Data protection by design in the SAP world

Explicit in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation is the instruction that the protection of sensitive data must be ‘by design’.

In the past, ignorance was never a valid excuse concerning the old legislation, but the fines were so small that companies would happily plead ignorance, and pay the bill.

GDPR has changed that dramatically. With the fines being a maximum of 4% of global revenue (or €20 million, whichever is greater) companies will be much more keen to comply. This figure was originally earmarked to be 5%, but was negotiated down. Even now, there are predictions in some quarters that early in 2018 there is likely to be a high-profile transgressor on the wrong end of a very significant fine.  

It’s clear that the best way to avoid the maximum fine is to show that there are processes and procedures in place, and that these have been critically and well thought out, and implemented. If this is the case and a company is still found guilty of neglect or non-compliance, they can at least show serious intent to comply. The reality is that the actual detail of what is required in a specific situation is very hard to be completely sure of. And in many cases, the written law contributes 75% of what’s needed, but legal precedent determines how the law is interpreted in a particular jurisdiction.

So how do we deliver ‘data protection by design’ in the SAP world?

In Part 2 of the post on this topic - the Enterprise spread of personal data, I talked about the myriad of test systems which are often copies of production. Clearly, the best policy here is to remove or mask anything which could be determined as personal data. Changing a customer to ‘Mr Smith’ but leaving their home address intact may come under the term “pseudo-anonymisation”. Consensus among legal experts is that Pseudonymised data remains personal data because it can be re-associated with a specific consumer. The regulation applies to pseudonymised data, with some differences, but does not apply to fully-anonymised data, as discussed previously.

Another important point in the regulation is consent. It’s clear that there is an obligation to be able to track and show how and where personal data is stored. The subject can either consent to the storage of personal data in that form, or request removal. The regulation is very clear that placing an all-encompassing consent clause in the small print will not suffice. Consent must be freely given, specific and informed. If consent is required, it has to be expressly given: "clear affirmative action by the data subject."

The first step is to be able to find and display all the data related to a particular data subject across the company’s SAP landscape. At that point, we can either accept the subject’s explicit consent, or we can carry out ‘removal’; or in the case of SAP, removal of the sensitive text parts but not the entire master record. In most cases, the fields we need to remove are actually mandatory in a SAP system so a single ‘REDACTED’ type value may be required. However, it is essential to understand the SAP data model very well to ensure you do not redact something actually required by the systems to function.

Helping our clients to find a solution

Fortunately, this is an area my colleagues and I have been working in for 20 years. Of course there is no one-size-fits-all solution, so we are working with our clients to help them understand their choices and give them guidance about data types and where data is stored in SAP. We’re also running workshops and webinars about GDPR to help explain the challenges faced by businesses.

We believe some companies will work on a reactive approach, waiting for requests and responding to them, but some will be proactive and build a ‘data retention policy’ into their process. The masking engine required for this is something we’ve had in one format or another for about eight years. I was involved in some of the design sessions with our developers, and particularly the UI team, and they put forward some really interesting ideas on how we can really help customers to plan their data protection by design in the SAP world.

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