Elodie Dowling, EMEA General Counsel, BMC Software With an increasing number of data protection laws around the world, data privacy remains a very pressing topic, and businesses such as cloud service providers continue to face an array of complex and logistical challenges to adhere to across their multi-cloud infrastructure, to ensure their customers’ data remains protected. Over the course of the last year, there have been a large volume of data breaches being reported. Data Privacy day comes as a very timely reminder for customers and their service providers to continue to work towards updating their existing privacy standards to a compliant level, while ensuring robust security is in place to protect customer data. Most recently, European regulators have imposed £97m in data breach fines, and businesses who operate within the cloud must remain vigilant to avoid similar penalties. It’s important once a business starts using a variety of cloud-based services and infrastructure to regularly carry out audits to ensure that systems and services being used remain compliant with data privacy laws. Under GDPR, personal data may not be stored longer than needed for the predefined purpose. Therefore, it’s important businesses implement retention periods, whilst having the ability to delete data effectively when retention periods have expired - both for data locally stored and in the cloud. Companies are able to achieve better data protection in today’s IT ecosystem through four critical measures. 1. Visibility – IT needs the tools to know where sensitive customer data resides, how it is being processed, and by whom. 2. DevOps - teams must be aligned to maintain security and compliance. 3. Integrity – IT must validate structured and unstructured data automatically, and ensure that stored data is intact. 4. Recovery – Organisations must ensure data is recoverable in a timely manner in the event of any physical or technical incidents.  Read Less