One year later: GDPR has made data protection a business priority

GDPR, the EU’s new data privacy regulation, will celebrate its first anniversary on 25 May 2019. Although it's a European Union regulation, as many firms around the world are now familiar, it has a global impact due to the reach of European citizens’ personal data across countries and enterprises.

GDPR highlights the fact that data protection is becoming a significant strategic risk for enterprises of all types and is climbing up the executive agenda. The cost of non-compliance is now much higher with the significantly greater fines under GDPR – up to 4% of its annual global revenue. And we are expecting to see more and more fines being applied: earlier this year, the European Commission issued an infographic on GDPR showing that over 40,000 data breach notifications have been submitted since GDPR came into force.

For this reason alone, C-level executives are asking more questions about the data in their business, and how it is being managed and protected. And this top management attention is just as relevant to cybersecurity as to privacy compliance.