The Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) applies to all private-sector organizations operating in Canada. It explains the standards that businesses need to adhere to when handling personal information belonging to their employees and customers.
Throughout Canada, PIPA is the primary legislation that governs privacy and the handling of personal information. As such, if there are conflicts with any other act or regulation protecting businesses’ personal information, then the applicable section of PIPA takes priority, unless noted otherwise.
Most importantly, your company is legally responsible for all personal information under its control. This also applies to digital data that you don’t actually own, so it’s a particularly important area to think about if your company is planning to migrate all or part of its IT operations off-site to a cloud services provider.
The first step would involve identifying the personal information under your control. Next, you’ll need to determine whether the storage and transmission of the potentially sensitive data complies with the PIPA legislation, and failing to comply with the legislation can cost a business dearly, with fines reaching up to 100,000 CAD.
Fortunately, Dyrand can greatly simplify PIPA compliance during and after your migration to the cloud by taking care of your initial assessment and the ongoing compliance for you.
Accountability and Compliance
Dyrand helps companies create policies governing who can access your data and who should be held accountable if there’s a data breach. We also build policies that ensure that desired actions are promptly taken whenever a potential data breach or violation of policy occurs.
These policies also bring together all responsible parties, including auditors, data users, and any other members of your team who need to access personal information. And thanks to the fact that we provide a centralized, cloud-based solution for the storage and processing of your company’s data, we can also continually monitor things for any potential violations.
In other words, we can optimize your entire IT infrastructure to ensure compliance with the PIPA legislation.
Storage and Destruction of Information
PIPA legislation demands that organizations may continue to store personal information for legal or business purposes only for as long as it’s considered reasonably necessary, or for as long as they’ve been given permission to. When records are no longer required, they need to be destroyed as according to the suggested standards.
Our systems define end-to-end data migration rules through complex databases, defining the way data is stored and exactly where it’s stored. This is particularly important in the case of off-site storage, where companies often don’t know where their data is physically located.
Our private cloud systems allow for complex data migrations to always conform to PIPA legislation.
Handling Data Breaches and Policy Violations
Constant, round-the-clock monitoring is the most basic and one of the most important managed IT services of all. With real-time alerts based on data activity, you will always know who is accessing your data, where they’re accessing it from, and which files they are accessing.
Whether it is changes to the Active Directory service, to file permissions, or to anything else, you’ll always be the first to know about any suspicious activity. Our powerful monitoring and alerts system will ensure you’re notified immediately about potential security breaches, possible configuration issues, and violations of your security policies.
This will allow you to act immediately as per your data-breach response plan, a step that ensures your business complies with all data protection legislation pertaining to the notification of unauthorized access or loss of personal data.
Complying with data protection laws is often complicated if you’re relying on multiple vendors or solely on in-house systems. However, migrating your IT infrastructure to the cloud can simplify regulatory compliance enormously. By choosing Dyrand Systems to keep your data in check, you’ll be able to focus freely on core areas of your business. Call us today to find out how we can help protect your company and prepare it for future growth.