The Register is reporting today on a new survey of 2000 businesses by YouGov and UK solicitors Irwin Mitchell, which exposes an underlying absence of awareness and urgency about complying with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which takes effect May 25, 2018. Findings show that just threein every ten organizations surveyed (29 percent) have started preparing for the new data governance rules. GDPR places data privacy and protection responsibilities directly on businesses and their data ecosystem partners, and affects organizations worldwide transacting with EU-based users. IT security experts commented below.
Michael Osterman, President at Osterman Research:
“Achieving GDPR compliance is not something the IT department can do alone. Failure to adequately prepare will push firms into a compliance quagmire once May 2018 arrives.”
Pravin Kothari, Founder, Chairman and CEO at CipherCloud GDPR Solution Center:
“Meeting the deadline for such a major shift in IT services, that is GDPR, requires a well-planned roadmap and implementation. ‘GPS’ insight is needed to execute the critical data protection and architecture requirements for GDPR compliance.”
Bob West, Managing Director, Risk Services at CareWorks Tech:
“The vast majority of companies will get breached at some point. The real question is what have you done to protect your data both on-premises or in the cloud so a breach doesn’t become a GDPR violation.”
Attorney Gerard Stegmaier, Partner at Reed Smith(legal expert in corporate governance, intellectual property and internet privacy issues):
“The market impact of the GDPR goes far beyond its geographical reaches – it’s a big deal. While the GDPR harmonizes data protection laws across Europe, local EU data protection authorities are offering inconsistent opinions on enforcement, creating a lot of uncertainty for multi-national companies.”
Fazal Sadikali, Director at Cloud First, Accenture:
“Any business with data in the cloud needs to take adequate precautions and controls. Customer-controlled encryption provides persistent control and helps you meet a wide range of regulations including the GDPR.”
Paul Simmonds, Chief Executive at The Global Identity Foundation:
“If someone else is processing your data the risks of GDPR exposure are huge. Even if it’s encrypted at rest, when it’s processed it gets decrypted and can be accessible in many forms – in memory, logs, cached, temporary storage, or search results.”
