Introduction
Today, data has become the world’s most valuable resource. A huge amount of data is generated every day, and storing it safely and securely is a significant challenge, especially when working with sensitive data like personal information and finance records.
As a step towards addressing this issue, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a law implemented in 2018 by the European Union (EU). It dictates how data of EU residents can be collected, used, and stored. It also affects any business organization processing the data of EU citizens regardless of the company’s location. GDPR gives individuals more control over their data and keeps them safe from any potential data misuse by the company. Transparency, purpose limitation, storage limitation, and confidentiality are some of the key features of GDPR.
As a part of compliance with GDPR, companies that collect user data need to follow some set procedures for handling and collection. Robust data security measures, consent for obtaining and using their data as well as sharing the data with only authorized parties are among those measures. Users’ rights include the right to access, rectify, erase, and restrict the processing of their data.
By ensuring GDPR compliance, companies permit users to retain control over their data while being fully operational. However, GDPR compliance is compromised if all user data is stored centrally. Therefore, to better protect data and ensure its integrity, it is important to consider eliminating centralized storage.
Unlike traditional cloud storage, decentralized storage uses multiple servers and operates on blockchain technology. Privacy, security, and data integrity are among the top features decentralized cloud storage has to offer. As you can imagine, this makes it inherently GDPR-compliant. In this article, we’ll explore GDPR and how decentralized storages like Züs Network are tailored, keeping GDPR in mind.
What is Decentralized Storage?
Traditional servers use a single, powerful, centralized server to store the data. Decentralized systems, on the other hand, distribute the data across a network of multiple independent machines. This approach uses distributed ledger technology and peer-to-peer networks to manage and store data. In decentralized storage, data is split into fragments, encrypted, and distributed across various nodes. Advantages of decentralized storage include:
- Robust Security: Breaking down the data into smaller pieces and storing it across multiple geographically dispersed servers, known as data fragmentation, makes it very difficult for hackers to tamper with the data.
- Transparency: Decentralized storages employ blockchain technology, which maintains a public and open-source ledger for all transactions. While they use this technology, you are still not able to monitor file changes on the blockchain.
- User Control: Users have more control over their data. The downside is that you often cannot choose your storage providers.
- High Data Availability: Since a single server is not handling all data requests, decentralized storage guarantees higher uptime, lower latency and enhanced bandwidth.
How GDPR Compliance Can Improve With Decentralised Storage
Clearly, decentralized storage offers some significant advantages over traditional server-based architectures. Let’s take a look at how GDPR compliance can be achieved with decentralized storage.
- Minimal Risk of Data Breaches: Decentralized storage eliminates the single point of failure in traditional server storage architectures and instead relies on robust data exchanging protocols. This improved security helps meet GDPR’s requirements for protecting personal data and preventing breaches.
- Data Minimization: This technology allows organizations to manage data more efficiently, which limits storage to only that which is strictly necessary and meant to achieve its purpose. It operates on the principle of data minimization in that it allows mechanisms to control what information is collected and for how long.
- Auditability and Transparency: Decentralized networks come with intrinsic auditability. All transactions in the network are traceable on a public ledger, which brings about transparency and traceable continued evidence. Moreover, this transparent public ledger system conforms to GDPR requirements. This makes data handling processes verifiable and upholds privacy while ensuring accountability.
- Consent Management: The GDPR requires consent for data processing activities. With the help of smart contracts, decentralized storage could assist organizations in managing records of consent by keeping those consents transparent and auditable.
- Minimized Data Silos: Traditional storage systems may create data silos, complicating GDPR compliance efforts. Decentralized storage can provide a unified approach to data management, making it easier to track and manage personal data across different systems.
- Data Localization: Data localization enables users to choose where to store their data. By storing their data within the EU, they can comply with GDPR requirements for data transfers and jurisdictional controls.
- Data Integrity and Accuracy: The distributed approach guaranteed by decentralized networks minimizes the risk of data manipulation or corruption since altering data in one location without consensus from the entire network becomes virtually impossible. Each transaction is verified and recorded, ensuring data integrity and accuracy at all times.
- Data Processing Transparency: Every transaction and access request is recorded in a tamper-proof manner on the blockchain, enabling auditors and stakeholders to trace the history of data interactions. This transparency fosters trust and accountability in data management practices.
- Automated Compliance: Smart contracts, programmable self-executing contracts on blockchain platforms, streamline compliance processes related to data protection regulations. They can automate consent management, data request handling, and ensure adherence to data minimization principles. This automated approach reduces human error and enhances the efficiency of compliance efforts.
- Right to access and erasure: Decentralized storage architectures facilitate seamless access and deletion of personal data. Users have direct control over their data stored across the decentralized network. They can exercise their right to access their data at any time and request its deletion securely, without relying on a centralized authority.
- User control: Decentralized storage enhances user control over their personal data. Users can manage permissions, access, and storage duration, ensuring they have full autonomy over their data. Through decentralized governance models, users can manage permissions, access rights, and storage duration preferences autonomously. This shift from centralized control to user-centric management ensures that individuals retain sovereignty over their data, reducing the risk of unauthorized access or misuse.
Real-World Example: Zus
Among other similar multi-cloud storage, Züs provides the requirements of data protection, tamper-proof, transparent, and immutable record-keeping, ease of access to data, consent management, and data security. Where Züs stands apart from traditional cloud storage is the decentralized nature of the storage it offers.
Züs’s approach utilizes blockchain technology for a secure and efficient way of storing data among many nodes. This means that no single point of failure in the configuration will be compromised. As you can imagine, this is in line with a security approach aiming at both security and a high level of availability.
Here are some key features of Züs that make it possible for companies to retain user data, let users be in control, and also be GDPR compliant:
- Blockchain Technology: Uses blockchain to log all data handling activities, ensuring every change is recorded and can be audited. This provides a clear, unalterable history of data transactions.
- Data Transparency: Users have full visibility into where their data is stored and how it is managed, enhancing control over data. Detailed file information reveals the specific server used, the exact location of each data fragment, and the server’s performance metrics.
- Privacy: User data remains entirely private and under the user’s control, with no access granted to any external entity, including us or the government.
- Proxy Re-encryption: Ensures secure data sharing by re-encrypting data for each recipient, enhancing data security during transfers. All data is, therefore incomprehensible to unauthorized parties, which expect complete datasets stored on the same server.
- Data Fragmentation: Divides data into fragments which are stored across multiple servers or nodes. This reduces the risk of data breaches as compromising a single server does not compromise the entire dataset. Moreover, traditional attack vectors are oriented towards a single target, rendering them weak against decentralized storage.
- Tamper-Resistant Distributed Immutability: Once data is stored across distributed servers, it cannot be modified or deleted without detection. This immutability protects against unauthorized changes and ensures long-term data reliability.
- Regular Integrity Checks: Conducts ongoing challenges to verify that data fragments stored on different servers are accurate and unaltered. These checks ensure that data remains consistent and intact over time.
- Secure Access Controls: Züs deploys strong access controls such that only authenticated personnel can access sensitive data, in keeping with the requirements of the GDPR.
- Data Confidentiality: Ensures that Züs cannot access or read user data. Only the data owner holds the encryption keys, maintaining full control over data confidentiality.
- Multiple Servers: Distributed storage eliminates single points of failure. If one server goes down, data can still be accessed from other servers, ensuring high availability and uptime.
- Private Cloud: offers dedicated servers exclusively allocated to enterprises or allows enterprises to bring their own servers. This ensures a secure, isolated environment for storing sensitive data, optimized performance, and granular control over data management and security protocols.
One of Züs’s unique selling points is the fundamental safety it comes with. A Züs blobber is a component responsible for storing users’ data on its file system. It ensures data availability and correctness, provides an HTTP API for user interaction, and participates in network challenges to validate data storage.
Moreover, Züs offers proxy re-encryption, which ensures that a static key exchange is used for data transfer and no private keys are revealed at any point in the data exchange process.
Unlike centralized cloud storage, which has a single point of failure at the main server, decentralized storage solutions like Züs are not impacted by the loss of a few blobbers. Data is redundant and always verified before being accessed, ensuring ease of use as well as tight security.
Endnote
Decentralized storage is emerging as a very promising solution, given all the troubles organizations face because of GDPR requirements. Keeping in line with those requirements, Züs provides very high data security with transparent and permanent record-keeping, easy access, and portability of data with consent management and data security.
Furthermore, decentralized storage solutions simplify access to individuals’ personal data and facilitate porting of user data to another controller. They also provide a transparent record of consent, along with every audit trail possible, to enable easy consent management by organizations in a secure and auditable way.
Choosing a decentralized storage solution like Züs to ensure compliance with GDPR, protecting user data and removing the hassle from user data management could make all the difference!
FAQs
How does decentralized storage ensure data integrity and security?
Decentralized storage ensures data integrity and security through data fragmentation, encryption, and distribution across multiple nodes. Each data fragment is encrypted, making it challenging for unauthorized users to access or tamper with the data. Additionally, decentralized systems often employ regular integrity checks and cryptographic techniques to verify the accuracy and consistency of stored data.
What role does blockchain technology play in decentralized storage solutions?
Blockchain technology provides a transparent and immutable ledger for tracking data transactions in decentralized storage solutions. This ledger records every data access, modification, and transfer, ensuring a verifiable history of data handling. Blockchain’s decentralized nature eliminates single points of failure and enhances data security and transparency, crucial for GDPR compliance.
How does decentralized storage handle data redundancy and availability?
Decentralized storage handles data redundancy and availability by distributing data fragments across multiple geographically dispersed servers. This ensures that even if some nodes fail or become inaccessible, the data remains available from other nodes. This distribution enhances data availability, reduces latency, and provides higher uptime compared to centralized storage systems.
How does decentralized storage facilitate GDPR-compliant consent management?
Decentralized storage can leverage smart contracts to manage and document user consent for data processing activities. These smart contracts create transparent, auditable records of consent, ensuring that organizations can demonstrate compliance with GDPR requirements. Users can easily manage their consent preferences, and any changes are automatically recorded on the blockchain.
What mechanisms are in place to prevent data breaches in decentralized storage systems?
Decentralized storage systems use several mechanisms to prevent data breaches, including data fragmentation, encryption, and robust access controls. Data is broken into smaller fragments, encrypted, and stored across multiple nodes, making it difficult for attackers to access complete datasets. Additionally, access controls ensure that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data, and regular integrity checks verify that data remains unaltered.
