New EU Data Protection Regulations (GDPR)
At Format, we are always looking to keep our customers up-to-date on any changes required in their IT network.
You may have seen in the news recently about the new EU Data Protection Regulations, this is the biggest overhaul of data protection since 1995. The penalties companies can face have risen significantly (up to 20million Euros or £17.5million) if a breach of a system occurs and personal data is violated.
Why the need for change? Well since the regulations haven’t changed in so long newer forms of data (e.g. Social media posts) have never been included and cloud technologies were also not developed so there is an extra complexity to protecting personal data.
From a wider perspective, each EU member state (28 currently) has individual data protection laws making cross-continent data handling time consuming with ensuring the right regulations are met for the country you are dealing with. With these new guidelines, every EU member will have the same regulations meaning more efficient dealings.
What does this mean for your business? An emphasis on ensuring your customers data is protected using the necessary measures. These include regular backups of your data for recovery in the event of a breach or system failure, a process for testing the effectiveness of security measures and encryption of data to make it unreadable in the wrong hands.
On that last point, our favoured security software vendor Sophos provides a product called Safeguard to encrypt your files within your network. This means that anyone trying to access files from outside will not be able to read the data and it is therefore secure.
It works in the background following your files wherever they go… even into the cloud! This means you always know you are protected and falling in line with one of the major changes in regulations.
Click on the below image to take a 60 second compliance test to see how ready you are for the changes:
For further information please see https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/safeguard-encryption.aspx