New Laws on Data Privacy and Security Are Coming. Is Your Company Ready?

Governments are in the process of passing and implementing new laws to ensure higher standards for software security and data privacy. This means the era in which tech companies inadequately test their software for security and privacy vulnerabilities is coming to an end. While these new laws will not be quick in coming — regulations are notoriously slow to adapt to new technological challenges — they are indeed on their way, and software companies and their corporate customers shouldn’t wait to take action. To start with, they should gauge their level of security in terms of not just the patches they install or the incidents they respond to, but also the labor-intensive, ongoing processes they devote to preventing privacy and security vulnerabilities. That means a central metric in securing enterprise data will become time: the time devoted to testing the software that companies create and purchase, and the time devoted to maintaining that software once it is deployed.