This week sees many businesses returning from the festive break eager to clear down the backlog of emails and achieve ‘inbox zero’. While some businesses are commencing new financial years, others are busy preparing themselves for upcoming year-ends as well as completing tax returns for the 31st January deadline.
But looming on the horizon is another important deadline, one which a significant number of businesses have yet to realise; this will be one of the most significant pieces of legislation to hit the business community in recent years – GDPR.
Many businesses are in the early stages of preparing for the new legislation that comes into effect on 25th May 2018 – the new General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, however, there is still a significant number of small businesses which have yet to get to grips with what this new legislation is, its potential impact and what actions need to be taken to ensure compliance, especially considering the potential fines which can be enforced for non-compliance.
What is GDPR?
According to Wikipedia, GDPR is designed to ‘strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals of the EU’ as well as address the export of data outside of the EU.
Data in today’s environment has no borders; it is everywhere from the social media platforms that we use each and every day to business applications in the cloud such as Xero and many more.
However, with increased use of these applications comes great responsibility; the trust of users to keep the data secure, especially for those of us that are entrusted with processing data on behalf of our clients. It is vital that organisations across all sectors of industry including retail, hospitality, not for profit and ourselves within the professional services community recognise the need to protect the data rights of our clients and, in the event of a data breach, their rights to privacy.
GDPR puts the control back firmly in the hands of citizens and introduces strict fines to ensure that all organisations in the EU and beyond take data protection seriously.
Join us for a FREE workshop on how GDPR will affect your business and what steps you need to take now to ensure that you comply with the new regulations coming into force on 25th May 2018.
In our workshops we will cover:
- GDPR and what it means for your business
- What the challenges are and how you need to prepare
- An action plan for you to follow to ensure compliance
This article first appeared on our old website.