Data sovereignty best practices are vital for businesses looking to comply with local regulations and protect sensitive information from cyber threats. These include conducting an audit, implementing data protection measures, and meeting localization requirements.
Current technical solutions focus solely on control to achieve sovereignty. Our approach, grounded in Social Contract Theory (SCT), incorporates higher-level aspects that combine control and security mechanisms.
Data Sovereignty and Compliance
Data sovereignty is an evolving concept that encompasses the ownership and control of digital information within a country, including laws and governance structures pertaining to who may access or protect it, its storage locations and where access might occur. Data sovereignty should be an important consideration for global organizations operating across various geographies with different regulatory environments.
Establishing best practices for data transfer across international boundaries involves developing best practices that address any regional or national regulations that might apply, and companies should prepare themselves for different security protocols or privacy concerns in each country, or local legal compliance requirements so they avoid fines or penalties.
Current technical solutions tend to focus on control, such as restricting who can view or access data (Hellmeier & von Scherenberg, 2023). Unfortunately, this only addresses one aspect of sovereignty; other concepts related to security and ownership remain unexplored (Munoz-Arcentales et al., 2019).
Data sovereignty best practices can enhance business agility and competitive advantage, but it's crucial that businesses understand its difference from other key data management concepts such as localization and residency. Localization refers to where information is legally collected while residency describes where physical storage occurs - creating confusion if businesses do not clearly define and implement data sovereignty policies effectively.
Data Encryption
Data sovereignty refers to the principle that nations own and control all of the data generated within their borders, enabling political jurisdictions to grant data privacy rights for their citizens as well as dictate rules organizations must abide by in order to secure such information.
Most data regulations focus on protecting individuals' rights to control how their personal information is collected and utilized by businesses. Some regulations follow principles of data localization that require companies to store it within a country's borders in order to maintain privacy protection for each country they operate in; this can present issues for multinational enterprises with multiple branches in multiple geographies.
Data stored across multiple locations makes it challenging to manage and comply with various laws, such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which stipulates that any organization processing, storing or transferring European citizen data must comply with its regulations regardless of where their organization resides. This issue also poses challenges for businesses operating within the US where each state has different set of rules that must be observed in order to operate successfully.
To effectively address these challenges, CISOs should assess their backup and disaster recovery solutions to determine which ones offer optimal protection from losing critical data due to regulatory violations. This will enable them to devise an action plan for how they will migrate data and infrastructure into the cloud while meeting local requirements.
Data Sharing
The Data Sovereignty movement is an emerging phenomenon centered on the belief that countries or jurisdictions have the right to control the collection, storage and processing of any data that arises within their borders. This may have significant ramifications for cross-border data sharing; some countries have even passed laws mandating certain kinds of information must remain local - for example those related to national security or consumer privacy issues; this may force businesses into creating local data centers.
Data sovereignty can have far-reaching ramifications for businesses when sharing data with partners or the public Beeble . Data sharing provides insights that can enhance decision-making, fuel innovation and create competitive advantages for businesses; yet understanding different aspects of data sovereignty when making this decision can help guide the right course of action.
Data sovereignty, residency, and provenance are interrelated concepts that influence how information is shared within and outside a business. For instance, if a company collects data from California residents that is stored on servers within that state then their data could fall under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). This can create problems among departments as analysts must build ETL pipelines specifically tailored for regional data sets to comply with local legislation while still fulfilling legal compliance.
Data Management
Data management is vital to complying with local regulations and protecting yourself against cyber threats. Conducting an in-depth data audit and adopting best practices for protecting information will help ensure it stays in its place while guarding against privacy breaches.
More than 100 countries have recently passed laws mandating that citizens' data be stored within their jurisdiction, creating new challenges for businesses. By adopting data sovereignty strategies, businesses can demonstrate to customers that they are committed to safeguarding personal information while building trust relationships.
Compliance with data sovereignty and localization requirements will require significant adjustments in business practices, from altering how apps are built and run to revising cloud contracts to meet regulatory standards for data sovereignty.
Data sovereignty involves multiple interlocking aspects that make it complex to comprehend and implement, making it hard to grasp. To address this challenge, an interpretative framework for data sovereignty is required - one derived from Social Contract Theory (SCT), providing a basis for understanding where data sovereignty may emerge within different contexts. We propose three contextual conditions as our interpretative framework:
