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Whether you are driving to work, striking a deal with a client, playing in a competitive sports league, or doing activities within the home, there are policies, rules, and restrictions when it comes to organizations handling the personal information of individuals. If your business gathers and holds personal information about an individual’s health records, social security number, credit card information, or any other private matter, then your company is subject to complying with standardized regulation organizations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability), PCI (Payment Card Industry), CIPA, and more.

With businesses now storing everyone’s information online, cybersecurity companies can help protect the information of your company’s clients and comply with all relevant regulatory requirements. Now, where do you stand? What kind of data do you store, and which compliance act or standard do you have to adhere to? Below are a few of the most common regulations that companies, big or small, must follow.

PCI-DSS

The first compliance program you need to know about is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. As you may guess, this standard has to do with any sort of credit/debit card information and is in place to protect the security of an individual’s financial information. The founding members include American Express, Discover, JCB International, MasterCard, and Visa. Essentially, they created this standard so that banks, retail stores, online vendors, and software developers would be required to uphold the privacy of the cardholders’ information.

HIPAA

The next compliance act is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Created in 1996, HIPAA sets regulations that secure certain health information. With the rise of technology and convenience, health industries also adopted the utilization of online record holding. However, with so much personal information on health records, new security needed to be developed. These confidentiality rules apply to hospitals, pharmacies, medical insurance companies, health clinics, and more. Thanks to the assistance of cybersecurity companies, the above-mentioned entities can focus on their medical work and leave everything else to the experts.

Privacy Amendments

Since the 4th Amendment in the constitutional Bill of Rights in America, people have been entitled to their own information, and with the increase of cyberattacks online, other countries have started to amend related laws that protect individuals’ personal information. The EU (European Union) and all of Australia have updated laws that deal with protecting online information. In Australia, if a breach is made, the entity is required to notify all individuals involved even if nothing is lost. Similarly, the EU has put in place what is known as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), which puts a stronger emphasis on protecting all personal data. It is regulations like this that make businesses of all sizes turn to cybersecurity companies for help.

Here, we have only mentioned a few compliance regulations but there are a lot more. If you are unsure what kind of compliance regulations your company needs to adhere to, call us to see if we can be of any assistance.