GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation is a directive that requires different businesses to protect the employees’ personal data and privacy for any transactions that happen within European Union (EU) member states. And not being able to comply could cause your company dearly.
So if you’re looking for more details on how to be GDPR compliant in a sustainable way and protect your digital assets in a data-driven society, then you’ve come to the right place.
Read more as we tackle this topic in today’s post.
A Practical Approach To Making GDPR Compliance More Manageable
Here are the steps you need to follow to make your business GDPR compliant:
Access – The first thing that you have to do is to gain access to your company’s data resources. It doesn’t matter what technology you’re using now if it’s structured data or traditional data warehouses, because what you need to do is to audit and investigate all the personal data that’s being stored within the cloud or hard drive(s).
Seamless access to your company’s data sources is essential so you can build an inventory and evaluate the risk or exposing personal data and enforce privacy regulations in your enterprise. And you have to prove you know where the personal data is stored to ensure GDPR compliance.
Data Identification – Once you’ve access your data resources, you have to inspect and identify what types of data are being stored so you can group them into categories based on data elements (names, social security numbers, email addresses, etc.) to make an inventory. The cataloging can’t be manual since you’ll be dealing with volumes of data. Also, you’ll have to inspect the level of data quality like the standardization, data quality rules, and patterns recognition to meet the GDPR compliance requirements.
Govern – Understanding personal data lets you define what it means and share this knowledge across different departments in your company. And the privacy rules you made must be properly documented and disseminated across all business lines to ensure the data will only be used by personnel proper according to the nature and the security permissions given to the employee or user group.
More importantly, roles of every employee must be properly defined to maintain the required control levels as stated in the GDPR compliance guidelines.
Protect – Once the inventory and rules are established, you have to set the ideal level of data protection for your business. And you do this by pseudomization, anonymization, and encryption. The right technique must be applied based on the rights of the user to ensure the growing needs of your business in terms of forecasting, analysis, querying, and reporting won’t be compromised.
Audit – And for the last part of GDPR compliance so you’ll be able to show regulators in your report that clearly shows:
- You are familiar with the personal data in your business and where it is located.
- You were able to get proper consent from all individuals involved.
- You were able to develop a process for addressing certain situations like data breach and the likes.
We recommend you consult a GDPR laywer regarding this matter so you’ll be able to know that you are doing the right steps to ensure your business is GDPR compliant.