Is the GDPR Good or Bad News for Business

The European Union?s General Data Protection Act (GDPR) is a new data authority coming into force on 25 May 2018. It replaces the current Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC, while extending the remit to include the export of personal data outside the EU. It aims to give EU citizens and residents living there more control over their personal information. It also hopes to make regulatory compliance simpler for participating businesses.

The Broad Implications for Business
The GDPR puts another layer of accountability on businesses falling within its remit. It requires them to implement ?comprehensive but proportionate governance measures? including recording how they make decisions. The long-term goal is to reduce privacy infringements. In the short run, businesses without good governance may find themselves writing new policies and procedures.

Article 5 of the European Union?s General Data Protection Act lays down the following guidelines for managing personal data. This shall be ?
? Processed transparently, fairly, and lawfully
? Acquired for specific, legitimate purposes only
? Adequate, relevant and limited to essentials
? Not used for any other, incompatible purpose
? However it may be archived in the public interest
? Kept up to date with all inaccuracies corrected
? Ring-fenced when the information becomes irrelevant
? Adequately protected against unauthorised access
? Stored in a way that prevents accidental loss
Furthermore, affected businesses shall appoint a ?controller responsible for, and able to demonstrate, compliance with the principles.?

Implementing Accountability and Governance
The UK Information Commissioner?s Office has issued guidelines regarding provisions to assure governance and accountability. These are along the lines of the ?don’t tell me, show me? management approach the office has generally been following. In summary form, a business, and its controller must:
? Implement measures that assist it to ensure demonstrated compliance
? Maintain suitable, relevant records of personal data processing activities
? Appoint a dedicated data protection officer if scale makes this appropriate
? Implement technologies that ensure data protection by design
? Conduct data protection assessments and respond to results timeously

Implementing the General Data Protection Act in Ireland
The Irish Data Protection Commissioner has decided it is unnecessary to incorporate the GDPR into Irish law, since EU regulations have direct effect. The office of the Commissioner is working in tandem with data practitioners, and industry and professional bodies to raise awareness in business through 2017. It has produced a document detailing what it considers the essentials for business compliance. Briefly, these pre-requisites are:
? Ensure awareness among key personnel, and make sure they incorporate the GDPR into their planning
? Conduct an early assessment of quality management gaps, and budget for additional resources needed
? Do an audit of personal data held, to determine the origin, the necessity to hold it, and with whom shared
? Inform internal and external stakeholders of the current status, and your future plans to implement the GDPR
? Examine current procedures in the light of the new directive. Could you ?survive? a challenge from a data subject?
? Determine how you will process requests for access to the data in the future from within and outside your organization
? Assess how you currently obtain customer consent to store their data. Is this “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous”?
? Find how you handle information from underage people. Do you have systems to verify ages and obtain guardian consent?
? Implement procedures to detect, investigate, and report data breaches to the Data Protection Commissioner within 72 hours
? Implement a culture of always assessing the effect on individual privacy before starting new initiatives

So Is the GDPR Good or Bad for Business
The GDPR should be good news for business customers. Their personal data will be more secure, and they should see their rate of spam marketing come down. The GDPR is also good news for businesses currently investing resources to protect their clients? interests. It could however, be bad news for businesses that have not been focussing on these matters. They may have a high mountain to climb to come in line with the GDPR.
Disclaimer: This article is for information only and not intended as a comprehensive guide.

Contact Us

(+353)(0)1-443-3807 (IRL)
(+44)(0)20-7193-9751 (UK)

Check our similar posts

Quality Assurance

There is a truism that goes “The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of low price has faded from memory”.

While every consumer can probably relate to this idea, business enterprises offering goods and services are the ones that should heed this the most.

Quality Management Systems

The concept of quality was first introduced in the 1800’s. Goods were then still mass-produced, created by the same set of people, with a few individuals assigned to do some “tweaking” on the product to bring it to acceptable levels. Their idea of quality at that time may not have been that well-defined, but it marked the beginnings of product quality and customer satisfaction as we know it now.

Since then, quality has developed into a very basic business principle that every organisation should strive to achieve. Yet while every business recognises the importance of offering product and service quality, it is not something that can be achieved overnight.

If you’ve been in any type of business long enough, you should know that there is no “quick-fix” to achieving quality. Instead, it is an evolving process that needs to be continually worked on. And this is where the importance of having a workable Quality Management System (QMS) in an organisation comes in.

Whatever Quality tools and processes you need to implement the change needed in your organisation, we can help you with it. We are ready to work in partnership with your team to develop strategic systems which will produce significant performance improvements geared towards the achievement of quality.

What is a Quality Management System?

A Quality Management System is defined as the set of inter-related objectives, processes, and operating procedures that organisations use as a guide to help them implement quality policies and attain quality objectives.

Needless to say, the ultimate goal of every quality management system is to establish quality as a core value of the company among all employees, and across all products and services. Why? Because quality services make for happy customers, and satisfied customers ensure continued business for the company.

A Quality Management System does not stop with simply having a set of guidelines that the leaders of a company can easily have their organisation members accept and adhere to. Rather, effective QMS can be implemented when management provides a culture of pride and patience, which will inspire acceptance of individual and group responsibility.

In this manner, not only the heads of the organisation but the employees as well, will develop the desire to achieve company goals that will benefit:

All contributing teams;
The customers; and
The company as a whole.

Find out more about our Quality Assurance services in the following pages:

Still Looking For A Way To Consolidate Excel Spreadsheets?

We use Excel spreadsheets everyday. We use them to prepare budgets and reports. We even use them when drafting plans and forecasts. With this ubiquitous office application, entering data and carrying out on-the-spot computations and analysis is quick and easy. However, when it’s time to consolidate Excel data, I won’t be surprised if you wished there was an easy way.

In fact, you were probably looking for a solution before landing on this page, right?

Because budgeting, reporting, planning, and forecasting are normally done by a group of people and not just by one individual, spreadsheets bearing the necessary data can be scattered in different folders, desktops, offices, and, in the case of really large organisations, geographical locations.

How are these data brought together? Through email attachments or by sharing folders in a local area network. Each member of the working team sends out copies of their own spreadsheets to other members, who then review them, make necessary changes, then send back to the source. The files can go back and forth until everyone is satisfied.

With each sending, sharing, and edit, business critical data gets exposed to all sorts of spreadsheet risks. Copy-paste errors, omission of a negative sign, erroneous inputs, accidental deletions, and even fraudulent manipulations can take place. And because each member can end up with multiple versions of a single spreadsheet, the chance of working on the wrong version exists.

So when all the data gets consolidated and finalised, it is possible for the end product to contain significant errors. It may not happen all the time, but it certainly can happen.

But that’s not the only disadvantage of spreadsheets. The entire process of comparing cells and sheets, copy-pasting data, linking cells, writing formulas, and specifying ranges can be very tedious, not to mention time-consuming. With spreadsheets, beating deadlines is always an almost impossible exercise.

What you need is a solution that will no longer require you to consolidate Excel spreadsheets. One that is faster, more reliable, and significantly less error-prone. Denizon has a server-based solution that has all those capabilities and much more.

With a server-based solution, all your data is stored in one place. Everyone is working on the same data source, so consolidation is fast and easy. Everyone becomes synchronised and no one has to worry about working on the wrong version.

Read more about our server-based solution

More Spreadsheet Blogs

Spreadsheet Risks in Banks

Top 10 Disadvantages of Spreadsheets

Disadvantages of Spreadsheets – obstacles to compliance in the Healthcare Industry

How Internal Auditors can win the War against Spreadsheet Fraud

Spreadsheet Reporting – No Room in your company in an age of Business Intelligence

Still looking for a Way to Consolidate Excel Spreadsheets?

Disadvantages of Spreadsheets

Spreadsheet woes – ill equipped for an Agile Business Environment

Spreadsheet Fraud

Spreadsheet Woes – Limited features for easy adoption of a control framework

Spreadsheet woes – Burden in SOX Compliance and other Regulations

Spreadsheet Risk Issues

Server Application Solutions – Don’t let Spreadsheets hold your Business back

Why Spreadsheets can send the pillars of Solvency II crashing down

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

Spreadsheet Risk Issues

It is interesting to note that the riskiness of operational spreadsheets are overlooked even by companies with high standards of risk management. Only when errors amount to actual losses do they realize that these risks have been staring them in the face all along.

Common spreadsheet risk issues

Susceptibility to trivial manual errors

Due to the fundamental structure of spreadsheets, a slight change in the formula or value in any of their inhabited cells may already affect their overall output. An

accidental copy-paste,
omission of a negative sign,
erroneous range selection,
incorrect data input or
unintentional deletion of a character,cell, range, column, or row

are just some of the simple errors spreadsheet users frequently encounter. Rarely are there any counter-checking controls in place in a spreadsheet-based activity and manual errors therefore easily go undetected.

Possibility of the user working on the wrong version

How do you store spreadsheet files?

Since the most common reports are usually generated on a monthly basis, users tend to store them using variations of these two configurations:

If you notice, a user can accidentally work on the wrong version with any of these structures.

Prone to inconsistent company-wide reporting

This happens when a summary or ?final? spreadsheet is fed information by different departments coming from their own spreadsheets. Even if most of the data in their spreadsheets come from one source (the company-wide database), erroneous copy-pasting and linking, or even different interpretations of the same data can result to contradicting information in the end.

Often defenceless against unauthorised access

Some spreadsheets contain information needed by various individuals or department units in an organisation. Hence, they are often shared via email or through shared folders in a network. Now, because spreadsheets don’t normally use any access control, any user can easily open a spreadsheet file and view or modify the contents as he wishes.

Highly vulnerable to fraud

A complex spreadsheet system with zero or very minimal controls provides the perfect setting for would-be fraudsters. Hidden cells with malicious formulas and links to bogus information can go unnoticed for a long time especially if the final figures don’t deviate much from expected values.

Spreadsheet risk mitigation solutions may not suffice

Inherent complexity makes testing and logic inspection very time consuming

Deep testing can uncover possible errors hidden in spreadsheet cells and consequently mitigate risks. But spreadsheets used to support financial reporting are normally large, complex, highly-personalised and, without ample supporting documentation, understandably hard to follow.

No clear ownership of risk management responsibilities

There?s always a dilemma when an organisation starts assigning risk management responsibilities for spreadsheets. IT personnel believe users in the business side of the organisation should be responsible since they are the ones who create, edit, store, duplicate, and share the spreadsheet files. On the other hand, users believe IT should be responsible since they have always been in-charge of managing IT infrastructure, applications, and files.

To get rid of spreadsheet risks, you’ll have to get rid of spreadsheets altogether

One remedy is to have a risk management activity that involves both IT personnel and spreadsheet users. But wouldn’t you want to get rid of the complexity of having to distribute the responsibilities between the two parties instead of just one?

Learn more about Denizon’s server application solutions and how you can get rid of spreadsheet risk issues.

Contact Us

(+353)(0)1-443-3807 – IRL
(+44)(0)20-7193-9751 – UK

Is the GDPR Good or Bad News for Business

Contact Us

Check our similar posts

More Spreadsheet Blogs

Common spreadsheet risk issues

Spreadsheet risk mitigation solutions may not suffice

To get rid of spreadsheet risks, you’ll have to get rid of spreadsheets altogether

More Spreadsheet Blogs

Contact Us

Ready to work with Denizon?