Do you know what’s funny? Waiting for a storm to hit you. And what’s even funnier, when you know the precautions and still don’t apply it. Though these five data strategies will be enough and you’ll be all covered.
GDPR is now a common need for every business because the enterprises must understand global privacy regulations and GDPR Compliance Requirement. In accordance with the UK GDPR compliance directory, companies still scuffle for the appliance of data strategies. Because these strategies will eventually be made you deal with challenging regulations, however, the negation for compliance can jeopardise you by putting potential risks like losing your customer’s data. So not it’s time to take some action.
Let’s proceed to the data protection journey, and find out what these five strategies have for us
Have complete know-how of your data
It is true that data management is much fatigued but makes sure it doesn’t come in your way of GDPR compliance. So if managing data is a tedious activity, you still can’t back off and do know what type of data you hold. If we go digging, the unstructured data can be more problematic to handle, because anyone can have access to it. So many people can use, copy and change it according to their will. Therefore, companies containing personal data in bulk, think they own it; however, they are custodians merely.
Data mapping, pinpointing personal data, its content and its risk profile, makes stakeholders comprehend the ‘before and after’ of a breach. And, this is the result that assists in predicting, the lacking, which can bring a loss and a potential impact. There will be consequences anyway, be prepared and make sure your data protection team has a backup plan.
Decrease the problem people face
Every single person in your company is accountable for the data you hold about millions. Either it is a C-level in the boardroom, all the way to the individual teams that help to do business. “You can’t patch people”, a key factor to bear in mind. No quick fix exists if employees under you are struggling with their role in good information governance.
Businesses do rely on the employees, but still, they can be your weakest link, in spite of the fact, do not stop training them, as this will benefit you in the future. Educating your employees is the best way to be compliant with GDPR. Do not impose things on them, but instead let them have their required awareness and training to carry on the process legitimately. Do check that the data they are processing is secure to keep data breach away or at least to the minimum. Your priority should be to develop a “no blame” environment. This will comfort your staff because they will not be fearful of reporting a breach.
Don’t let your data take over
Data is center attention for your business, do not let it control you; in fact, you control it. It’s imperative to keep in mind that encryption does not equal infosec, and security does not equal data protection, so don’t fall into the trap of thinking this is the case. To ensure that your valued data is only being used for the intended purpose, take precautions, including controls on copy creation. As you know that it is not rocket science to create databases for ‘dev and test’ processes, where anyone can anonymously use the data. Moreover, copy controls are made to intercept un-encrypted or un-anonymized data finding its way onto open cloud shares, which is a common way for breaches to happen.
As far as personal devices, such as mobiles, laptops, and USBs are concerned, their data must also be monitored. They must have an in-house backup data to instantly recover if in any case, the device gets lost or stolen. And it will also be aware of risk factors for your data protection team.
Remote encryption or wiping personal data on those personal devices, which means you know where you are in regard to reporting to the supervisory authority should a breach occur.
Automation is the way forward
As mentioned earlier, unstructured data is the most vulnerable and hard to deal with manually. You will find 70-80% of data unstructured in a single typical organisation. And, it eventually ends up in endless management and breach-related headaches. Business does not have an only person to handle this data, and this becomes even more challenging.
The data inventory and mapping tools are always available. Still, they cannot recover data from laptops, across heterogeneous on-premises systems and the cloud, including SaaS offerings like Office 365.
Governance is not a roadblock
Data protection processes will nestle neatly within your more extensive governance program. Compliance is all about meeting data protection regulations, set by governing bodies. However, the governance encompasses all manner of processes and procedures above and beyond mere legal compliance. USP can be governance; it makes it easy to understand and clear regarding your use of customers’ data and also can put you in a trusted position amongst your competitors. After all, reputation is built in a year and can be lost in seconds. Only a few businesses can stand back after a massive data breach, but still, they lose their customer’s trust, which took years to build.
By the implementation of these strategies, a business can work by being compliant. They can also exhibit that the data processes are accurate and safe. Gaining full visibility of your data and automating its management reflect your planning for bad times. This permits you to make your employees a primary focus. Similarly, your data will work for you, not against you.
Make you compliance issues to the least with us
Seers UK helps organisations to handle the challenges of GDPR compliance. Our experts can help your firm with a variety of best-practice GDPR solutions, from evaluating your current state of compliance and developing a remediation roadmap, through to implementing a best-fit privacy compliance framework. Your compliance with our mission.
