How to avoid fines …

Yesterday we have mentioned what are the biggest fines issued by the ICO.

The fines show that the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), has given enforcers like the UK’s ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office), some serious teeth. With these fines in mind, it’s a good time to make sure you’ve minimized your risk of being next in line.

GDPR is focused on protecting European Union citizens and it applies to anyone who holds personal data on an EU citizen, wherever in the world you are based. .

Here are the best practices we recommend to all organizations to follow in order to minimize the risk of a GDPR data loss fine:

1. Minimize the risk of a cyberattack by fixing vulnerabilities that can be used to gain entry to your systems illegally. There is no perimeter, so everything matters: patch everything.
2. Treat the cloud like any other computer – close unwanted ports and services, encrypt data and ensure you have proper access controls in place. And do it on all your environments, including QA and development.
3. Reduce your exposure by collecting and retaining only the information you need, and making sure the only people with access to it are the people who need it to do their jobs.
4. Ensure that everyone who might come in to contact with personal data knows how they need to handle it – this is a GDPR requirement.
5. . Be able to show that you have thought about data protection, and have taken sensible precautions to secure personally identifiable information.

For more information on this, we are always open to discuss, and always here to help, as nobody wants to get in such problems.