GDPR is a data privacy act put in place to give more control to the everyday person’s data. If your business is within the European Union or serves customers within this part of the world, then your organization needs to be compliant.
Compliance is not something you can just blissfully ignore either, especially when there are some steep fines involved for anyone that doesn’t adhere to the privacy acts themselves. With that being said, doing everything to prevent that and to remain GDPR-compliant as a business, is essential.
In this guide, you’ll learn more about what GDPR is, why it’s important to remain GDPR compliant, and five tips for staying compliant as a business this year and beyond.
What is GDPR?
GDPR is a data privacy act that was passed by law and came into action on 25th May 2018. As a result of this new data privacy act, many businesses across Europe and those serving European customers had to make swift changes to how they collected, stored, and managed the data they received as a business.
The GDPR data privacy act is considered one of the world’s strongest set of data protection rules in place, which is something to take seriously.
Why is it important to be GDPR compliant?
Without GDPR compliance, you could see your business get into a lot of trouble as a result. While it may only take a day for the auditing process to take place, depending on how big your organization is and the current state of your data setup, the process should start here. It’s worth setting aside a few days though so that you or those responsible for organizing GDPR compliance, are observing and assisting the auditors. Not complying with GDPR rules will result in a fine of up to 20 million euros or up to 4% of the company’s total global turnover in the preceding fiscal year. Whichever is the higher of the two, is what you’ll be fined.
With that being said, it’s not something that you want to avoid doing. There are, of course, other fallouts from not being GDPR compliant. These include a lack of trust and loyalty in your customers and causing avoidable data breaches that could ultimately cause your business to shut down.
Furthermore, regulators want to see exactly how data moves through your systems from the start to the end. This means you must have a clear map of your data flow to show where information comes from and how it changes. Many businesses struggle with this step because their data is spread across different platforms. Knowing how to prove data lineage is a key part of this process. It helps you show auditors that your records are accurate and compliant. Having this proof ready can save your business from heavy fines and long audits.
Five tips to stay GDPR compliant as a business
There are some important tips worth knowing when it comes to staying GDPR-compliant as a business. It’s useful to recognize these and use them to help your business remain compliant as it grows. Whether you’re a new business or not, here are five tips to stay GDPR compliant as a business this year.
- Review your current data management processes.
Firstly, it’s important to review how you manage your data currently and what processes are involved. For any new business, it’s a lot easier to get set up in the right manner but for those who were around already when GDPR was introduced, it meant a lot of effort over the months leading up to its implementation.
Take a look at what type of data management processes need to be put in place in order to bring all of your data together. Ideally, this should be your main goal as it can be helpful to know all of the data held by the company is accessible from one point.
Understand which employees have access to this data and perhaps consider creating levels to the amount of data each employee is able to see and manage.
- Get your business audited for GDPR.
Business auditing is something that many businesses are selected for but it’s something you could have done for many areas of the organization. Data privacy and compliance are one of those needs that you can fulfill with auditing.
It may only take a day for the auditing process to take place depending on how big your organization is and the current state of your data setup. It’s worth setting aside a few days though so that you or those responsible for organizing GDPR compliance, are observing and assisting the auditors.
With an audit, you then have a starting point that you can make use of when it comes to making your business more compliant.
- Conduct GDPR training for employees.
To help keep the business compliant in all areas, GDPR training is a must-have for pretty much all employees within the workplace. The reason for this is that every single employee is likely to interact with some form of data, even if it’s a minimal amount.
It’s also something they’ll need to learn about and understand so that when they encounter this data, they know exactly what to do with it, in order to remain compliant as a result.
With the GDPR law having an impact on many businesses, a lot of businesses weren’t knowledgeable about what was right and wrong. Therefore, there are plenty of training courses and opportunities available for businesses to take full of advantage of nowadays.
- Create an incident response plan.
To help ensure your organization reacts accordingly to a potential data breach, it’s useful to have an incident response plan in place. This is a useful way to trigger the best course of action, should there be a suspected data breach or you realize there is one.
Every employee will have access to this plan and therefore if they need to follow a course of action without the guidance of more senior staff, then they should be able to do so.
It’s all about helping to do the utmost to prevent this potential breach from becoming worse or impacting the business and its customers further.
- Be selective with the data collected.
When it comes to data collection, make sure you’re being selective with that data. You don’t need to know absolutely everything about your customers, only the relevant information that will help push and promote your products or services to the right people.
Try to only collect the data you need, rather than gathering all of the information including who their next-door neighbors are. It’s not needed and if anything, it does put your business in more danger of a data breach or data becoming compromised.
Staying GDPR compliant is important so with that being said, use these tips to make sure your business ramps up its adherence to GDPR and any other data privacy laws in place.
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