GDPR Compliance Software

GDPR refers to the EU General Data Protection Regulation that came into effect in May 2018. Under GDPR regulations, citizens in the EU are guaranteed protections regarding their data and privacy. GDPR pertains to how businesses handle an individual’s data and the security systems and protocols used by businesses. Any company that markets goods or services to EU residents, regardless of whether the company is physically located in the EU, must comply with GDPR requirements or potentially face penalties for violations.

For businesses and individuals operating in the EU, GDPR compliance covers three main elements:

1. The collection of personal data such as name, email, and IP addresses
2. The operations or set of operations performed on personal data
3. How the business is minimizing and protecting the use of personal data

Various obligations are imposed upon a business to comply with GDPR. Organizations, or data controllers, can also be liable for the work of third-party users and must review the data practices of their vendors and contractors.  

GDPR also requires certain companies to assign a data protection officer (DPO) responsible for overseeing data security and implementing GDPR compliance. 

Best practices for demonstrating GDPR compliance will involve more than just updating websites and software. For most organizations, cultivating more transparent data practices will involve changing the mindsets of key personnel in HR, IT, marketing, and security—everyone who interacts with consumer data. GDPR compliance will likely involve building new mechanisms and conducting an internal review of products, services, tools, providers, and relations with external collaborators.  

In addition to GDPR for EU citizens and residents, several other governments have enacted strict data privacy regulations. These include:

• Brazil – Lei Geral de Proteçao de Dados Pessoais (LGPD)
• Australia – Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme amendment to the Privacy Act
• California – California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
• Japan – Act on the Protection of Personal Information Act
• South Korea – Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA)
• Thailand – Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA)
• India – Personal Data Protection Bill (PDPB)
• South Africa – Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA)
• China – Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL)
• Canada – Digital Charter Implementation Act (DCIA)

Most of the requirements outlined in GDPR are intended to realign business practices to comply with six principles:

1. Privacy Policies / Legal
2. Data Protection / Security
3. Data Subject Rights
4. Data Management / Mapping
5. Awareness / Training
6. Data Breach Notification

GDPR compliance regulations aim to create a higher standard for data protection, privacy, and security for personal data from the EU in the following ways: 

• GDPR expands the territorial scope of EU requirements, extending it to businesses outside the EU that handle personal data of EU citizens.
• GDPR requires both the protection of personal data and evidence of the protection measures for both physical and digital locations where personal data is collected, processed, stored, or transmitted.
• Under GDPR, businesses must be able to identify when personal data is exposed or becomes compromised.

To demonstrate they are GDPR compliant, organizations should complete assessments, identify compliance gaps, and take steps to address these gaps. After identifying gaps between current procedures and GDPR requirements, companies should develop operational policies regarding consent, procedures and technical measures to help safeguard data and monitor third-party compliance issues for which they may be liable. They should also conduct an inventory of data flow to determine the types of data they hold and conduct risk assessments of existing security measures while analyzing the likelihood of a data breach.

GDPR compliance software is designed to help organizations fulfill GDPR requirements proactively, before violations occur. Unlike other policy mandates, GDPR does not recommend specific protocols or controls that can be easily added, but a rigorous internal review and the implementation of new mechanisms.

GDPR compliance solutions can help businesses and their data protection teams help ensure GDPR readiness and accelerate audits by providing:

• Thorough system monitoring, often using log data, to catch potential data breaches
• Notifications for security breaches or potential problems, including custom alerts for security issues that could affect GDPR compliance
• Reporting capabilities to improve internal oversight or prove compliance to auditors

Effective compliance software can make it easier to keep systems in compliance on an ongoing basis and makes it possible to demonstrate compliance through auditor-ready reports.

GDPR compliance software works by providing businesses with the tools they need to manage internal access to sensitive data.

GDPR compliance checkers can help you:

• Understand your personal data: You should first take inventory of the data you handle that could be subject to GDPR compliance. GDPR rules are wide-reaching when it comes to personal data—you may need to consider individual IP addresses and cookie data, along with typical data points like name, identification number, and address. A GDPR compliance tool can help you quickly detect unauthorized changes to critical files and folders to help prevent data breaches. 
• Manage internal user access: While external threats can affect personal data, you’re just as likely to break GDPR regulations due to internal threats. That includes both accidental and malicious user activity. GDPR compliance checkers can help you manage users proactively so you’re less likely to expose data. GDPR tools can also help improve your accuracy in assigning permissions to end users with features like automated templates. In addition, using software to manage user access is critical because admins can better understand what user accounts exist and what resources those users are currently able to access to better track high-risk accounts (that is, those with high levels of permissions), so that if suspicious access does occur, admins can investigate that activity as soon as possible. 
• Run compliance reports: Automated reporting offers two major advantages. First, it supplies admins with fast, clear overviews of user activity and permissions settings. You can filter custom criteria so that reports give you exactly the information you need to know. Secondly, automatic reports can be shared with auditors when it’s time to report on compliance or support forensics investigations. When created within GDPR software, these reports can be designed to highlight information relevant to GDPR regulations. 

Access Right Manager is built to help businesses accelerate and simplify GDPR compliance by automating risk assessment, generating reports to demonstrate compliance, and helping support your ability to develop processes to handle data subject access requests.

GDPR compliance requires that companies conduct an internal audit and readiness assessment of data access to address any security issues. Access Right Manager is designed to improve oversight for user access by enabling administrators to monitor and audit data access through a user management system. Administrators receive a detailed record of which accounts accessed which data flows, what changes were made, and when. 

Access Right Manager can also help you prevent costly data breaches through visualizations of account permissions. By displaying SharePoint permissions in a tree structure, ARM user management system is built to provide clear sightlines into who has permission to what. Monitoring is made easier with quick insight into unauthorized access and changes to Windows file servers.

Manually generating compliance reports can be time-consuming. ARM helps by automating this process. ARM enables admins to log access activity and more easily demonstrate compliance by generating reports of user access, which can support greater reporting accuracy and help streamline audits.

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