Organizations generate, collect, and store vast amounts of telemetry data. With this data comes the growing responsibility to ensure compliance with various regulations, from GDPR to HIPPA. Data compliance ensures data is handled, stored, and processed according to laws and standards protecting personal information.

But what makes compliance regulations scary is that it’s ever-changing and rules vary across industries, making it complex to manage. And with the rapid growth in data volumes, ensuring compliance becomes even more challenging. Audit reporting is painfully manual, and searching through massive amounts of data to try and pinpoint where issues are occurring is also time-consuming and inefficient.

There are severe consequences if companies fail to comply and experience a massive security breach, including financial losses, reputational damage, and a loss of trust. Protecting sensitive data is critical, especially when it’s routed to various destinations and/or stored in cloud environments.

Data retention is also essential for compliance, especially for unforeseen and unplanned investigations. However, storing large amounts of data, particularly within analytics tools, can be financially draining. That’s where Cribl Lake comes in.

How Storage Plays a Role in Data Compliance

When customers agree to allow a company to collect their data, the company has an obligation to disclose to the customer what data is collected, how it’ll be used, and where it’ll be stored.

Several key factors play a role in selecting compliant data storage solutions:

1. Cost-effectiveness: As data volumes grow, storage costs can quickly escalate. A sophisticated data management platform can help transform data to ensure only necessary information is stored, reducing costs.
2. Retention periods: To comply with regulations, data must be retained for specific time durations — sometimes as long as 7 years — before it can be purged.
3. Security: Sensitive data must be protected, including both at rest and in motion, tokenization, and multi-factor authentication to safeguard against unauthorized access.
4. Access controls: Users should be able to access the data they need while preventing unauthorized access to enforce security and privacy policies.
5. Audit logs: Maintaining detailed logs allows organizations to trace data back to users and data access to ensure compliance with access controls.
6. Centralized management: A unified data management system provides a holistic view of data, both in transit and at rest, streamlining compliance efforts.
7. Scalability and flexibility: Grow and evolve alongside changing compliance requirements with adaptable systems, so organizations can ensure they’re prepared to manage compliance across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments.

By considering these factors, organizations can build a robust data compliance strategy that ensures security, reduces costs, and prepares for regulatory changes.

Cribl Lake for Your Compliance Reporting

Cribl provides the tools businesses need to stay compliant while managing massive data volumes. With Cribl Lake, a managed data lake solution, organizations can protect sensitive information, ensure compliance, and avoid costly fines and penalties.

When storing data in Cribl Lake, you can keep a copy of full fidelity log data in Cribl Lake and search and replay data back. This makes it quick and easy to access and find the data needed for threat hunting, incident response, or audit reports.

Encryption at Rest and in Motion

One fundamental aspect of Cribl’s security model is real-time data encryption, which is crucial for protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access. With Cribl Stream, organizations can encrypt sensitive data as it is ingested, transformed, and routed, ensuring that all data is securely handled throughout its lifecycle. Cribl Stream supports end-to-end encryption, enabling data to be encrypted as soon as it enters the pipeline and remains encrypted until it reaches its final destination.

Cribl Stream’s flexible and powerful routing capabilities allow encrypted data to be sent to multiple destinations simultaneously, whether to low-cost storage, cloud environments, or third-party applications. This ensures that data integrity and security are maintained across various platforms without compromising performance or operational efficiency.

All data saved in Cribl Lake is encrypted at rest within your Cloud workspace using server-side encryption with a unique key. As an additional safeguard, the key is encrypted with a root key that is rotated regularly.

By leveraging Cribl’s encryption capabilities, businesses can confidently manage their data workflows, know that their data is safeguarded against potential breaches, and ensure compliance with the highest security standards.

Cost-effective Storage

As data volumes continue to explode, storage costs can quickly spiral out of control. Cribl offers an effective way to reduce these costs by compressing data, significantly reducing storage footprints and data transfer requirements. This compression strategy not only lowers costs but also helps organizations manage budgets more effectively, especially when some SIEM solutions charge based on raw data volume rather than the actual stored amount.

Compressed data occupies less storage space, making it more feasible and cost-effective to store the required data without compromising on compliance mandates. This is particularly important when retaining logs, transaction records, or any data required for regulatory audits and investigations.

Unify Retention, Security, and Access Control Policies

Cribl enhances data security and compliance with robust role-based access controls (RBAC) that grant or deny access based on predefined roles and rules, ensuring only authorized users can access specific data.

Cribl Lake also offers flexible retention management, allowing organizations to define custom retention periods for each dataset. This automated data lifecycle management helps maintain compliance by expiring and deleting data beyond its retention period, reducing unnecessary storage and processing costs. Together, Cribl’s access control and retention features provide a secure and efficient data governance solution, aligning with regulatory requirements and minimizing operational overhead.

Audit logs

Cribl Lake provides up to 30 days of audit logs from Cribl.Cloud, ensuring secure and controlled access to log data. These audit logs capture detailed records of user actions, and transformations within the platform, offering enhanced visibility into data flows. This observability allows businesses to monitor and trace data interactions, making compliance audits faster, simpler, and more accurate.

Flexibl and Scalabl Data Engine

Cribl Lake plays a crucial role in Cribl’s Data Engine for IT and Security, providing centralized data management that is both scalable and flexible. Cribl Lake allows organizations to consolidate and control their data, ensuring that sensitive information is handled in compliance with regulatory requirements. By integrating seamlessly with Cribl Stream, Cribl Lake enables centralized data routing, allowing businesses to direct data to the appropriate destinations in real time. This centralized control helps reduce the risk of compliance violations and provides a transparent audit trail of data movement.

Built to support large-scale data environments, Cribl’s platform allows enterprises to easily scale their compliance efforts as their data volumes grow. Whether managing data on-premises, in the cloud, or within hybrid infrastructures, Cribl Lake provides the flexibility needed to maintain control and compliance across complex environments. This scalability ensures that as your data needs evolve, Cribl can adapt without compromising security or performance.

Conclusion

Data compliance is an ongoing challenge for modern enterprises, but with the right strategies and solutions in place, businesses can effectively manage their obligations while unlocking the value of their data. By centralizing data management, organizations can overcome the most pressing compliance challenges. With Cribl’s powerful data engine, organizations can confidently navigate the complexities of data compliance, ensuring that they remain protected and prepared for the future.

To learn more, check out these resources:

• Cribl Guide for Data Compliance
• Cribl Stream for GDPR Compliance
• Data Governance with Cribl’s Observability Solution
• Use Cribl Copilot to Build a GDPR-compliant Data Pipeline

Cribl, the Data Engine for IT and Security, empowers organizations to transform their data strategy. Customers use Cribl’s suite of products to collect, process, route, and analyze all IT and security data, delivering the flexibility, choice, and control required to adapt to their ever-changing needs.

We offer free training, certifications, and a free tier across our products. Our community Slack features Cribl engineers, partners, and customers who can answer your questions as you get started and continue to build and evolve. We also offer a variety of hands-on Sandboxes for those interested in how companies globally leverage our products for their data challenges.