The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most famous example of this. The legislation mandates that all companies have serious data privacy processes which respect the rights of EU citizens to control their personal information. But rushing into attempting compliance is not good enough. Regulations such as the GDPR are bound to become even stricter and more complex. Addressing compliance with one piece of legislation will not be enough without both strong data infrastructure and positive company culture around data heading into the future. Here’s how we think you can drive a data privacy program that will remain successful in the long-term.

Making Privacy Policy, Reality

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to compliance, but any successful data privacy compliance program will entail the following:

  1. Company Data Culture
    Data doesn’t manage itself. Your people are the ones who complete every data security and privacy process. Data culture is the single most important factor in realising data privacy policy. It’s impossible to be compliant if your people aren’t clear on the importance of privacy, and able to effectively manage it. But such a culture cannot emerge spontaneously. Data privacy processes and responsibilities must be democratized throughout the organization. A social norm has to be constructed within the business, where everyone who works with data participates in the privacy protection process.

     

  2. Proper Process Workflows
    If you’re to democratize privacy processes and responsibilities, you absolutely must create clear, consistent and repeatable workflows. These workflows provide your people with the guardrails for any sensitive privacy or compliance processes. Handling sensitive data will never be unguided. Nobody should be operating in the dark. Put simply, there’s no way to create the kind of company data culture required for compliance if your people don’t have access to simple, effective process workflows. Given we’re talking about data privacy, these processes must also be secure.

  3. Centralization and Scale
    Getting serious about privacy means you’re going to have to deal with a variety of regulations. If it’s already not the case, it’s just naive to think that your company will only be subject to a single set of regulations with respect to data privacy and security. This means two things will be necessary for any successful data privacy program. First, you’re going to need a centralised way to govern privacy policies and ensure privacy requirements are being met across the entire enterprise. Second, this central privacy platform will need to be scalable to allow for the development of existing regulations and the addition of new ones. This will future-proof your privacy operations both from new regulations, and the addition of new internal IT systems.

You’re going to need the right Platform

To put these features of a successful data privacy program into place, you need the right technology for the job. Alex Solutions provides a self-managing data platform for workforce productivity to some of the world’s largest companies in the most aggressively regulated industries. When talking about centralization and scale, you can’t look past the most comprehensive and configurable data sensitivity connectors in the world. Alex automates data location and sensitivity scanning across your entire enterprise application and data systems, centralising all the information you need to get compliant in the one platform. But this isn’t a static central store of information – it’s a working platform. From here, data privacy processing can be democratized, allowing you to move away from compliance being the domain of just a few experts. Alex has all the building blocks you need to build a serious company culture around data. All privacy regulations can be represented within the Alex Intelligent Business Glossary. Here, not only will policies be accessible, but privacy process structures can be made visible. These can be converted into automated process workflows which guide your people in achieving every aspect of compliance with a particular regulation. Alex Automated Data Lineage makes these workflows and sensitivity detections actionable by enabling rapid root cause and impact analyses and enabling remedial actions.

All of this makes Alex the perfect foundation on which to build your automated data privacy operations. If you want a free, personalized demonstration of how Alex can take you beyond manual privacy processes, request a demo with our friendly, expert team below!

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