GDPR: It's significance and how it'll benefit your business

GDPR: It’s significance and how it’ll benefit your business

What exactly is GDPR?

People today, find it difficult to trust any organization when it comes to data security. They realize that data breaches are inevitable. No matter what scale or size an organization they are sharing their data with, it gets lost or stolen and lands up in the hands of such people who have malicious intents.

What’s next?

Their worst nightmare comes true. Their personal data is mishandled and they feel betrayed.

For years, European Commission has been going above and beyond to eradicate these woes of the customers and website visitors. Finally, the authorities have come up with the strictest data protection law in the world i.e. GDPR. After a long planning, it finally comes into force today.

This data privacy revolution sets guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information of individuals within the European Union (EU).The General Data Protection Regulation act requires the organizations in Europian Union and the ones outside EU who sell products or services in EU, to make sure that:

They gather the personal data (name, address, photos, and IP address) legally and under strict conditions.
They protect the data from misuse and exploitation.

The regulation mainly aims at boosting the rights of individuals and enable them to control their data. So, the organizations that fail at providing the desired proofs of proper handling of sensitive data, they are sure to face penalties within 72 hours of the data breach. They may have to pay fines up to €20 million or 4% of their global annual sales, whichever is bigger.

Though it is the strictest data protection act to date, it provides a number of benefits to the businesses that abide by it:

It will provide an improved data security:

The GDPR act ensures that none of the sensitive data lands up in wrong hands. That’s because the access to sensitive data is limited to only a few professionals in an organization.

The act further makes it mandatory for an organization to any breach within 72 hours of its occurrence failing which would lead to a fine of around €20 million or 4% of their global annual sales. This, in turn, ensures improved data security.

GDPR will improve data accuracy:

GDPR mainly aims at providing customers more control over their data. So, the businesses can collect the required data using lawful basis and store it. The customers can access it, inspect it and validate it if they find any discrepancies.

Thereafter, the data controllers should rectify any identified errors, hence ensuring the accuracy of the stored data.

It will help make the businesses more credible:

Since GDPR has been termed as the strictest data protection law in the whole world, so being certified as GDPR complaint is going to be a great advantage in marketing terms.

Just like people look for SSL certification of the websites, they’ll soon be looking for GDPR compliance. So, the businesses that abide by the data protection are sure to be seen as more credible and preferred over the ones that do not care about GDPR.

Nonetheless, to say, GDPR is going to be one of the customer loyalty boosters in the coming years.

Now that you are familiar with this big data protection revolution, don’t waste any more time and start leveraging it right away!