According to a survey on business preparedness for the European General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), 51% of respondents said GDPR would impact their companies, while nearly a third of the respondents didn’t expect the regulations to impact them. In all, 11% were unsure if GDPR would impact their companies and 5% were not familiar with GDPR at all.
The survey of 170 security professionals by Imperva, Inc., a company protecting business-critical data and applications in the cloud and on-premises, was taken at RSA 2017. The event is claimed to be the world’s largest security conference.
GDPR protects the privacy of European citizens and applies to all businesses that hold and process personal data collected in the European Union, regardless of their industry or location. It becomes effective on May 25, 2018. Organisations are focusing on GDPR compliance because fines for certain violations may be up to the greater of €20 million (US$21.87 million) or 4% of total worldwide annual turnover. Companies with significant revenue could face billions of dollars in fines.
The survey also showed an overall lack of urgency among the IT professionals surveyed, with 43% of respondents indicating that they are evaluating or implementing changes in preparation for GDPR, 29% saying that they were not preparing, and another 28% signifying that they were unaware of specific preparations.
“U.S. companies should be evaluating the impact GDPR will have on their data practices, given the major fines for non-compliance,” said Terry Ray, chief product strategist at Imperva.
“Companies need to begin the GDPR legwork now by documenting how personal data is collected and processed in their organisations. From what we’ve seen in working with our clients on GDPR readiness, the projects are complex and involve multiple teams, technologies and systems.”
In asking survey respondents about who is driving GDPR compliance in their organisation, 49% of survey respondents cited their organisation’s legal department, while 8% said the IT department is managing the process.
Imperva provides data discovery and classification tools, user access controls, data masking, data breach detection, data transfer controls and other data compliance solutions that can assist organisations in their GDPR compliance efforts.
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