What is GDPR?
A trending topic these days is the latest data regulation that businesses all around the world will soon follow—GDPR. For those of you who don’t already know what GDPR is, let’s start with the basics. GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation and was validated by the European Union (EU)—a political and economic union of 28-member states that are located primarily in Europe—back in 2016. The regulation was designed to protect the personal data belonging to EU citizens. The overall goal of the General Data Protection Regulation is to unify data privacy laws across Europe.
When will it take effect?
After four years of deliberation and two more years of working out the implementations of the new law, companies will officially be required to comply with GDPR beginning on May 25 of this year.
What does this mean?
If you are a company that does business with or collects and stores data from anyone in the EU in any way, here are five things you should know:
- You may need to hire or appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO) to manage the process of protecting this data to ensure that you remain compliant with GDPR.
- Your company could face heavy fines if it fails to comply.
- Fines can be up to 4% of annual global turnover, or the equivalent to €20 million.
- The law applies to all controllers and processors, including cloud-based businesses.
- Any information that could potentially identify a person is considered personal data and must be regulated by GDPR standards.
How can we help?
The changes and additional responsibilities that GDPR will bring companies may appear to be overwhelming for many organizations, but we have a solution that can help. RiskWatch offers risk and compliance management software that can alleviate all your worries by giving you an easy-to-manage platform that will keep track of your risk and compliance efforts. Take a product tour or sign up for our free trial if you want to see how it works.
Additional resource:
GDPR enforcement is right around the corner and there is a lot more to know about it than what I mentioned above.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union
https://www.slideshare.net/CarolineBoscher/gdpr-for-dummies
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