GDPR compliance checklist - 6 steps to comply with this new law

Posted by Tom Hardy on July 19th, 2018

General Data Protection Regulation is a new kind of data protection law for European Union citizens. It has superseded the previous personal data safety regulation which was known as Data Protection Directive. With the introduction of GDPR, there are some important rules that every business organization has to comply with when processing personal information of EU citizens.

This law has not only impacted the companies which reside inside the territory of the European Union, but it also applies to all the organizations which gather, store and process data from the citizens of this region.

Due to this law, individuals will now have more power and control over their personal information held by organizations. They can demand from companies to reveal or delete that information.

What is mandated by GDPR?

Although all of the requirement of this law hasn’t been finalized, but there are some obligations which have already been introduced:

• Data security: Organizations are required to take stringent measures to secure the data collected from individuals.
• Data control: Companies are directed to process data for authorized purposes only, ensure data integrity & accuracy, reduce the chances of individual’s exposure and implement effective security measures.
• Right to erasure: According to this point, companies cannot store data for long time and they have to remove it from their repositories when required.
• Reduce privacy risks: Organizations are required to assess potential risks to data security and attempt to mitigate them.
• Data breach notification: If there is any data breach, companies are required to notify about it to authorities within 72 hours.

You can prepare yourself for the GDPR compliance with these six steps:

1. Understand this regulation

First thing you should do as a business is know about your obligations under General Data Protection Regulation compliance. Since, it relates to collecting, storing and processing data, you should check your requirements.

2. Create a strategy

In order to cope with this law you need to research about it a lot and form a useful strategy. You can also search for GDPR consulting firms, who provide assistance for complying with regulation. Make sure you meet all requirements on the compliance checklist.

3. Understand the data which is regulated

Check whether the data falls under special category of this law. After this, you should ascertain, who shares the data, categorize individuals based on types of data and which applications process the data.

4. Start with important procedures and data

Assess the potential risks to all the data and then review the existing policies and procedures. Implement stringent security measures for data containing core assets and then bring those measures into back-ups and repositories.

5. Ascertain any other potential risks

You should also check for any other possible risks that can result in breach of data security.

6. Repeat and revise

Repeat the steps from 4 to 6 to find any mitigation and adjust the findings accordingly.

These are some steps that you should follow to make your business compliant with the GDPR regulation. However, you can also get assistance of a GDPR compliance checklist provider who can guide you on how to become compliant with this law. Moreover, the impact of this law isn’t limited to just the companies selling goods & services, but it will also affect IT industry & e-commerce businesses, in fact, they have a great impact of this regulation, since they process individual’s data at a larger scale. So, e-commerce industries & online store businesses are also required to comply with this data safety regulation.