When a customer, private individual or an employee trust you with their personal data, you have a legal and ethical duty to protect them and uphold digital privacy. But many businesses are still not up to speed when it comes to minimizing compliance risk and meeting even the most basic GDPR requirements and ISO standards.
Just about all businesses – from the local sports club to major international corporations – process personal data to some extent, and are therefore subject to GDPR. In addition, there are also industry-specific requirements that businesses in very tightly regulated sectors have to comply with to protect digital privacy.
In other words: Regardless of its size, type or sector, your business has a legal and ethical duty to manage data flows properly in order to avoid data privacy breach. The consequences for the company of not doing so can be severe: From a tarnished reputation, to fines amounting to millions.
What is regulatory compliance?
In brief, regulatory compliance is about obeying the applicable laws, rules and standards with the appropriate risk management.
To ensure data privacy compliance you must fulfill all legal requirements, regardless of sector or the markets you operate in. That requires knowledge and understanding of which specific policies, rules and documentation apply, and what they mean for your business area. To do so, you need the right procedures, processes and roles in place. You need to ensure those processes are well established within the business, and that you comply with them, and in particular, can prove that you do so.
Compliance risk management has become a discipline that your business has to be able to master.
Digital privacy is lagging behind
Even though the Danish Data Protection Act and GDPR have been in force for several years, businesses of all sizes and in different sectors are still not up to speed with the rules. Even businesses that seem at first glance to have implementation and processes in place, are lagging behind when it comes to ensuring digital privacy.
There has been several examples of businesses failing to comply with current regulation. They have failed to manage the processing of personal data and thereby ensuring data privacy compliance. Fines amounting into millions are often the result of inadequate compliance risk management. What all those cases have in common is, that they originate from non-compliance with very basic requirements, that have not been fulfilled. An example could be, not ensuring updated data on customers, employees and even suppliers. Another example is managing the enormous amounts of data spread over documents on drives, in locally saved folders or in emails.
The key to managing governance risk and compliance framework lies in establishing and maintaining overview, responsibility and processes. The fact that it is still a problem for many organizations, is the lack of training and knowledge resulting in human error and events old habits and working methods are hard to change.
