Where is the ROI in Privacy Engineering?

Why all this talk about privacy engineering? Why not leverage existing engineering teams to cover data privacy needs? Privacy executives are asking these questions as they weigh risk and efficiency. 

The truth is that developing individuals who excel at privacy and also have a technical understanding of your product platform can be a game changer for your throughput as well as your governance functions. 

Let’s take a look at 3 ways in which Privacy Engineering can generate ROI.

#1 - Keep Privacy Compliance Costs In Check

As products evolve and development teams grow, risks grow as do compliance costs. Sprawling and distributed architectures make privacy verifications and remediations more complex. Decisions dating back to times of low process and high growth cause unintended compliance issues across the platform.

Where Privacy Engineering Comes In

Privacy engineers can help build centralized tools that can then be used as services by product engineering teams. This will help create a more predictable and quantifiable compliance process rather than several bespoke, and possibly counterproductive, compliance tools.

That way, your product teams can spend more time building products that delight your customers while proactively meeting your compliance goals.

#2 - Reduce Privacy Review Time to Speed Up Development 

Privacy compliance assessments and verification often introduce friction between privacy and product development teams. Late discovery of risks can delay product releases and slow the organization’s pace of innovation. 

Where Privacy Engineering Comes In

By creating blueprints and templates for risk assessments, privacy engineers can help reduce the time it takes to complete and verify compliance. Privacy engineers can derive insights from these reviews that will help build further automation in the review process. These tools help centralize and accelerate the compliance regime, thereby de-risking product releases and minimizing process hoops. 

That way, you can avoid the false choice between data-driven innovation and data risk, becoming a more mature and scalable business. 

#3 - Shrink Risk Surface

As your products mature and grow, redundant data processes, shadow datastores, and forgotten third party integrations become your reality. Besides increasing risk of inappropriate access and exfiltration, you end up paying higher cloud and vendor costs that do not add value for your company and your customers. 

Where Privacy Engineering Comes In

Privacy engineers will build automated review processes and APIs to help detect data more quickly and accurately. This will help identify patterns and anomalies, helping you fix issues ranging from the “known knowns” to the “unknown unknowns”.

That way, privacy engineers can convert uncertainty into risk and risk into resolution at scale, minimizing unwelcome surprises.

To Close

Privacy engineering is about consistency, efficiency, and transparency. It will help you build privacy into your products at scale by improving data visibility, governance, and developer enablement.

Additional Resources

• See Debra Farber's top 20 privacy engineering resources
• Join Privado’s Privacy Engineering Community to meet privacy engineers of all levels of experience
• Check out Privado and Nishant Bhajaria’s free Technical Privacy Masterclass: 26 lessons and over 2 hours of content