Data Privacy Compliance on the Other Side

Today's data breaches are at an all-time high. The increasing complexity and severity of these breaches cost the world more than $1 trillion in 2020, up 50% from 2018. Consequently, consumer trust in data security is at an all-time low, with 59% of Americans, for example, describing companies that fail to meet the data privacy expectations as "untrustworthy." But there is another side to this fuss about data privacy.


The Other Side

On the other side, companies have made a considerable transition to a hybrid work environment due to Covid-19, accelerating digital transformation initiatives by the equivalent of seven years in just a few months to fulfill consumer demand. However, the increasingly tricky work of preserving data and system security in a complex, dispersed environment is no simple undertaking – and it has grown considerably more difficult due to the same pandemic. And this swift digital transformation is raising concerns about the systems that now have various access points for consumers, partners, and workers, resulting in a larger attack surface.


Not to mention the volume of data that has expanded tremendously since the pandemic, adding to the companies' already complex problem of determining what data they have, how they use it, and where it is kept, further adding pressure to the existing information management solutions. In addition to this, the growing need to unlock data for better decision-making and gain a competitive advantage through business analytics has brought a problematic task ahead of the security and privacy compliance experts to leverage data securely while still allowing the company to function compliantly.


Compliance on the Other Side

According to GDPR Enforcement Tracker, a staggering 55% of GDPR fines imposed on companies are related to poor personal data processing. Whereas 40% of penalties are related to the lawfulness of processing and whether the company has the correct legal basis for using the data and the proper controls in place to ensure usage is aligned with the defined purposes. To put that into perspective, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined the instant messaging app WhatsApp €225 million earlier this year, concluding the inquiry that began in 2018, deciding that the messaging app's privacy policies and managing consumer data were not transparent enough.


In addition to that, there is an increasing focus on employee and workplace PII privacy on the 'other side' as well. When a company acquires employee personal data, it must clearly identify the systems in which the data is housed and how it is managed. That is because employee data is frequently found in unstructured files like emails, chats, and other locations, which is usually not on a priority list for the management and security. To put that into perspective, the popular high-street fashion brand H&M was recently fined not because it wasn't detecting and preserving employee data properly; instead, it was leaving talks in chats and disclosing sensitive information. But there could be a way out of this mess.


The Way Forward

As consumer demand for improved data privacy compliance grows for the 'other side,' backed by a worldwide legislative push, businesses must invest wisely in technological solutions and compliance management software that will enable them to meet compliance and preserve customer confidence without sacrificing performance. When done right, these solutions will make complying with regulatory privacy standards a lot easier while allowing businesses to use personal and sensitive data more ethically and effectively and maintaining the confidentiality of their workers and consumers alike, as witnessed by the following:

The average expected benefit of privacy spending was $2.7 million across all organizations in a survey. Large businesses (those with 10,000 or more employees) put the worth of their benefits at $4.1 million, with 17% putting it at more than $10 million in the same survey. Benefits for small firms (250-499 employees) were also anticipated by the study at $1.8 million.

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