Security-First Data Engineering: Best Practices for Compliance in Healthcare and Financial Data Pipelines

Abstract

Security-First Data Engineering Framework (SF-DEF) is a holistic approach to intrinsically integrate security, privacy, and compliance in data pipeline solutions in both healthcare and financial industries. With a transition to proactive integration across the data lifecycle, replacing the classical frameworks of reactive security with the enabling of major vulnerabilities in the transformation processes, SF-DEF can meet complex regulatory standards such as HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, and SOX. The framework has seven fundamental security principles, namely data minimization, zero trust architecture, encryption by default, role-based access controls, automated compliance validation, immutable logging and data masking, which provide defense-in-depth protection and simplify compliance management. Experimental assessments in both health and financial settings reveal extensive enhancements in policy violation identification, security efficacy, and audit efficacy under constant review and automated checking, which converts the compliance to an intermittent operational trait.