Dec 12, 2018
Compliance with GDPR requires absolute control over enterprise data, something fractured compliance measures cannot adequately handle.
At the heart of all business operations is one goal: make money. As such, organizations structure around revenue generating channels, often to the detriment of the bigger picture, and a fissure occurs. On one side, revenue generating activities; on the other, the unpleasant necessities of running a business. Too often, compliance is swept into the latter until a crisis brings it into glaring focus.
The latest such event is the enactment of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which fundamentally changes how organizations approach personal data. Compliance with GDPR requires absolute control over enterprise data, something fractured compliance measures cannot adequately handle. To cohesively comply with GDPR and the bevy of other regulations to which financial services firms are subject, a comprehensive, proactive, and unified data management strategy is key.
Identify All Data Sources
The first step to building a proactive data management strategy is understanding your current environment: what you have and where it is. Most likely, data is scattered across dozens of environments, if not more, ranging from file shares to email servers to communication resources like Slack or Dropbox. While these sources all provide value to end-users, they complicate compliance measures, especially as new sources—and instances of each source—are added. Remember: regulators won’t care that no one communicated a new source to you; they’ll only care you didn’t know about it.
Many of the biggest challenges compliance officers face in complying with GDPR and numerous other regulations can be traced back to these data silos. In the past, collecting and reviewing regulated communications was the industry’s largest data management challenges. While no easy task, it pales in comparison to GDPR’s scope: all EU resident data held anywhere in an organization’s environment.
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