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If you listen carefully you can almost hear them: the IT managers, CIOs, CISOs and the rest who probably feel like preparation for the GDPR occupies their every waking moment (and a few non-waking moments, too.)
Boiled down to its very basic elements, complying with the GDPR is all about properly understanding and controlling your data. That’s easier said than done, of course, which is the reason you’re reading this right now instead of finessing your drive on the golf course.
A proper understanding of your data – what data you hold, where it resides, where and how it travels, how it’s protected, and more – has to be the starting point for your compliance journey. Organizations have to investigate thoroughly all of these factors to develop a complete picture of their data protection stance.
Conducting a full audit of an organization’s data is always a very involved process. With data volumes growing exponentially and so many different cloud services in use in any modern business, joining the dots is a complex but necessary task.
The purpose of the audit stage is to deliver implicit visibility of what a company and its employees are doing in the cloud. The first stage of any audit is to uncover the cloud services in use within an organization – either sanctioned or unsanctioned. The latest Netskope Cloud Report (September 2017) found that organizations use an average of 1,022 cloud services. That’s potentially a lot of data being uploaded, shared and stored in a huge number of cloud services, although if you can be confident that none of this data would be held to be “sensitive” as defined in the provisions of the GDPR, then you can rest easy. But in reality, most if not all companies handle sensitive data of some sort, such as personally identifiable information (PII) of EU citizens – staff or customers, for example.
So initially, the audit is designed to provide visibility of what cloud services are in use, and where your data is going. That information, in turn, provides a list of the cloud services, at which point the next step for organizations is to assess whether or not those services are GDPR-ready. Some modern cloud access security brokers (