Expert Comments on Privacy Shield Agreement Approved By European Governments

Following the news that European governments have approved the Privacy Shield agreement, Richard Lack, Director of Sales EMEA at Gigya commented below. For some background, Gigya works with brands such as Coca-Cola and Dell to help them establish mutually beneficial relationships with their customers and correctly store customer data.

Richard Lack, director of sales, EMEA at Gigya:

With the EU-US Privacy Shield now finalised and approved by European governments, privacy compliance is now a necessity for all global brands. However, research has shown that 95 per cent of large enterprises are only “somewhat aware” of their legal obligations when it comes to complying with today’s privacy regulations.

With this in mind, it’s important that businesses of all sizes understand the cost of non-compliance, as well as the price of manually managing policies in-house. For example, a recent Data Protection Compliance Report by IT Governance shows that monetary penalties were more severely enforced for online breaches and cyber-attacks, costing companies an average of £52,308 per incident.

But lawmakers and institutions are not the only ones holding businesses accountable when it comes to data privacy – companies must also answer to their customers. As data becomes the linchpin of business success, consumers are growing increasingly wary of how their personal information is being used.

As a response to the changing privacy environment, and the challenges involved with keeping customer data secure and legally compliant, many companies are now evaluating cloud-based customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions, which can offload much of the cost, resources and risk from businesses when it comes to maintaining privacy compliance. A CIAM platform helps manage customer authentication, identities and data, saving significant development time and resources that would otherwise be spent managing regional privacy regulations. It also gives businesses the flexibility to structure registration forms and flows in keeping with regulations when implementing social login.

There’s no doubt about it: privacy can be pricey, but solutions exist to help businesses operate in the best possible way and not rack up sizeable costs because of non-compliance.