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The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) announced the publication of the Data Protection Best Practices White Paper. Designed for stakeholders involved in cybersecurity, privacy and IIoT trustworthiness, the paper describes best practices that can be applied to protect various types of IIoT data and systems. The 33-page paper covers multiple adjacent and overlapping data protection domains, for example data security, data integrity, data privacy, and data residency.
Failure to apply appropriate data protection measures can lead to serious consequences for IIoT systems, such as service disruptions that affect the bottom-line, serious industrial accidents and data leaks that can result in significant losses, heavy regulatory fines, loss of IP and negative impact on brand reputation.
Categories of Data to be Protected
Data protection touches on all data and information in an organization. In a complex IIoT system, this includes operational data from things like sensors at a field site; system and configuration data like data exchanged with an IoT device; personal data that identifies individuals; and audit data that chronologically records system activities.
Different data protection mechanisms and approaches may be needed for data at rest (data stored at various times during its lifecycle), data in motion (data being shared or transmitted from one location to another), or data in use (data being processed).
Data integrity should be maintained for the entire lifecycle of the data from when it is generated, to its final destruction or archival. Actual data integrity protection mechanisms depend on the lifecycle phase of the data.
Data Privacy
As a prime example of data privacy requirements, the paper focuses on the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which grants data subjects a wide range of rights over their personal data. The paper describes how IIoT solutions can leverage data security best practices in key management, authentication and access control can empower GDPR-centric privacy processes.
The Data Protection Best Practices White Paper complements the IoT Security Maturity Model Practitioner’s Guide and builds on the concepts of the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture and Industrial Internet Security Framework.