Data Privacy Journey and its Importance

Governing and safeguarding personal information has become one of the key regulatory requirements across various industries. Basically, compliance with Privacy Acts is based on the specific facts of an organization’s business, operations and use of data. This article provides a set of best practices and food for thought that may be useful in the development of an organization’s data protection and compliance efforts.

You could be exposing your company to significant business risk while working on processing employees/customers personal data. With a keen awareness of the impact of personal data collection and use and amplified regulation, many companies are probing ways to effectively collect personal information throughout its lifespan. The number of global data privacy laws such as GDPR, PIPEDA, CCPA, PDPA is also growing.

Data Privacy Acts and Laws came into force to enhance the protection of personal data. Data Privacy Act is a law that pursues to protect all forms of personal information, be it private, personal, or sensitive data that’s processed or shared. This act is also meant to cover both natural and juridical persons involved in the processing of personal information. These data protections or privacy acts released as per various local legal and regulatory standards apply to any organization (anywhere in the world) that processes the personal data of data subjects.

What are the various types of Data Risks?

Data Privacy Model

Predators take advantage by exploiting personal data, intruding networks, hacking passwords, breaching access controls, and especially utilizing the open network used during COVID-19. The risks and costs associated with data security breaches are enormous. This makes data security among the biggest concerns today, and a problem for which modernization and communication are of utmost importance.

Potential Privacy Compliance Gap within Organizations

• Lack of knowledge and awareness of Privacy Acts’ requirements

• Lack of record keeping mechanism on how data is being collected, processed, transferred, and retained
• Lack of Data Privacy Governance Body, DPO and accountability framework
• Lack of a Privacy Impact Assessment that identifies and mitigates privacy risks
• Existing processes, policies and procedures and contracts that do not incorporate data protection/data privacy requirements
• Lack of responsive data breach reporting mechanism
• Meeting data protection legal and regulatory compliance
• Using old legacy systems or inadequate disposal of old hardware
• Unsecured mobile devices
• Unrestricted access to computers

Key considerations for organizations

• Evaluate organization’s awareness of Data Privacy Acts and Data Protection policies, including first and second line of business
• Assess organization’s current privacy governance model
• Evaluate organization’s compliance program against privacy requirements
• Assess organization’s ability to timely report data breaches and respond to data subjects’ requests
• Incorporate privacy compliance in the audit framework

As organizations become accustomed to growing regulations across the globe, GAVS has developed a robust privacy function for customizing the needs and changes expected in the current emerging trends. We have a 24/7 inhouse DPO (Data Privacy Office) which primarily focuses on reducing the risks of data loss and data misuse, while improving compliance with data privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA, PDPA and HIPAA. We also work on keeping ourselves updated with the current regulations and changes in demand to implement a strong data privacy solution, highlighting the benefits of a properly deployed data-centric solution for our customers across the globe.

GAVS Privacy Model

GAVS’ data privacy services and solutions are designed to help organizations protect their information over the entire data lifecycle – from acquisition to disposal. Our service offerings help organizations adhere to data privacy best practices and regulatory compliance in a constantly evolving threat environment and regulatory landscape. In any misuse of data or breach of personal information, GAVS helps in forensic identification of the scope and nature of the data breach, and efficient remediation and reporting of the event.

For more information on GAVS’ Data Privacy services, please visit https://www.gavstech.com/service/data-privacy-services/

About the Author –

Kavitha S

Kavitha has 18+ years of experience focused on CyberSecurity, Data Privacy, Business Resilience, Security Assurance and Vendor/3rd party Risk Management across Healthcare, Financial Services, Telecom, IT Services and Product Corporates.

She is a natural leader with versatility to negotiate and influence at all levels. Kavitha is self-driven and is willing to learn from everything life has to offer.

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