"Supporting GDPR Compliance through Data Classification"

Wednesday, June 21st

10 am ET/3 pm BST


 

Yes.  We know. We know. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming and it fundamentally changes how organizations manage personal data. It gives EU citizens the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict, and migrate their personal content existing in any data center that does business in the European Union. 


The good news is that companies still have a little more than 11 months to get ready for GDPR. The bad news is that most companies are woefully behind on those efforts - if they even know about GDPR and whether or not they should be compliant. We just plowed through the recent study from Varonis who spoke with IT decision makers in the EU and in the U.S. and found that 52 percent said they face challenges in order to identify PII (personally identifiable information) on their network and who has access to that PII. Perhaps even more alarming is that 42 percent of respondents said that GDPR isn't a priority for their company. 

Looking at how devastating the fines are under GDPR, especially for smaller organizations, we can't imagine why GDPR isn't a bigger deal. As we reported last month from the GDPR event hosted by Global Compliance Review magazine, the rather paltry fines assessed against Facebook in April by France and Germany for data privacy violations ... €150,000 (US$166,000), which is just 25 minutes' of Facebook profit, based on last year's financial results, but the maximum allowed under current EU law ... would have been €20 million ($22 million) under GDPR.



We have attended six "GDPR preparation" events so far, and we have 12 more in the pipeline just this year. We'll also have a video interview in September with a GDPR technology pro to show you all of the very cool tech out there to help you comply with GDPR.

One of the more intriguing approaches to all of this is the one being taken by Index Engines and (based on our initial look) it seems to have the only software on the market today that we've seen that supports GDPR compliance with several unique capabilities that include:
  • petabyte class indexing and federated reporting across nodes
  • a flexible reporting and classification system for comprehensive analysis and knowledge
  • some cool insight functions into your metadata and content
  • an automation and monitoring function with full audit trails to ensure compliance, something we definitely want to spend more time with

And according to Eric De Grasse, our Chief Technology Officer who has spent weeks looking at all of the GDPR tech out there (we are agnostic; no vendor supports us or pays for our review/coverage), the Index Engine system supports all classes of data from primary storage to legacy backup data. And even better, they have partnerships with advisory firms that include EY and FTI. 

But rather than have us rabbit on and on here is a video Index Engines produced to give you a more comprehensive overview of their approach:





Index Engines support for the GDPR
Index Engines support for the GDPR




And for their more comprehensive GDPR guide click here.

They have a webinar coming up on Wednesday, June 21st, to explain all of this and how they  give organizations a process by which to simplify their GDPR and other compliance tasks. We urge you to attend:

To register for the webinar   click here
 










The Project Counsel Group

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