In order to continue business practices in a compliant way, organizations seeking to maintain their brand reputation and gain competitive advantage will have to automate their processes and accelerate the pace of their privacy program.
Data protection laws prescribe strict obligations when it comes to collecting, storing, sharing, and managing personal data.
Organizations need to know where their data is stored, who has access to personal information, how long they need to keep it, how to respond to clients’ requests to access their personal data, and how to share data with third parties.
Responding to all those requirements is impossible without transforming and accelerating your privacy program and automating your processes.
However, compliance can seem overwhelming if you try to do everything at once. That’s why sometimes it is better to adopt a phased approach to advance your privacy program.
1. Personal Data Discovery and Classification
Do you know where your data is? Any effort to advance your privacy program must start with understanding where your data is located and what the organization is doing with personal data.
Personal data is not easy to discover. It can be hidden across your systems in structured and unstructured forms or different formats, resulting in an incomplete and erroneous data inventory which can be detrimental to the success of any privacy program.
Additionally, you are not only accountable for the data that you know you have but also for personal data hidden across all your systems.
DPM Data Discovery is an AI-based solution designed to automate personal data discovery and classification, a result of years of research and development & co-funded by the European Union.
- Automatically searches for personal data across all your IT systems
- Uncovers dark data and shadow processing eliminating potential risks
- Extracts sensitive personal information using state-of-the-art machine-learning approaches
- Label personal data in any language and any script
- Extract personal information even from languages for which NER off-the-shelf solutions do not exist
- Works with various scripts (i.e., Cyrillic), eliminating the need to send the data to third parties such as Google, allowing for the entirety of both the discovery process and detected data to be kept safely in-house
- Personal data never has to leave your network
2. Digital Transformation of Privacy Program
Do you have an overview of all processing activities? The second phase is focused on facilitating internal cooperation between departments, building records of processing activities, managing third parties, automating your processes, and allowing your DPO to have continuous insight into all processing activities.
Data Processing Inventory
Data Processing Inventory represents one of the main compliance pillars that will give you an overview of procedures and important information about data processing activities.
It facilitates collaboration between DPO, Legal services, IT, and Marketing, allowing you to divide their responsibilities and work together toward compliance and:
- Manage Records of Processing activities
- Have a visual dashboard of data processing
- Connect processing activities with systems and third parties
- Assign risks to processing activities
Data Subject Requests
All data subject rights require different workflows to register, process, fulfill, and document data subject requests. All while keeping track of response time and assuming you can locate the data in the company’s system.
The Data Subject Request module allows the orchestration and management of data subjects’ requests. It automates the entire process so that the IT systems where the data is stored can execute user requests timely and accurately.
The process becomes an automated workflow giving you clear insight every step of the way.
Third Party Management
Third Party Management allows you to centrally manage information about third parties and guide your partners through vendor management process workflow.
In terms of the GDPR, sharing customer personal data is a risk that needs to be properly mitigated. The challenge is making sure the processing of personal data by a data processor is done responsibly and with respect to data subjects’ rights.
Data Privacy Manager helps companies to better understand the data disclosure basis for each of the data processors. It includes understanding and defining applicable safeguards to prevent abuse or unlawful access or transfer of data.
Risk Management
The Risk Management module gives DPO a high-level overview of risks associated with each processing activity and allows more detailed insight into residual risks behind a particular processing activity by means of linking it to a relevant data protection impact assessment (DPIA).
3. Managing Data Subjects’ Consents and Preferences
How confident are you that your consent records are compliant? Compliant Consent and Preference management is one of the most common challenges.
Contacts can give consents and revoke them on different platforms and in different ways, and it gets complicated to track if you have the correct data to perform your marketing or other activities.
DPM Consent and Preference Management serves as a central place for consent management, giving you real-time insight into all given consents.
It provides real-time insight into the complete personal data lifecycle, from the moment of opt-in to the data removal, with a clear view of activities, so you can demonstrate compliance for any data subject at any level and at any time.
Find out more about how Consent and Preference Management platforms work: What is a Consent Management Platform and Why You Need it.
In combination with the Privacy Portal, an out-of-the-box user interface, it enables you to collect consents from your existing and new customers easily by sharing links and allowing them to set their preferences.
4. Managing the Lifecycle of Personal Data
How long should you keep personal data? Most sets of personal data you process have an expiration date. There are laws and regulations that dictate how long you are obligated to keep data and when you must delete them.
The last phase deals with the automation of data deletion, enabling you to define data retention and data removal operationalization on different data categories.
Identifying and implementing data retention policies can be exhausting when navigating countless local, regional and global data retention obligations, especially for companies operating in multiple markets.
Data Privacy Manager has paired up with filerskeepers to provide a privacy platform with instant access to data retention information across hundreds of countries worldwide, allowing you to resolve compliance issues around defining data retention periods.
filerskeepers works as a Data Privacy Manager add-on that allows you to scan and access all laws that define records retention obligations and statutory limitations for different countries with just a few easy clicks.
Data Privacy Manager
Data Privacy Manager is a modular privacy software created to respond to specific challenges in your compliance process.
Modularity means you can break the entire compliance project into smaller phases, starting with the problem that is critical to your business and then upgrading with different modules as you move on.
