50% of Employees Believe Their Business not Ready for General Data Protection Regulation

A survey conducted by Usurv for Storage Made Easy (SME), trading name of Vehera LTD, showed that 1 in 2 employees thought that their company was not ready for the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

 The survey asked a simple question to 200 employees which was whether they believe their company was ready for the upcoming data protection law which will come into force in less than a year from today.
 
The regulations extensively reform data privacy and protection and can result in heavy fines for companies that fail to protect customer data. The regulations impact on any company, irrespective of country, that stores private data of European citizens.
 
The fines are substantial and can be up to 4% of a companies gross turnover as opposed to the current £500,000 limit imposed by the existing data protection act.
 
Jim Liddle, Storage Made Easy CEO, said: “The GDPR are the most stringent update of data privacy and protection regulations for many years. They affect all businesses whether large or small and potentially could have the effect of putting some companies out of business if they are in breach of certain aspects of the regulations.  Companies are going to need to ensure they understand their data estate, be that on-cloud or on-premises, and that they implement strict enforcement controls which will should include discovery, audit, encryption and policy settings. As a UK company that is affected by GDPR, Storage Made Easy have worked very hard on ensuring our File Fabric product work as an enforcement gateway across all company data sets to help protect existing corporate data, and this definitely shows in the upturn of enquires and sales that we are fielding in relation to GDPR.”
 
Two free whitepapers for companies who need to get ready for GDPR (subscription required)