Accepting a brand new degree of information threat
There isn’t a means round it: distant work is right here to remain. For companies, this poses a significant problem, particularly as customers proceed to speed up e-commerce tendencies and start to dwell extra of their lives on-line. The inherent hazard of distant work settings stems from the truth that when workers work past the 4 partitions of an workplace, the community turns into extra uncovered and dispersed as workers share data throughout workstations. As soon as workers open their laptops from dwelling, it turns into considerably extra attainable for brand new dangers to be launched to a company community.
And whereas organizations should come to phrases with accepting this new degree of threat, that doesn’t imply they’ve to surrender within the face of information breaches and compliance fines. Step one in accepting this new degree of threat is to totally perceive all the information and discover out what kinds of data are being collected, why it’s being collected, and the place it’s situated. Solely then, can compliance leaders and safety officers start to try to mitigate threat by training in addition to consciousness. After all, as information continues to proliferate the community, organizations must be conducting common information safety assessments that decide the place the best degree of threat is, in addition to the potential impression a breach would have.
Compliance enforcement on the rise
Given the pandemic’s impression on governments and world enterprise operations, it’s not stunning that we noticed the enforcement of shopper information privateness legal guidelines take a backseat in 2020. And whereas it stays tough to foretell what enforcement will appear like within the new yr, with a number of main regulatory updates and implementations coming down the pipeline, organizations ought to take steps now to turn into compliant.
In simply the primary half of the yr, we’ll see the implementation of the Thailand Private Information Safety Act (PDPA), a very new model of the Cost Card Trade Information Safety Customary (PCI DSS), and the creation of the California Privateness Safety Company, the primary company in the US solely devoted to shopper information privateness consciousness, administration, and enforcement. That is only a small handful of what compliance officers and organizational decision-makers must be listening to within the new yr.
Whereas organizations could also be hoping to fly underneath the compliance radar within the new yr, the enforcement our bodies behind these laws could also be trying to make a splash as soon as carried out. The pressure positioned on companies in 2020 was almost unprecedented, and as they give the impression of being to rebuild, a hefty compliance penalty or information breach may very well be devastating, not solely to the underside line, however to buyer belief and general model fame.
If 2020 has taught us something, it’s that issues can change and not using a second’s discover. Companies should be as ready as attainable for these adjustments, or they run the chance of being left behind and unable to pivot to issues like distant work, new product choices and new types of information assortment. However it’s simply as essential to have the ability to correctly and efficiently shield that pivot and the information it creates. In 2021, anticipate organizations to handle their pivots by accepting a brand new degree of threat and shoring up their compliance initiatives earlier than the following unpredictable occasion.
Learn the second a part of this opinion subsequent week
