, projects, and security clearances. For example, a "Project Leader" can be granted the secret key to read encrypted data, but not a "Contract Worker".

Secure Integration

Typically, a CDP doesn't operate in isolation. It needs to securely integrate with other systems within your company, like data storage, marketing automation platforms, and email services.

For instance, if you want a CDP to read text files from a Google Drive folder, you'd only need to grant it read permissions for that specific folder. Avoid unnecessary permissions like creating or deleting files. This is the principle of least privilege.

If you're hesitant to grant a CDP direct access to your data source, it can provide a Software Development Kit (SDK) for controlled data ingestion. With an SDK, you can securely transfer only the necessary data to the CDP.

Ingest from a data source or through an SDK

A CDP should also ensure that data only comes from your trusted sources. A common technique is token-based authentication, which works similarly to passwords.

Each ingestion request to the CDP requires a valid token, ensuring that only authorized sources can send data, thus preventing malicious data ingestion.

On-Premise Deployment

In highly regulated sectors like financial services, where data protection is paramount, minimizing the risk of data leaks is crucial. You may need a more flexible control of the security measures.

While many CDPs are on cloud services like Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, you can opt to have the CDP deployed on your infrastructure. This setup isolates your CDP from the public internet, accessible only from your company’s network or a VPN.

However, on-premise deployment is more complex and involves higher engineering costs, so it is not recommended for all companies.

Audit Logs

Audit logs are a trail of historical information that details the timeline of a series of actions taken within a system. They provide a record of who did what and when.

A CDP should produce audit logs whenever changes happen to crucial resources. They track changes, identify security breaches, and ensure accountability.

Suppose there is a data pipeline that ingests data into a CDP. You can have audit logs that describe the changes made to the pipeline.

Conclusion

Data privacy in a CDP is a complex topic that requires close collaboration between businesses and the CDP vendor.

The CDP must provide the necessary security features to protect user data. But, it is ultimately up to businesses to implement these features in alignment with the best practices recommended by the CDP provider.

In other words, data privacy is a shared responsibility!

🫵🏻 If you’re interested in leveraging a CDP to enhance your data ecosystem, feel free to reach out to discuss tailored solutions for your use cases.