How to prepare your business for GDPR?

In today’s data empowered world, maintaining data privacy and security has become alarmingly important. Every other day, millions of personal information are shared all over the internet. But how secure is our personal data? Lately, the Facebook — Cambridge Analytica data breach incident has revealed some major flaws in the security and confidentiality of our personal data. As the magnitude of stolen data is steadfastly increasing, we can see that more data privacy policies are being implemented around us.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new data privacy policy for the European Union (EU) citizens, that intends to regulate the access and usage of their personal and sensitive data by online parties. The GDPR will affect all businesses that handle the data of EU citizens. Sources cite that any organization that does not comply with the new GDPR policy can face fines up to 20 million or 4% of their annual worldwide turnover.

Prepare your business for GDPR

As seen above, businesses can face grieving consequences if they do not follow the GDPR guidelines while accessing personal data of EU citizens. Even if yours is a global website instead of a European centered one, you still fall within the purview of the regulation.

In such cases, how can your business prepare for GDPR to prevent any misfortunes in the form of fines and penalties?

Data Audits & Reviews

Check if your organization qualifies for GDPR. If your organization has centers in the EU region, sells goods or services to the EU citizens or monitors the behavior of EU citizens, then you should be GDPR compliant. Conduct audits and analysis to see how your website presently accesses, utilizes and saves the users’ data. Analyse what type of data is collected, the purpose of data collection, how and with whom it will be shared and who has access to it.

Appoint a Data Protection Officer

A Data Protection Officer (DPO) monitors, tracks and regulates all data activities within your organization. The DPO acts as the single point of contact to the supervisory authorities. If you already have an in-house expert in GDPR, then these regulations shouldn’t worry you much. Otherwise, consult experts who can help you to understand the new data protection policy and make your online portals compliant with GDPR.

Adapt Privacy by Design

Include the concepts of privacy from the initial stages of your application development. It should happen in such a way that all privacy controls and measures are implemented in the design phase itself. This way businesses can ensure that their online assets are GDPR compliant from the day one and reduce future risks.

Ask for Consent

While requesting access to personal information, always provide your users with an option to grant or reject consent. Do not display pre-ticked checkboxes or complicated messages on the screen. If the same data is used for multiple purposes, ask consent separately for each purpose in a simple and easy format. If a user wishes to withdraw their information, it should be eradicated completely from your website.

Measures for Website Security

Ensure that your website has an SSL certificate and has activated HTTPS for safety. Brute force attacks and data breaches are some of the last things you ever want to happen on your website. Get your website running on the latest software and initiate the necessary steps to protect your users’ data.

Be Careful with Cookies

If your website uses cookies to track online activity of users’, ask their consent. There are three types of cookies seen such as necessary, statistical and marketing. Separate checkboxes should be provided to allow or reject consent to using each type of the cookie.

Data Breach Notifications

If there is a potential threat to your customers’ data, there should be proper notification mechanisms to alert the concerned authority. In this case, it will be the Data Protection Officer first, who should inform the security breach to higher authorities within 72 hours. If the data breach can affect the users, they should be informed as well.

Why SayOne to make your business GDPR compliant?

With GDPR in practice, businesses are vested with the responsibility of duly managing and distributing their customers’ data. Here, it is of great importance to appoint the right Data Protection Team to ensure that you maintain your online presence credibly. SayOne is today seen as one of the early movers to have helped enterprises become GDPR ready. We understood the need for sustainable GDPR compliance and began our journey to help other enterprises in a time when there was limited information available.

Our team of experts has got the workaround for your existing online portals to be GDPR compliant. From understanding the nature of your business and industries you cater to, we assess if you are GDPR compliant and identify the GDPR policies that should be implemented on your website. SayOne has the adequate GDPR knowledge, technical skillset and provisions to execute these changes successfully for your applications. If it is a new website or application, we initiate GDPR practices from the design phase to eliminate any scope of adversities.

To find out more about our GDPR plans for your business, speak to our experts!

Originally published at www.sayonetech.com.

How to prepare your business for GDPR? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.