Covid-19 turned out to be the biggest accelerator for digital adoption. The firms which traditionally shunned digital ways of working, have either adopted them or are in the process of kickstarting their digital transformation journey.AMcKinsey survey found evidence of this acceleration.
Will the dust ever settle on the data deceit of the century? Aka the violation of user data by Cambridge Analytica and lack of vigilance on the part of Facebook, which compromised the personal information of 50 million Facebook users. Only time will tell.
Imagine, you purchased an all-expenses paid holiday of a lifetime to the Caribbean, as a surprise gift for your mother on her 60th birthday. Sadly, it never ever reached her even though your trusted holiday provider dispatched the gift way ahead of time.
It’s a daunting task isn’t it? But, that’s what compliance can feel like at the start. GDPR compliance is definitely a business cost. Yet, you'd be missing a trick or two if you view it as only that. In fact, you'd miss five.
Once in a while, we’ve all felt the need for a spring clean of stuff. This fact holds true for data that businesses have on customers.
In this digital age where information proliferates across various online channels, it is important to be mindful of how data is used and stored, as it can have serious implications.
Which is why, getting rid of clutter can feel good and save huge storage costs, especially where data is concerned.
Pave the way for Data Protection
As GDPR compliance looms large on the horizon, businesses must steer clear of hoarding irrelevant data. Data minimisation, a key GDPR principle will serve as an important measure for facilitating data protection by design and default. The regulation defines data minimisation as ‘adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed.’
Take the example of our retail customer who experienced a major space crunch on its enterprise data platform. As a strategic IT partner, we investigated the cause of the storage loss in order to implement measures for freeing up space on the platform.
Upon interviewing a cross section of business and IT stakeholders, we discovered that a lot of data was unnecessarily hoarded. Key findings of the investigation included:
- Unspecified data owners, resulting in orphan data within the system
- Regulatory concerns leading to data hoarding
- Departmental silos resulting in multiple copies for different reporting requirements
Look at it as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, when GDPR comes into force on May 25, 2018, your customers can exercise their ‘right to information’, ‘right to erasure’ and ‘right to data portability.’
If your personal privacy was violated you’d be really upset. And rightly so, as your right to privacy is precious. In the business world, it is the onus on businesses to ensure the security of customer data. As the unlawful usage of data can ruin the relationship that enterprises have with customers.
Take for instance, the public sector, which is growing extensively connected. This could be because numerous government bodies share citizen data for civilian convenience, analytics and cost-control.
To further complicate matters, GDPR compliance is creating huge challenges in these connected environments. For example, if PID (Patient Identifiable Data) is shared across departments or organisations without any governance, there are obvious risks around not having a common view of controls, which lead to data leakage risks.
It’s touted as the Holy Grail to encourage data compliance, customer retention and nurture by most in the industry. In fact, in our April blog, Graham explains how financial institutions can use the requirement to comply with new legislation around personal data collection and processing as an opportunity to regain consumer confidence.