It’s been just a year since The European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in May 2018. But even in that short time, enforcements and fines have already started to pile up.

Even though the goal of establishing the GDPR was to simplify obligations for organizations with a single, unified regulation, it turns out complying with the regulation requires a great investment of time and effort. There’s considerable work to be done, processes and procedures to implement, and specialized tools to deploy. Finding a compliance platform to help you coordinate all your compliance activities can bring order to the chaos, and help you work smarter, not harder.

Here are three steps you can take to demonstrate your GDPR compliance more easily using technology.

1. Repurpose frameworks and remove the guesswork

Start by re-evaluating the GDPR’s requirements and how well your organization is meeting them (i.e., what controls you have in place to manage risks). If you’ve already invested in frameworks (e.g., NIST ISO27001, ISO270018, SOCII, COBIT 5, etc.), they can be borrowed for your GDPR plans too.

Our HighBond platform lets you take advantage of integrated GDPR content with ready-to-use regulatory compliance maps and industry frameworks, complete with controls and procedures to reduce the manual, administrative burden of your compliance.

Using the HighBond platform, you can:

• Intuitively map controls and procedures to both legislative requirements and internal policies to ensure coverage.
• Harmonize multiple requirements under the coverage of a single control or vice versa.
• Include rationales when requirements are not applicable.

2. Automate monitoring of your controls and procedures

Automated monitoring of events helps you be more confident that your organization’s privacy-by-default processes are effective.

Using HighBond, you can inspect data flows and conveniently share that information with other members of your team. Surveys and questionnaires are another feature that help you uncover further insights to inform your investigations into potential risks.

The system can be set up with preset priority statuses and escalation paths. Where material events are uncovered, automated triggers notify the right people to remediate any issues. For example:

• Has a data subject request been received?
• Has a request aged or an obligation gone ignored beyond an acceptable threshold?

Many scenarios are perfect for this form of automation, both from the controls monitoring perspective and the general GDPR workflow.

3. Strive for compliance; don’t slave over your activities

Achieving and maintaining compliance is about bringing together multiple disparate conversations, projects, initiatives, and activities. And this is exactly what purpose-built technology does to help you achieve a holistic view of your compliance.

HighBond helps you get a snapshot of your compliance status by:

• Giving you visibility into material events in real-time
• Using data visualizations to tell the story by aggregating and pulling in feeds from different systems
• Minimizing the work required to attest to effective controls and procedures.

GDPR readiness can be achieved without the chaos

The GDPR is a complex regulation with many pieces that need attention. Compliance with the regulation can be managed more easily with the use of purpose-built technology.

With experience across different regulations, Galvanize offers the latest automated monitoring technology to free you from administrative burdens related to compliance, so you can focus on more strategic work.

To get assistance with your GDPR compliance visit the ComplianceBond page.