English

Analyzing the Impact of GDPR on Storage Systems

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2019-05-17 v3 Databases

Abstract

The recently introduced General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is forcing several companies to make significant changes to their systems to achieve compliance. Motivated by the finding that more than 30% of GDPR articles are related to storage, we investigate the impact of GDPR compliance on storage systems. We illustrate the challenges of retrofitting existing systems into compliance by modifying Redis to be GDPR-compliant. We show that despite needing to introduce a small set of new features, a strict real-time compliance (eg logging every user request synchronously) lowers Redis' throughput by 20x. Our work reveals how GDPR allows compliance to be a spectrum, and what its implications are for system designers. We discuss the technical challenges that need to be solved before strict compliance can be efficiently achieved.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.04880,
  title  = {Analyzing the Impact of GDPR on Storage Systems},
  author = {Aashaka Shah and Vinay Banakar and Supreeth Shastri and Melissa Wasserman and Vijay Chidambaram},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.04880},
  year   = {2019}
}