GDPR Compliance: 10 Best Practices and How We Can Help

Last Updated on April 6, 2022

Many small-to-medium-sized businesses have expressed concerns about implementing their own GDPR policies. This could be due to an organizations' highly fragmented and diversified data setting, making it challenging to achieve effective GDPR compliance. Going by the numbers, approximately a third of EU companies are not GDPR compliant.

In order to achieve GDPR compliance and have complete control of the data assets, organizations need to invest in comprehensive governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) strategy. This will not only give them the direction to develop a compelling data privacy practice to mitigate risks, but also ensure compliance and secure the brand value.

To help address these concerns, STAEDEAN offers integrated risk management solutions that work to enable GDPR compliance in your organization successfully. In this blog, we will dive into the top 10 best practices that will allow you to implement GDPR compliance in your organization effectively and how our solutions, RapidValue BPM Suite and Security and Compliance Studio for Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM, can help.

Best practices to successfully implement GDPR compliance

Not everyone might understand or be a compliance expert, but neglecting compliance might cause more harm than good for any organization. Becoming GDPR compliant is not a one-time data fix, but a continuous process that can evolve over time based on changes to the law or legal landscape.

Let’s look at the ten best practices you can implement to make your GDPR compliance a success:

1. Treat the GDPR compliance project as a strategic investment with continued benefits in your organization.
2. Ensure top management/leadership buy-in. The business and IT leadership (Chief Information Officer and Legal Head) should take the responsibility for GDPR compliance project deliverables.
3. Establish proper organizational alignment involving the Chief Information Security Officer, Legal, Compliance, HR, and Data Protection Officer.
4. Initiate an organization-wide data mapping and analytics project. Furthermore, try and minimize data and procedure management platforms for cloud, on-premises, and unstructured data. An ideal situation would be to have a single platform that can offer a complete overview at any time.
5. Guarantee process governance, i.e., ongoing maintenance of process documentation.
6. Setup a continuous improvement framework involving SOTA (state-of-the-art) targets.
7. Create a robust response and communication process for the worst-case scenario if a breach happens.
8. Implement specific GRC (governance, risk management, and compliance) and GDPR business processes and flows with our Rapidvalue BPM Suite once GDPR compliant.
9. Align your GDPR compliance goals and objectives further with RapidValue BPM Suite.
10. Enable companies to take a significant step towards safeguarding data assets and resources in alignment with GDPR compliance with our Security and Compliance Studio for Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM.

How can STAEDEAN help in your GDPR journey?

At STAEDEAN, we believe laying the groundwork for your compliance strategy might be the right way to get started toward becoming GDPR compliant. This would typically consist of defining the project goals and requirements, reviewing existing processes, identifying key focus areas, and establishing the project structure, besides mapping organizations' capabilities to them.

Here we propose a five sequential phased approach for an effective GDPR journey. The image below gives you an idea of the phases (discover, define, develop, deploy, and sustain) and the objectives of each.

Additionally, our in-house solutions, RapidValue BPM Suite and Security and Compliance Studio, constructed specifically for Dynamics 365 F&SCM, offer features that can support and accelerate your GDPR compliance process.

RapidValue BPM Suite is a business process management tool that can help define and map all the organization-specific GRC (governance, risk management, and compliance) and GDPR business processes and flows, within the solution. It can further enable you to:

• Create a GDPR compliance roadmap, process models, and data models, besides offering complete visibility of your GDPR compliance journey
• Scope and phase out your GDPR compliance project based on the five-phased approach mentioned above
•  Carry out a fit-gap analysis, ensuring there are no disparities in your compliance efforts

On the other hand, the Security and Compliance studio can help you implement your GDPR audit and privacy requirements – all in one place. The solution's foundation is built on security, audit, compliance, and transparency. It also supports GDPR requirements by:

• Ensuring users get access to only complete their work optimally and regularly monitoring for any discrepancies
• Tracking any changes mapped to user-defined PII (Personally Identifiable Information) using the data security feature
• Improving transparency with predefined embedded insight with drill-down features, which come with pre-built charts and graphs

What can you do next?

Being GDPR compliant is not only limited to large multinational organizations, but is essential for any company that stores, uses, and processes data. Now that you have an understanding of the best practices to adhere to when trying to become GDPR compliant and how we can support you in the process, you might want to get started on the course of re-engineering all the data GRC related policies.

To further gain an overview of our solutions, visit our STAEDEAN RapidValue BPM Suite and Security and Compliance Studio solution pages. Alternately, you can also reach out to our domain expert for any questions you may have in order to take the next steps.

For more in-depth insights, we recommend you check out the ebook that we put together, which can guide you on:

• The need to be a GDPR compliant company
• The five phases to achieve successful GDPR compliance
• How our solutions enable efficient compliance