Are you Ready for the Upcoming GDPR?

We’re sure by now everyone has heard of the upcoming GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). But what exactly is it and how does it affect you? In this post, we would like to inform you of how you can stay ahead of the GDPR by switching to Microsoft Office 365.

So, a lot of us have been asking what exactly is GDPR and what does it mean for us? In the simplest terms, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a change in data protection laws – this is the biggest change to these laws in over 20 years. The new GDPR law comes into effect on May 25th, 2018 and it intends to give the citizens of Europe back control over their personal data.

Microsoft Office 365 is designed with industry-leading security measures and privacy policies to safeguard your data in the cloud, including the categories of personal data identified by the GDPR. Office and Office 365 can help you on your journey to reducing risks and achieving compliance with the GDPR.

One essential step to meeting the GDPR obligations is discovering and controlling what personal data you hold and where it resides. There are many Office 365 solutions that can help you identify or manage access to personal data.

With Office 365, you have the increased flexibility of working across multiple devices – anywhere in the world. This means that you can view, create, and edit your files at any time and on the go. Furthermore, businesses can sync, share, and securely edit documents with colleagues in real-time. In relation to GDPR, another core requirement is protecting personal data against security threats. Current Office 365 features that safeguard data and identify when a data breach occurs include:

• Advanced Threat Protection in Exchange Online Protection helps protect your email against new, sophisticated malware attacks in real time.
• Threat Intelligence helps you proactively uncover and protect against advanced threats in Office 365.
• Advanced Security Management enables you to identify high-risk and abnormal usage, alerting you to potential breaches.
• Office 365 audit logs allow you to monitor and track user and administrator activities across workloads in Office 365, which help with early detection and investigation of security and compliance issues.

If you are non-compliant with the new regulations, the financial penalties are much higher now than way back when the old Data Protection Act was in place. Penalties can range from €20 million to 4% of your annual global turnover, whichever is the greater amount. Other penalties can also include:

• Warnings
• Demanding you erase stored data
• Audits
• Demanding a resolution within a strict time frame
• Stop data transfers to other countries
• Apply these powers to data controllers and processors and data processors

All in all, GDPR is a good thing. We’re all people, all consumers. And we all deserve the respect and consideration that proper data privacy represents.

Although switching to Microsoft Office 365 will not make you 100% GDPR compliant, depending on the size of you organisation and current data structure, you may need to implement other changes in your business before the 25th of May. Please see GDPRandYou.ie for a full list of steps you will need to achieve to become GDPR compliant.