Veritas to guide on new European data regulation

Dubai / Emirates Business

Veritas Technologies — the global leader in information management — has announced a set of solutions and services to help prepare organizations for the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) recently finalized by the European Union Parliament. Veritas Enterprise Vault™ 12, Data Insight 5.1, Information Map and supporting services including the dark data assessment to provide businesses with critical visibility into their unstructured data that will help them to achieve better compliance with the new GDPR and existing regulations.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation aims to catapult data protection into the era of big data and cloud computing, ensuring that data protection is a fundamental basic right uniformly and consistently regulated throughout Europe. Any company that serves European customers and collects their data will have to abide by this law — even companies based and handling that personal data outside Europe.
The regulation empowers the Data Privacy Authorities in Europe to impose fines for serious infringements of up to 4 percent of annual worldwide turnover or 20 million Euro, whichever is the greater. The magnitude of fines that can be levied virtually ensures that data privacy will become a board-level issue, as non-compliance with the GDPR presents a significant financial and business risk.
“The GDPR is the biggest change to data protection laws in almost 20 years. People and businesses will profit from clear rules that are fit for the digital age and give strong protection,” said Matthew Ellard, Senior Vice President, EMEA at Veritas.
“Any organization that handles personal data relating to individuals located in the EU will be obligated to review their information management processes. Veritas is committed to helping them to get control over their data, gain visibility and insights, so they can demonstrate compliance to GDPR.”
The regulation will be enforced in May 2018, so businesses have two years to prepare for the GDPR. A business that finishes this task earlier, will not only benefit from getting their data under control. Stronger information management will help them to use their storage resources more efficiently and to win valuable insight into the data they are storing.
The GDPR introduces new principles like “the right to be forgotten” and notification obligations. Therefore in certain circumstances, a company must completely erase personal data within a certain period if a user requires it. Also individuals affected by a data breach must be notified without undue delay if any of their personal information has leaked into the wrong hands and that leakage presents a serious threat to their rights and freedoms.