The EU’s new general data protection regulation (GDPR) threatens businesses with huge fines from May 25, 2018. As such, it has never been more important to keep your business’ data safe.
The spate of high-profile data protection breaches in recent years has seen the EU stand up and take notice, and its latest piece of landmark legislation can hit companies with fines of up to 4% of their global turnover if they fail to meet the strict, new data protection regulations .
According to consulting giant PwC, this is the largest change to data protection legislation in 20 years, while internet security company Kaspersky found just half of all businesses feel they are prepared for GDPR.
In essence, the new GDPR laws aim to make it easier for consumers to know who has access to their data – whether that be their online shopping preferences or their phone number and email address.
Consequently, European businesses have been sending out a flurry of emails asking their customers whether they wish to continue receiving their marketing communications etc. For many companies, this is the first step in ensuring their business is compliant with the new GDPR rules.
For banks and other financial organisations this presents a real challenge, as not only do they hold information on their customers, but many are also in contact with other businesses which provide them additional services.
Customers also now have the powers to request any EU business to report exactly how it uses their data. Furthermore, they are entitled to dispose of all private data ever held and, most importantly, it is mandatory to report any data protection failures to their country’s information commissioner.
It is the threat of heavy fines from these data protection failures which pose IT security and data protection issues. So it is vital to know your network infrastructure is completely secure. And with Penta’s fully-encrypted, private cloud services, your business can be confident your customer’s data cannot be accessed by the wrong people.
And while keeping rogue hackers is only one part of maintaining your data security, Farhad Khalilnia, Chief Executive Officer of Penta, said companies can rest assured their data is not even accessible by Penta itself, let alone other clients.
He says: “We act as the custodian to our clients’ data. We protect it but we have no access to it. We continually manage the infrastructure, ensuring it is protected by the latest security. And we back this up by inviting the world’s best ethical hackers to test our systems’ integrity every year, trying to find any shortcomings in our network security.”
As well as being almost impossible to hack into over the internet, Penta’s data centres are also remarkably secure physically too, based in a secure location in the Swiss countryside, meaning the chances of a physical IT security breach are close to zero.
FAQs on GDPR
What SMEs need to know about the EU rules
UK ICO
Financial services and GDPR
The biggest change to data protection law in 20 years
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Only half of businesses ready
How legislation will hit business
Kaspersky