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Solution Accelerator for Data Compliance

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If you’re responsible for data compliance in your financial organization, you might be considering critical questions such as:

  • Are your data management systems robust enough to ensure regulatory compliance at every point where data enters or moves within your environment?
  • How effectively are you identifying, classifying, and protecting sensitive information, such as personal, financial, or transactional data, across all business units and regions?
  • What measures do you have in place to prevent unauthorized access, accidental exposure, or improper retention of regulated data, especially as privacy laws and industry regulations evolve?
  • Do you have deep visibility into your data flows, so you can quickly respond to regulatory requests, audits, or data subject inquiries, and prove compliance across jurisdictions?

Traditional compliance approaches often fall short in managing the complexity and pace of today’s regulatory landscape; especially when handling high-volume, multi-jurisdictional data. That’s why Splunk has developed the Solution Accelerator for Data Compliance. This tool is designed to empower you to tackle these challenges head-on. It automates the enforcement of compliance policies as data is ingested, enabling you to maintain trust, meet regulatory obligations, and confidently support your business’s growth.

Challenges

In today’s digital-first financial services landscape, the volume, velocity, and value of data are unparalleled. However, with opportunity comes obligation; financial institutions must comply with a rapidly evolving patchwork of data protection and privacy regulations, or face severe penalties and reputational damage. Ensuring data compliance is no longer just a check-box exercise; it is a foundational pillar of customer trust, operational agility, and business continuity.

The Splunk Solution Accelerator for Data Compliance empowers financial organizations to confidently onboard, process, and manage data in accordance with the world’s most stringent regulatory requirements. By leveraging Splunk’s Data Management solutions (ingest actions, Splunk Edge Processor, and Splunk Ingest Processor), institutions can automate compliance controls at the earliest point in the data lifecycle to reduce risk and streamline audit readiness.

The image below shows the landing page you'll see when opening the Solution Accelerator for Data Compliance.

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The regulatory landscape: Managing complexity across regions

Financial institutions are subject to an expanding array of regulations, each with its own scope, controls, and enforcement mechanisms. The challenge intensifies for organizations operating across borders, where overlapping and sometimes conflicting requirements must be reconciled in real time.

  • GDPR (EU): Requires strict consent, data minimization, and “right to be forgotten” controls for EU residents, with global reach.
  • GLBA (US): Mandates protection and transparency for consumers’ nonpublic personal financial data.
  • PCI DSS (Global): Enforces robust controls for credit card data, with regional variations and local enforcement.
  • SOX (US): Imposes rigorous internal control, retention, and audit requirements on financial records.
  • CCPA/CPRA (California): Provides California residents rights over personal data access, deletion, and sale.
  • PIPEDA (Canada), APPI (Japan): Further regional requirements around privacy, consent, and cross-border transfers.
  • Data residency laws: Increasingly, countries mandate that certain data stay within their national borders, creating additional complexity for global firms.

Each of these regulations can apply simultaneously to a single transaction or customer record, with enforcement actions and fines that can reach millions of dollars. Compliance must be a proactive and ongoing process, especially as new rules emerge and existing ones evolve.

Data onboarding: The first line of defense 

The journey to compliance begins as soon as data enters your organization. Uncontrolled ingestion of raw, unfiltered data can expose sensitive information, violate regional regulations, and complicate downstream compliance and audit efforts.

Splunk data management services help institutions take control from the very first step:

  • Ingest actions: Transform, redact, or route data based on compliance policies as it is ingested. The image below shows an architecture overview.unnamed - 2025-07-21T101254.401.png
  • Splunk Edge Processor: Enforce compliance at the data source or branch, ensuring sensitive or regulated data is handled appropriately before it leaves the origin environment. The image below shows an architecture overview.unnamed - 2025-07-21T101308.184.png
  • Splunk Ingest Processor: Centralize and scale processing to normalize, tag, and enrich data for downstream compliance monitoring and reporting. The image below shows an architecture overview.
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Splunk data management services: Automating compliance at scale

Ingest actions

  • Real-time data redaction and masking: Strip or obfuscate sensitive information (for example, credit card numbers or SSNs) to meet privacy requirements before indexing.
  • Data filtering and routing: Exclude non-compliant data or route records based on regulatory jurisdiction or business needs.
  • Policy enforcement: Apply transformation policies dynamically as regulations change.

Splunk Edge Processor

  • Local compliance enforcement: Process and transform data at the edge, on-premises, or in-region, ensuring that only compliant data is transmitted to central platforms.
  • Data minimization: Remove or tokenize personally identifiable information (PII) at the source to adhere to regional privacy laws and minimize exposure.

Splunk Ingest Processor

  • Data normalization and tagging: Enrich incoming data with compliance tags (for example, “GDPR,” “PCI”) for downstream tracking and reporting.
  • Field extraction and audit logging: Ensure all relevant data fields are captured and logged in accordance with regulatory requirements.

The image below shows the Introduction to Data Compliance Implementation landing page, where you'll start to set up these automations.

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Building a data compliance pipeline with the Splunk platform

  1. Identify and classify sensitive data: Automatically discover and inventory data sources, detecting PII and regulated fields.
  2. Define regional ingest policies: Use ingest actions to redact, filter, and enrich data based on region-specific compliance rules.
  3. Deploy edge processors for local enforcement: Ensure local controls are applied before data leaves its point of origin, reducing compliance risk and cloud egress.
  4. Implement Splunk Ingest Processor workflows: Centralize advanced processing, normalization, and compliance tagging for all incoming data streams.
  5. Monitor, audit, and report: Leverage dashboards, alerts, and audit logs to monitor compliance posture and generate audit-ready reports for regulators. The image below shows an example of the Monitor Data Schema Consistency dashboard, one of the dashboards available in the Solution Accelerator.

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Benefits of the Solution Accelerator approach

  • Accelerated time-to-compliance: Pre-packaged templates and policy-driven controls minimize setup time and enable rapid adaptation to regulatory changes.
  • Consistent policy enforcement: Automated, rule-based actions ensure compliance across all data sources, regardless of location or format.
  • Audit readiness: Comprehensive logging and reporting streamline regulatory audits and internal reviews.
  • Scalability and flexibility: Adapt to new jurisdictions and changing regulations without re-architecting data pipelines.
  • Reduced risk: Proactive controls minimize accidental exposure or retention of non-compliant data.

Example use cases

  • GDPR compliance: Redact or pseudonymize EU customer data on ingestion; tag events for data subject access requests.
  • PCI DSS enforcement: Mask cardholder data in payment transactions before indexing or storage.
  • Data residency: Ensure sovereign customer data never leaves national borders by processing with Splunk Edge Processor.

Next steps

Visit the Solution Accelerator for Data Compliance on GitHub. If you need help or assistance with the Solution Accelerator, reach out to your Splunk Sales Team.

In addition, these resources might help you understand and implement this guidance: