It’s no surprise that some corporate executives are panicked about the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) taking effect on this date. Some have procrastinated about the change, trying to figure out what to do at the last minute to avoid potentially millions of dollars in fines and risk to their reputation. It’s time to view GDPR compliance efforts through a different lens. Not as a scary beast but as an opportunity to effectively manage data to succeed in this increasingly data-driven and customer-centric age.
Effective data management means creating a holistic, intelligent, automated approach to data. Data is a company’s life blood, providing a critical differentiator in the ability to compete on the modern stage. The GDPR requires businesses to govern and protect personal data as well as provide enhanced rights around it. Specifically, GDPR applies to any organization (anywhere in the world) that processes personal data about EU individuals.
Data governance, data privacy and protection rise to the top of the agenda with the GDPR. The foundation for your GDPR journey is your ability to define your policies, processes, and stakeholders for GDPR compliance and then discover the data that you need to protect, monitor and potentially remediate.
Once you’ve defined and discovered your data, your goals may bring about the need to control access to your data, and it may even be beneficial to centralize your data across your organization. Such approaches are, at the outset, strategies for dealing with the new requirements of GDPR. However, adopting them can leave you in a better place overall in terms of data management.
Here are 4 ways companies can not only guide GDPR compliance efforts, but also wring value out of the process.
1. Define, Discover & Protect
Define: For companies to truly wrap their arms around their data, they need to define their policies, identify their stakeholders, and determine what data needs to be governed, specifically, in-scope data for GDPR compliance efforts. An intelligent and automated approach to data governance delivers these results across the enterprise.
Discover & Protect: Data can be found all over the organization, in silos, scattered across many systems, applications and sources. For GDPR compliance efforts. if you don’t know what you have, how can you manage it on behalf of your EU data subjects (which include customers, partners, staff and other individuals)? Companies need to discover sensitive data, identify data movement and analyze risk across all data in an organization. Also, its critical to protect, monitor and remediate risk for sensitive data across the organization with solutions providing data privacy and protection.
Beyond GDPR, data governance and data privacy and protection solutions sets a company up for success. Data becomes a strategic asset and business and IT collaboration increases across the enterprise. Also, as data grows, so does the need for privacy and protection to reduce risk, comply with regulations and fuel business initiatives
2. Control Access
Data Protection: Personal information is often exposed to many different individuals across an organization and its ecosystem. Data masking is one way to address the challenges raised by this exposure to help ensure that data is protected and access is controlled.
Data Minimization: Companies might also want to consider data archiving to purge data in connection with a data subject’s access request or when otherwise required by law.
Beyond GDPR, managing access and preventing unauthorized access of personal data makes good sense for our business and for our customer, employee and partner experience.
3. Manage Consents
Knowing whether a data subject has given consent to use their data to facilitate interactions with them will be critical for GDPR compliance efforts. Being able to effectively manage a data subject’s preferences for how their data is used and for which purposes will depend on a complete 360-degree view of personal data, particularly with a solution such as master data management.
Beyond GDPR, a complete 360-view of personal data means companies have relevant, trustworthy data at their fingertips for business and compliance needs.
4. Support Data Subject Rights
GDPR provides the data subject with specific rights to control who can have their data, and how it can be used, and for what purpose. At any time, when a data subject wants to exercise those rights (for access, correction, cancellation, etc.), companies need to be ready to quickly and effectively respond. A centralized, automated approach that locates data subject across all systems allows organizations to quickly and confidently support these rights.
Doing the work to become compliant has the potential to help companies focus on what matters: taking better care of their data and using it more wisely. And, these efforts will generate benefits and competitive advantage in the long run.
Technology companies, such as Informatica, provide a data-centric approach combined with AI and machine learning to deliver data governance and data privacy and protection solutions for GDPR compliance efforts. Please visit Informatica’s GDPR Compliance solution web page or check out our GDPR For Dummies guide.
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