Announcing the compliance toolkit: painless customer data compliance in one platform

The customer data compliance landscape gets more complicated every day. With complex user journeys and rapidly evolving regulations, staying compliant can become a full-time endeavor.

Compliance efforts can overwhelm teams for months, yet fragmented and inflexible infrastructures make it difficult for leaders to have full confidence in their implementations. If you’re feeling the pain of compliance, you’re not alone – in 2018, nearly 50% of companies surveyed by McKinsey reported feeling unprepared for GDPR.

At RudderStack, we believe in eliminating unnecessary complexity so you can build confidence in your compliance implementation and free your teams to focus on data projects that drive business value. That’s why we’re introducing a comprehensive toolkit to simplify compliance across the entire customer data lifecycle.

Compliance is complicated – your compliance toolkit shouldn’t be

The regulatory environment is complex, and it’s moving fast. In the US alone, regulations now apply at the federal and state levels. For companies operating internationally, GDPR and country-specific laws add further intricacy to the equation. Laws are also shifting from a harms-prevention-based approach to a rights-based approach, which places more responsibility on companies to protect their customer data and honor user preferences.

Plus, today’s customer data lifecycle is more sophisticated than ever – it spans multiple applications, pipelines, databases, and tools. Implementing compliance across the infrastructure for data capture, storage, and activation is a challenge. Compliance typically involves heavy-handed methods that still fail to deliver a system that inspires confidence in data leaders—and the rest of the company. Part of the problem is the lack of a unified toolset that reduces complexity and delivers visibility across the entire customer data lifecycle.

While compliance is challenging, it’s becoming more important as consumer awareness heightens and consequences for noncompliance grow. 87% of consumers say they wouldn’t do business with a company if they had concerns about its security practices, and Tiktok was recently fined $386 million for data privacy offenses.

This reality puts data teams in the middle of two conflicting pressures. On one end, the mandate to be compliant is clear and direct. On the other end, the demand for velocity and business growth is loud and clear.

Data teams are most valuable to the business when they’re free from unnecessary complexity – often a reality of the ‘be compliant’ mandate – and can spend time partnering with business teams to help them drive better outcomes. But compliance work can leave teams bogged down, cobbling together processes and controls just to get by without ever achieving a sustainable long-term solution. Business teams often pay the price with limited access to and slow delivery of data.

Here are some of the compliance challenges we’ve heard from our customers:

• Building and managing workarounds (i.e., tracking consent manually with a custom solution or hacking together custom integrations with tools like OneTrust)
• Dealing with tools that don’t integrate well with the rest of the stack (i.e., consent managers, user deletion APIs, etc.)
• Managing specific compliance needs in multiple different platforms (i.e., managing cookies in one platform and PII masking in another)

These conversations with customers have made it clear: Data teams need simplified compliance management, in a central platform, that operates within their first-party data infrastructure.

A comprehensive compliance toolkit

Our toolkit for customer data simplifies compliance across the entire data lifecycle so you can implement compliance measures with full confidence, faster.

The RudderStack compliance toolkit makes it easy to continuously manage consent, collection, storage, and deletion, all in one central platform. Each tool runs within your own data infrastructure and supports first-class integrations with compliance tools like Onetrust.

Here’s a breakdown of the toolkit for each phase in the data lifecycle.

Consent

Our user consent management tools make capturing and managing consent easier with first-class integrations for leading consent systems like OneTrust and Ketch, and our universal consent sync feature automatically syncs consent data to every tool in your stack, including marketing and product platforms. You can also easily customize the consent data format to match the specific needs of downstream teams.

Collection

Once you’ve captured consent, our collection tools make it easy to manage PII and cookies in a way that honors consent and automates compliant data capture.

Cookie management

With our centralized cookie management tools, you can easily manage cookie settings across websites, apps, and geographies. Rudderstack also enables you to implement cookieless tracking for pre-consent analytics and automatically align cookie functionality with user consent settings once captured.

PII management

RudderStack’s PII management features make it easy to manage PII at ingestion and use custom logic to determine which data points get delivered to which destinations. Use them to block, hash, or encrypt PII from any data source and manage delivery per destination.

Storage

Our warehouse native approach means we don’t store your customer data. You manage it in your own data warehouse or data lake. While we don’t persist your data, it does flow through RudderStack, so we provide options for geographic data residency in the US or Europe, enabling you to meet regulatory requirements for all data that passes through RudderStack. We also provide global forwarding logic for every integration, so you can easily control which destinations data is forwarded to across your entire stack by region and automatically align forwarding logic with user consent settings.

Deletion

A request for deletion from one of your customers shouldn’t result in a fire drill across the organization. Our compliance toolkit makes it easy to gracefully handle these requests with two key automations:

• Real-time consent updates – Our JavaScript SDK enables you to automatically forward consent updates to downstream business tools and notification systems.
• API-based user suppression and deletion – Our user suppression API allows you to update data collection settings and delete users across many tools at once via a single API.

Simplify your compliance implementation

If you want to reduce the burden of compliance-related work, you need a toolkit that delivers simplicity, consolidation, and flexibility. Don’t let data compliance work limit your ability to focus on the projects that help marketing and product teams drive growth.

Use RudderStack to manage consent, collection, storage, and deletion, in a central platform. Our toolkit simplifies data compliance so you can spend less time on heavy-handed compliance measures and more time partnering with your business teams to drive better outcomes. Schedule a demo with our team today to see the toolkit in action.