How to Conduct a GDPR Gap Analysis for Your Business

The General Data Protection Regulation is a broad law that helps to protect personal data and it has a big effect on how companies handle that data. Making sure you follow GDPR is important to avoid huge fines and keep your customers’ trust. A GDPR study is a good way to make sure you are following all the important rules, so let’s check out how to conduct this analysis for your business. 

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Understand what the requirements are 

GDPR analysis is done to protect people in the European Union’s privacy and personal data. Data processing needs explicit consent, meaning that people must give clear, specific permissions for this. People also have many rights under GDPR, such as the ability to check and correct incorrect personal data and the right to move their data to another service. Businesses must also make sure that data protection standards are built into all processing activities. When a data breach happens, they must make sure they inform the appropriate supervisory authority and anyone whose data may be affected. Also, there have to be data security impact assessments for processing activities that pose a high risk. Understanding these requirements will help you ensure your company is following GDPR the right way. 

Establish a team that will deal with it

It is crucial for all the regulations to be met that you form a team that will try to check all of them and see whether your business is adhering to them. In the team, you should put people from different sectors who know how to work together. This is quite a big job so you do not want people who want to do it all by themselves or who are lazy who will neglect their duties. They will need to go through all the regulations one by one and then see where your company stands. This task will take some time and it will require a lot of patience from you and your employees. It may be required that you assign a DPO or data protection officer if it says so in the regulations.

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Data mapping

Data mapping gives you a clearer picture of how personal data moves around your company. First of all, you need to make a thorough data inventory that will list how personal data has been collected, stored, processed, and shared. To do this, you can use tools like Privacy Helper that can help you conduct a data mapping exercise. Start by listing all the places where personal data comes from, like websites, mobile apps, and communication with customer service. Then, you should group the different kinds of information, like names, emails, payment information, and other ways of identifying people. Also, write down where you keep this data, like on local computers, in the cloud, or in third-party databases. Finally, carefully consider how personal information is shared within the company and other groups like partners or third-party sellers. This data mapping will help you find possible gaps in compliance, and it will also help you put in place strong data protection measures. 

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Assess the data protection practices

Every company needs to regularly check whether their safety procedures are up to date and whether they are working or not. The best way to deal with this is to hire someone to check these procedures for you. This person will be able to check whether they are good enough and whether they are acted upon. Of course, they will tell you how you should act. Most likely, you should not tell anything to your employees so that everything is questioned fairly. Of course, you should make sure that you have the right tools to defend your business from attacks. This technology is constantly upgrading and improving because of the development of the attacks. If you do not regularly upgrade your equipment, you won’t be able to withstand most of the attacks that are coming your way.

Identify the risks

Go over the results of your data mapping and compare them to the specific standards of the GDPR to find differences and actions that do not follow the rules. You will recognize these gaps easily, as they do not include enough records of data processing activities, have weak security measures, and have non-compliant contracts with third-party vendors. Then, you should evaluate the risks that come with these gaps. Think about how they might affect people’s privacy and how likely it is that they will be fined as a result. Sort these gaps according to how dangerous they are and how big fines and data breaches they can cause. Your company can create a clear plan that will comply with GDPR if you identify the risks this way and do your best to fix them. 

Make some changes

Once you have identified all the risks, you will have to make changes to your protocols, procedures, and equipment to ensure that they are non-existent. It would be great if you could provide more security measures to your company to ensure that all the data is more secure. This would mean that you would have fewer openings for someone to explore. Of course, it is not possible to completely stop everything because the attacks keep evolving. Even the biggest companies in the world, with the biggest budgets, can’t stop them but that does not mean that you should not give it your best. 

Monitor the changes that have been done

Of course, once you have made sure that you have brought some changes to your business, you will have to make sure that they are doing what they are supposed to. Many times, when businesses upgrade what they have, they will encounter bugs and other things that do not allow the security measures to work properly. Once you have monitored their work for some time, you should be safe and may continue your work as you have before.

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It is very helpful that these regulations have been set because companies can better protect themselves and their customers. The data that these companies hold is invaluable and must be protected at all costs so make sure you do your part.

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