Data privacy requirements are a complex and quickly evolving part of the data management domain. Especially in Healthcare (e.g., United States Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Veterans Affairs requirements), there has been a strong emphasis on data privacy and protection. Data storage is governed by multiple sources of policy requirements, including internal policies and legal requirements imposed by external governing organizations. Within a database, a single value can be subject to multiple requirements on how long it must be preserved and when it must be irrecoverably destroyed. This often results in a complex set of overlapping and potentially conflicting policies. Existing storage systems are lacking sufficient support functionality for these critical and evolving rules, making compliance an underdeveloped aspect of data management. As a result, many organizations must implement manual ad-hoc solutions to ensure compliance. As long as organizations depend on manual approaches, there is an increased risk of non-compliance and threat to customer data privacy.
In this paper, we detail and implement an automated comprehensive data management compliance framework facilitating retention and purging compliance within a database management system. This framework can be integrated into existing databases without requiring changes to existing business processes. Our proposed implementation uses SQL to set policies and automate compliance. We validate this framework on a Postgres database, and measure the factors that contribute to our reasonable performance overhead (13% in a simulated real-world workload).
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This content will become publicly available on August 18, 2024
Compliance and Data Lifecycle Management in Databases and Backups
From the United States’ Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there has been an increased focus on individual data privacy protection. Because multiple enforcement agencies (such as legal entities and external governing bodies) have jurisdiction over data governance, it is possible for the same data value to be subject to multiple (and potentially conflicting) policies. As a result, managing and enforcing all applicable legal requirements has become a complex task. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the steps to integrating data retention and purging into a database management system (DBMS). We describe the changes necessary at each step of the data lifecycle management, the minimum functionality that any DBMS (relational or NoSQL) must support, and the guarantees provided by this system. Our proposed solution is 1) completely transparent from the perspective of the DBMS user; 2) requires only a minimal amount of tuning by the database administrator; 3) imposes a negligible performance overhead and a modest storage overhead; and 4) automates the enforcement of both retention and purging policies in the database.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2016548
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10492262
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- DEXA 2023: Database and Expert Systems Applications
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 281-297
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ["Databases","Privacy Compliance","Retention","Purging"]
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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